It doesn’t often happen that I hear something on the news that makes me shout “hooray” as I’m driving along in the car. I did that yesterday when I heard the Obama administration has revoked a rule passed by their predecessors excusing oil and gas companies in polar bear habitat from special reviews to make sure their work doesn’t harm the animals.

(One of those great pics for WWF by Erik Malm)
It was a scandalous decision, taken as one of President Bush’s last official acts, which illustrates his low respect for nature conservation and backward policies on fossil fuels and climate change.
US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said science had to serve as the foundation for government decisions and federal agencies would have to consult with biologists before taking any action that might affect threatened or endangered species. Good on you Mr Salazar, and more power to you and your team. As President Obama marks his first 100 days in office, there are plenty of positive signs for the environment and climate policy. Nature conservation, renewable energies for energy security and job creation – let’s take that as an upbeat ending to today’s blog post. Good news for the bears for a change. We’ll catch up with the penguins’ problems later…

I’m feeling rather envious – or at least I’m getting itchy feet.
My colleague Stefan Nestler is on his way to the North Pole via Spitzbergen.
Mind you, he’s with an expedition that’s walking, skiing and towing all the necessary rations and equipment on their sledges.That is going to be quite a feat.
His Nordpolblog (in German, but there will be great pictures, I’m sure) looks fantastic.
Visit the North Pole Blog
Meanwhile, I have been doing conference duty here in Bonn, following the UN Climate Secretariat meeting trying to make progress towards an agreement to be signed in Copenhagen in December.
Fred has posted a comment asking what I think of all these conferences and their chances of success, and Obama’s role.
Well sometimes I think these giant meetings (more than 2 and a half thousand people at the UN meeting here until April 8th) produce enough “hot air” to raise the temperature of the planet considerably. But if we don’t get all the major players to agree on binding commitments, we have no chance.I don’t know if they really need that many people. And a bit more video-conferencing would save a lot of travel emissions.
Talking to the delegates to the UN meeting, I certainly get the feeling the change of US administration has given a boost to morale and the feeling that we might get there somewhere after all. But there are those who warn against expecting too much.
Let’s give the guy and his team a chance. And let’s see what comes out of this round of talks, and Obama’s special climate summit in April.
Meanwhile, I’m off on a break until after Easter. I’ll leave you with another link to the latest iniative by the online community connect2earth. They’ve launched a new campaign, supported by celebrities like Skandar Keynes (from Chronicles of Narnia – ha! bet you were wondering when Narnia was going to come in to it. Jack, you probably thought it would involve the lion…)
They want to encourage people to debate with the world’s top environmental experts. Check it out yourselves, here’s the link:
Join the green online community?
Check the Ice Blog again around April 14th please!

(Erik Malm Photography, Courtesy of WWF)

Well, the parties to the polar bear conservation treaty have been talking for a couple of days now. It seems to me the main thing that will come out of a conference like this is publicity for the plight of the bears and the desperate need to take action on climate change, rather than any concrete measures.Climate change is the real issue here, and the polar bears have become one of the main symbols of the negative effects. The parties need to come out with a strong message to the Copenhagen climate meeting in December.
WWF were understandably upset, to put it mildly, when the five Arctic states participating decided at the start to exclude ngos, an Indigenous organization and other observers from the key sections of the meeting relating to climate change and an action plan.
“We do not know what these countries have to say about protecting polar bears that cannot be shared with the world”, were the words of Geoff York, polar bear coordinator for WWF,interviewed earlier for the ice blog.
(You might also like to hear this report on Living Planet, including Geoff York and scientists working on sea ice development in the Arctic)
WWF and other parties had actually been invited officially to the meeting and given observer status. The Norwegian government wanted them there, but evidently some other countries have their own agenda and were not so happy to have the conservationists on board.

Polar bears depend on the sea ice to hunt their prey (seals in particular).

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Their situation is already getting so bad that some of the experts have observed increasing cannibalistic tendencies amongst smaller, less robust bears.
Andrew Derocher, chair of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, an international network of researchers, is quoted as saying "we don't have hard evidence about climate change, but we have evidence about the numerous symptoms of climate change on polar bears."

With the ice season considerably shorter than it was even just 30 years ago, the bears have problems if they can’t hunt seals, their primary source of food and an essential source of fat to last them through the summer.R esearchers in Alaska have reported several incidents of bears killing and eating other polar bears.N ews agencies are quoting Steven Amstrup, a research wildlife biologist with the US Geological Surcey. He says some bears have been attacking female bears in their denning area. There’s also an increasing trend for polar bears in northern Alaska, to build their den on land.
Geoff York told me in the interview there was no chance of polar bears, who are specialized to the Arctic eco-system with its sea-ice, adapting completely to life on land, because climate change is moving too fast to allow natural adaptation, and because there’s too much competition there. So combatting climate change is the only way to save our white Arctic symbol

(All these great pics from Erik Malm Photography, Courtesy of WWF)

I’ve just come back from Copenhagen, where I spent a few days with a transatlantic group of journalists and climate change experts (scientists and business people).It was part of a study tour devoted to Energy, Climate and Oceans – Impacts on the Global Economy. One of the people we talked to was Lyyke Fries, the new Danish Climate and Energy Minister, who took over while her predecessor becomes EU Commissioner. “The Copenhagen hangover is over”, she told me, and said she was happy that the Copenhagen Accord was going to be a springboard for the next rounds of negotiations in Bonn and Mexico this year. She was presenting the targets entered on the UN list by the deadline (a flexible one, as UN climate chief Yvo de Boer stressed in January) as a successful step forward. At the same time she admits freely that the EU was sidelined in the creation of that accord and is trying to work out how to regain a prominent position in the climate process. She also refers to the “new world order” emerging, with countries like India, China and Brazil at the forefront.So it’s hard to believe the hangover is really over for Denmark or the EU, to mention but a few.
We also visited the Copenhagen office of Greenpeace. You won’t be surprised to hear that they have a different view of the Copenhagen Accord.
More about that and some of the interesting views put forward by North American experts and journos in the next couple of days.

Ammu posted a comment from the USA after attending a seminar where the experts were saying energy efficiency should be our first goal. By that he means reducing our demand for energy, matching our energy output to demand and a more efficient transformation of the resources we put in into the energy we get out. I would agree with that Ammu. But I don’t agree that we should only expand renewables in a second stage. As you say yourself, we need to combine different aspects at the same time to tackle climate change as quickly as possible. That means setting ambitious targets and creating the political and economic climate to achieve them.
I think US President Obama is starting out on the right track there, with his renewable energy targets. And that brings us to your next point. Schwarzenegger as emperor because of his old-car-scrapping policy? Hm. I think he certainly deserves recognition for what he’s doing in California for the environment and the climate, although we know he’s still struggling to sort out the economic problems he inherited. But then the President gave priority to letting Schwarzenegger and the other state governors move ahead faster than the national administration to implement tougher environmental or climate-protecting legislation when they can.
What I think is really remarkable is Obama’s will to rise above party politics in the interests of the environment and the future of the planet. If he really thought everybody else would do that – especially those in the “opposition” – then he’s pretty idealistic. But since he has the majority to push things through, he can get on with it, even if he is getting impatient with the time negotiations are taking to get his legislation package through.
I’ve been following the British media intensively over the past week or so, while I was braving the “Arctic conditions” (!?) of the British midlands. I got a strong sense that people think the new US administration is prepared to move ahead and opt for innovation much more radically than European governments, which are still too tied up with protecting their traditional car and fossil fuel industries.
So let’s give President Barack Obama a chance Ammu, before we look for another “emperor”. OK?