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Recall one version of the peaker story – peak oil as a repository of hope.  This is the take in which, despairing of other avenues to rapid, large-scale changes, we look to peak oil to at least save us from the more extreme forms of climate disaster. 

The idea is that, as we burn our way through the peak, fossil fuels will get more expensive and this will tip the competitive balance to low-carbon energy sources.  So that despite the obvious reality of the day – let’s just say “governance failure” for the moment, and leave it at that – in which it’s all but impossible to price carbon at anything like its true social cost, its price will nevertheless rise, maybe even fast enough to save our bacon.

Does anyone still believe this?  They won’t after reading the Carbon Bubble report, which was just released by the impeccably capitalist Carbon Tracker Initiative, which describes itself as “the first project of Investor Watch, a non-profit company established by its directors to align the capital markets with efforts to tackle climate change.”  This report, which is unfortunately based on current science (unfortunately because current science is pretty terrifying) begins by noting that we have a mere 565 Gigatonnes of CO2 left in our shared planetary 200 to 2050 carbon budget, if we intend to maintain a high probability (80%) of holding the warming below 2C.  Which we should absolutely do, for lots of reasons – think “managing the unavoidable, and avoiding the unmanageable.”  It then goes on to demonstrate, by simple arithmetic, that “only 20% of the total reserves can be burned unabated, leaving up to 80% of assets technically unburnable.”

Which is to say that peak oil can’t save us, because if we get anywhere near it we’re toast.  Instead, the only transition scenarios that might hold water are those in which we manage to leave fossil fuels behind while we still have plenty to spare.  A future not of peak oil but rather of unburnable carbon.

There’s a lot to say about all this, but the bottom line is that – surprise! – the financial markets are failing yet again!  This time they’re radically overvaluing the value of coal and oil companies, by failing to put a reasonable price of the risk associated with climate mobilization.  Which is to say, the risk that we will actually decide to not commit civilizational suicide.  Because if we do so decide, we’ll have to contrive, one way or another, to not burn most of the proven fossil reserves on the planet.  Which in turn means that the current astronomic valuations of the companies that own those reserves will have to be, ahem, adjusted.

The authors of the Carbon Bubble report would like to see this adjustment take place in a rational manner. 

“Now is the time to move into the second generation of investor action on climate change, which tackles the system that is locked into financing fossil fuels. Climate change poses a great threat to the global economy and it is not unrealistic to expect regulators responsible for assessing new systemic risks to address the carbon bubble.

The goal now is for regulators to send clear signals to the market that cause a shift away from the huge carbon stockpiles which pose a systemic risk to investors. This is the duty of the regulator – to rise to this challenge and prevent the bubble bursting.”

The alternative, of course, is one in which “the markets decide” that, one way or another, most known economic reserves of fossil fuels will never be burned, and then proceed to rapidly, not to say catastrophically, reprice coal and oils stocks.

As Paul Gilding put it in his flawed but admirable new book, The Great Disruption, “if you lose your shirt on your coal and oil investments, don’t say you weren’t warned.”

It’s been a long time coming, but a team led by Glen Peters, of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, has finally published a comprehensive “consumption-side” analysis of global greenhouse-gas emission, one that takes international trade fully into account.  

Estimates of “outsourced emissions” or “embodied carbon” have been knocking around for a while now, but this one is different.  This time the study – Growth in emission transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008 — is comprehensive, and this time the publisher is the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, and that’s going to make the results, and their implications, harder to ignore. 

What consumption-side carbon accounting means is that, if a widget is manufactured in, say, China and then shipped to, say, the US – where it is “consumed” – the carbon embodied in the widget goes not on China’s books, as per the usual practice, but on America’s.  The difference makes a difference.  In fact, since 1990 – the Kyoto Protocol’s baseline year – 75% of the growth in the North’s consumption-based emissions took place in China. 

So what happens when such “Chinese emissions” are moved onto the consumers books?  

First, and much in contrast to the usual storyline, in which China’s emissions have risen to become the world’s largest, the size of its carbon footprint drops by almost a fifth.  And once that’s happened, then even by this rather misleading metric (the developing countries argue, with good reason, that these kinds of comparisons should take account of historical emissions), China is no longer the top emitter. 

Second, the world’s consumers loom even larger than before.  And since most of them still reside in the wealthy “Annex B” countries, (UN speak) this means that even the small progress that these countries appear to have made in reducing their emissions growth is, well, a bit of an illusion.

To quote the CICERO team directly:

 ”… the global emissions associated with consumption in many developed countries have increased with a large share of the emissions originating in developing countries… In addition, we find that the emission transfers via international trade often exceed the emission reductions in the developed countries. Consequently, increased consumption in the Annex B countries has caused an increase in global emissions contrary to the territorial emission statistics reported to the UNFCCC.”

That last bit – that, as the Reuters story put it, “the shift in manufacturing to emerging nations is doing more to curb rich countries’ greenhouse gas emissions than measures they are taking to meet the U.N. pact to fight climate change” – is why this is news that’s going to stay news. 

There’s a lot more to say about all this, of course, but the bottom line, as noted by Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science (who wrote a paper on this subject last year), is that “we consume a lot of stuff that is produced in China and other developing countries.  Their CO2 emissions are helping support my consumption.”

Not even an economist could argue with that!

Which, actually, is an odd turn of events.  Because if ever a moment was critical, it’s this one, midway through the cycle of negotiations (Copenhagen 2009, Cancun 2010, South Africa 2011) that will determine the shape and direction of the post-Kyoto climate regime.  What happens now matters, particularly because, all else being equal, the eventual end of the economic crisis will be accompanied by another rapid rise in global emissions.  The only way to avoid that rise, and many others, is to escape the logic of the business-as-usual world.  Despite the coming low-carbon energy revolution, we can’t expect to make that escape without systems of global cooperation, burden sharing and accountability to help us along, systems that can only be rooted in a fair multilateral accord.  Which is to say that the climate talks may not be fun, and may not even be the main event, but there’s no real hope without them.

Copenhagen, unfortunately, was a grave disappointment, and was quickly followed by a cascade of others: the “Climategate” fiasco, the failure of the beltway realists to deliver a US climate bill, an explosion of denialist populism on the American right, and, of course, the midterm American elections.  Even worse, from the point of view of the climate talks – the success of which depends, in the last instance, on international cost sharing – is the emergence, in Europe as well as the US, of an Austerity Panic Party that pretends, amidst unprecedented inequality and unprecedented wealth, that the North is bankrupt.  The point of the pretense?  To project a story of the future in which declining “foreign aid” is as inevitable as the decimation of domestic social services.

The discouraging pace of the international talks, in other words, is anything but unique.  Right now, nothing is working particularly well.  The US, in particular, is a model of dysfunction, and an eager player in the international “blame game,” which is now in full swing.  Nor is this a simple “climate problem.”  The truth is that the climate challenge is bound tightly to a larger political crisis, and that neither is likely to be resolved without the other.  So, to be clear – there is no “deadlock” in the global negotiations.  Nor is there a “North / South impasse.”  What we’re seeing, rather, is a political and governance disaster of the first order, and despite its many critical international dimensions, it’s a disaster that is centered in the wealthy world.

And the winner is…

In the United States, China bashing is much in vogue.  Recently, China has developed a taste for bashing back.  After a recent climate meeting in Tianjin, one of its senior negotiators compared the US to a pig preening itself in a mirror.  It was perhaps an undiplomatic comment, but it’s hard to deny that the US makes a tempting target.  If there were an international climate-spoiler sweepstakes, the US would have to be the presumptive winner.  It’s the US that knocked the Kyoto Protocol down to near irrelevance, and the US which led the Copenhagen charge to abandon top-down emissions targets in favor of a bottom-up process of voluntary “pledge and review.”  It’s the US, in the person of Obama’s climate chief Todd Stern, that insisted on a “new paradigm for climate diplomacy,” one that rejects a “Berlin Wall between developed and developing countries” and asserts instead a world in which the developed countries are no longer presumed to bear the overarching, if inconvenient, obligations of the rich and the responsible.  Or even the limited pragmatic obligations of flexibility, in the face of the “innovative finance” proposals (ranging from the auctioning of emissions entitlements to an “aviation levy” to the “Robin Hood Tax”) that, at this point, look to be our best way forward.

Is this too harsh?  Perhaps.  There are extenuating circumstances in today’s America, where the “tea party” – a corporate-funded creature of self-satisfied, self-destructive, flat-earth libertarianism – has emerged to oppose even climate science, let alone international solidarity.  It’s an heartily unwelcome development, and it almost makes a good excuse.  Moreover, there’s plenty of competition for the role of the world’s leading climate spoiler.  Look past the US to the rest of the usual suspects.  The Saudis (and, hell, the entire global carbon cartel), the Russians (who haven’t yet fully digested the world-historic heat wave that just ravaged their country), and the World Bank (you want coal with that?) are still around, and largely unreformed.  There’s the usual symbiotic crew of denialists and disoriented reporters (with their usual convenient failure to understand, let alone explain, the South’s position).  There are the Chinese, who, it must be said, are playing more than one set of cards.  There are the endless ranked phalanxes of corporate opportunists.  And, as always, there are the subtle Europeans, who until recently proposed to strengthen their emission-reduction target (from 20% to 30% below 1990 levels in 2020) while, at the same time, defending emissions-accounting loopholes designed to render such strengthening almost meaningless.

They’ve given up on the 30%, at least for now.  The loopholes remain.

Issues abound, and it’s hard to know who to forgive for what.  The global climate wish list is after all long and extremely daunting.  Just for starters it includes science-based targets, a democratically-governed global climate fund, a fair-shares global effort-sharing system, an honestly scaled and funded adaptation framework, technology and investment cooperation on a grand and global scale, a strategy for finessing intellectual property and trade disputes, a forestry and land-use agreement that’s both pro-poor and effective, the closing of the accounting loopholes, and national low- and zero-carbon development plans all around.

And this isn’t even a comprehensive list!  So it’s probably fortunate that, coming up to Cancun, the focus is on a small set of key issues, which must be at least provisionally resolved before the bigger problems can move onto the stage.  Which is to say that what we really need – an open and creative debate about the architecture of global climate justice – is not on the Cancun agenda.  What is on the agenda is “fast-start finance,” and finance in general, and the linked issue of transparency.&nbs
p; And, inevitably, the Kyoto Protocol.  And the obvious fact that the climate talks can only play their appointed role if the North’s negotiators rise, somehow, to the occasion.

The North’s move

Recall that Copenhagen ended with a shaky, acrimonious, and altogether unsatisfying political deal – the Copenhagen Accord – wherein most (but not all!) countries, industrialized and developing, agreed to openly publish their emission-reduction pledges and actions.  This in itself wasn’t a bad idea.  The problem was rather that, in Copenhagen, the move towards transparency came packaged with the repudiation, particularly by the US, of legally-binding targets and timetables.  And that the Accord was immediately (and predictably) used to take the spotlight off the North’s long recognized obligation (enshrined in 1992’s Framework Convention, 1997’s Kyoto Protocol and 2007’s Bali Action Plan) to “take the lead.”  This is a long story, but it’s one worth recalling, especially if you hope to get beyond the China bashing and posed pessimism that have come to dominate international climate coverage.

The bottom line here, one rarely explained, is that the so-called “North / South impasse” will not be broken until the North begins to meet its obligations, or, at the very least, to keep its promises.  Which is exactly why talk of a “North / South impasse” implies a false, non-existent symmetry.  The southern elites, to be sure, are hardly above criticism – they have badly mixed loyalties, and like elites everywhere they are often short-sighted and self-interested.  And with the financial crisis fading into a crisis of trade and development that neither the US nor the Chinese care to honestly face, there’s plenty of criticism to go around.  Still, and particularly when it comes to climate, it remains the North’s move.  No amount of “balance” is going to change this fundamental reality.

An interim deal?

The hope in Cancun is an interim deal, one that would change the tone, encourage statesmanship, and maybe, just maybe, set us up for a more meaningful breakthrough in December of 2011 in South Africa, when the next milestone climate meeting is scheduled to take place.  Whose fault will it be if such an interim deal fails to materialize?  That, dear reader, is the question that all good climate watchers must now prepare to answer.

What’s on the table?  Basically, “finance for transparency.”  Which is to say, for the North, delivering on its Copenhagen promise to provide $30 billion in “new and additional” fast-start finance designed to support mitigation and adaptation in the South, and to establish a working modicum of trust.  The South, in turn, would agree to a significant measure of transparency.  India has already signaled that it’s willing to accept a “facilitative process for transparency and accountability,” and Brazil and China have expressed “cautious support” for such an approach.  Which is not surprising.  Transparency is a natural tradeoff for the developing world, which is already doing a great deal, particularly when its efforts are measured against its relatively limited wealth and capability.

What would this transparency entail?  Leaving aside the details, both wealthy and developing countries would publish low-carbon transition plans, and package those plans into manageable strategies, and provide clear visibility into their efforts to shift to new kinds of development paths.  Measurement, reporting and verification; these are the keywords, and this “MRV” would not be restricted to actions that are “supported” by international finance and technology.  It would apply as well to the support itself – the wealthy world’s often obscure and corrupt channels and devices – and as quickly as possible it would apply to “unsupported” actions.  The goal – essential to any cooperative strategy for rapid global transformation – would be to make it possible for everyone to tell what everyone else is doing.  Or not doing.

The transparency problem is not a small one.  Verification is a charged and intrusive process in which industrial secrecy and state sovereignty are both at risk.  But the deeper issue, now as always, is the South’s fear that the climate transition will mean the end of its dreams of development.  That, even as the ice melts and the storms rage, endless negotiations will unfold into a trap, a narrowing series of gambits and tradeoffs in which the powerful North shifts the burdens of transition to the weaker, and far less culpable, South.  In this context, transparency means lost flexibility, and thus risk.  Nor is this a paranoid view of the situation.  The recent positions of the US – which seems to have taken its domestic travails as license for bluster and aggressiveness – have done much to make it credible, and to exacerbate distrust.

Finance proves the point.  It’s now clear that the finance pledge made in the Copenhagen Accord – “to provide new and additional resources, including forestry and investments through international institutions, approaching USD 30 billion for the period 2010 – 2012 with balanced allocation between adaptation and mitigation” – is not going to be met anytime soon.  There are many key words in this passage, but attend for the moment to “new and additional,” because many of the pledges that have thus far been tendered are, in the scrupulous words of the World Resource Institute, “restated or renamed commitments already made in the past.” Most, moreover, are intended for mitigation projects, with a mere USD 3 billion earmarked for adaptation.  And they are slated to be delivered, if indeed they are, though bilateral channels and multilateral agencies (like the World Bank) which the North controls, in ways that are anything but transparent and straightforward.

In the longer term, the forecast is more of the same.  This, at least, is the easiest conclusion to draw from the just-released final report of the Secretary General’s High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing, which explores options for raising $100 billion annually, starting in 2020.  Here, too, is a story that fails to inspire confidence.  For one thing, the $100 billion figure is entirely arbitrary, with absolutely no relationship to the likely costs of a rapid global climate transition.  For another, the most promising ideas for innovative global finance have been stonewalled by northern functionaries who, with deadly consistency, remain enthralled to the habits of neoliberalism.  Which is to say that realism-as-usual is still the order of the day, and that, despite the severity of the climate crisis, the wealthy world continues to proceed by way of limited funding options in which small offers of public finance are padded out with loans, repurposed and non-additional assistance that was already in the “aid” pipeline, and of course a great deal of private (profit seeking) money.

Will the South eventually accept such an offe
r?  Who’s to say?  But here’s a question: should it?  Should it if by so doing it accepts a future in which the high-minded aspirations that launched the climate talks back in 1992, aspirations that echo in the UN Framework Convention’s invocation of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” are set aside in the interests of short-term northern realpolitic?  Many people will say that the South has no choice.  But what if the consequence is a muddle of inadequate policies that, while better than nothing, still fall tragically short of both moral and scientific necessity?

Finally

Consider finally the Kyoto Protocol, the fate of which remains strangely, and strongly, explosive.  But why?  We could answer glibly, and many do – as if the South’s refusal to accede to bare-knuckled northern bargaining was unambiguously a product of Third-Worldist inflexibility.  Or, perhaps more usefully, we could ask why so many of our dearest comrades – delegates and activists alike – continue to aggressively defend Kyoto, and this despite its manifest, even absurd, inadequacy.

The answer, perhaps, is that the Kyoto Protocol, almost alone on the negotiating table, represents the obligations of the wealthy world.  And that, to many eyes, this trumps even its rude, unscalable, architecture.  Nor is this difficult to understand.  These years now, from Copenhagen on, mark a time of decision, and it’s one we simply can’t afford to get stupidly wrong.  We can’t, in particular, follow America’s Todd Stern, casting aside Kyoto’s blunt recognition of the North / South division with rough talk of an obsolete “Berlin Wall.”  To do so would be to cast aside reality.  It would not be statesmanship, or even realism; it would be abdication.

It’s time to place new bets.  Mine is that, at Cancun, the lines will be starkly drawn.  That the logic of pledge and review will be widely seen as collective suicide.  That the negotiating halls will simmer with better ideas.  And that, despite all, there will be a drive towards compromise and face saving.  Whether it will succeed I do not know.

I have hopes too.  That we’ll manage a recovery in which emissions do not immediately accelerate.  That the finance problem (which could, actually, be solved) will at least be faced, coldly and dead on.  That the rules of a new game will become increasingly discernible, a game of building blocks and momentum in which the obligations of the rich and the responsible can be openly and productively debated.  That we’ll wake soon in a world where calls for extremely rapid global emission reductions are no longer invitations to despair.

It’s still possible.  And by the way, Cancun will not be boring.

Maybe soon, it’ll no longer take a major loss to move us to frank public debate about fundamental things. Anyway, judging by the situation in Bonn, where a terminally inconclusive post-Copenhagen “intercessional” just shambled a bit closer to December’s rematch in Cancun, we’re going to get another disappointment soon enough. So stand ready. If the usual pattern holds, the next round of recrimination — a global round — will start in early December.

At least we can now see the writing on the wall. Hell, here in the U.S., our face is pressed right up against it. And, internationally, thanks to a recent series of reports, we know just how intolerable the post-Copenhagen status quo really is.  

To recap: the climate movement hasn’t even been able to agree that Copenhagen was a failure. This is because the last-minute “Copenhagen Accord” — though widely and justly disparaged — has actually moved the world’s nations to commit pledges to paper. The significance of this move was widely underappreciated in the bitter months just after Copenhagen, but now that it’s a fact on the ground, things are changing. Bottom line: the Copenhagen Accord sets up a “transparent” situation in which research teams around the world can sum and evaluate both the total size of the global emissions reduction pledge, and the total size of the Annex 1 (rich world) pledge.  

Alas, both are terribly low — not only with respect to the demands of the 1.5 and 2 degrees C temperature targets that constitute our best hope for survival, but also with respect to the oft-supported (even by the IPCC) claim that, to hold the 2 degrees line, the Annex 1 countries must reduce emissions, by 2020, to by at least 25 percent, and preferably 40 percent, below their 1990 levels. And if (like over 100 countries and most all the global climate movement) they want to hold the warming to 1.5 C, they support even larger cuts. The problem is that Annex 1′s “aggregate pledges” add up to cuts of only 17-25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and that’s before you account for the U.S.’s pledge (which is explicitly still on the table) to reduce emissions by 17 percent below the 2005 level by 2020. The pledge, it turns out, is almost as paltry as it is unacceptable to the American right. Factor it in and you dilute the total rich-world 2020 pledge down to 12-18 percent below 1990. 

Does this seem a large number? Perhaps in Washington, though it’s still entirely inadequate, given what it implies for the weak ambition of the overall global regime. But what if we, as they say, get realistic? Would it not at least be a break with the past, and maybe, just maybe, enough to get the ball rolling?  

The problem is that the ball only rolls if the pledges perform as advertized. And this, as it turns out, is not the plan. Because the Copenhagen pledges, though widely trumpeted by governments around the world, are rife with loopholes.  

The mere existence of such loopholes is not news — bogus land-use emissions accounting, non-additional offsets, “hot air” from the former Society states, “bunker” emissions associated with international travel and shipping — the climate NGOs have been talking about them for years, to anyone who would listen. What is news is that, now that the science is clear (see for example Mitigating climate change through reductions in greenhouse gas emissions: is it possible to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees C?, by the U.K.’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, and Hadley Centre) and the pledges have been collected by the U.N. Secretariat, the total size of the Annex 1 loophole can be properly evaluated. And, according to a series of recent accountings — one, by Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, presented at a UNFCCC workshop in Bonn (described in this excellent summary by the Third World Network), and another, The Integrity Gap: Copenhagen Pledges and Loopholes, published by Simon Terry at the Sustainability Council of New Zealand — it’s, well, huge.

In fact, even when conservative assumptions are used, the Copenhagen pledges contains so many loopholes that, taken together, they sum to 21 percent of 1990 emissions, a number that entirely negates the pledges themselves! So that the official, well-publicized global 2020 emissions reductions target of 12-18 percent actually means that emissions levels large enough to reach 3-9 percent above 1990 would be allowed. Which is (a technical point but one that climate wonks will appreciate) actually more than the business-as-usual projection!    

Here’s a picture, from Kartha’s presentation in Bonn:

It’s a grim situation. But at the same time, it’s an interesting one. Because the cat is out of the bag. The  rich world’s negotiating position is bankrupt. And we know it, though only painfully, as we also know that even the strained realism of Obama-era climate policy has been unable to move the U.S. Senate. As we know that, in its stasis, the U.S. goes a long way towards paralyzing the rest of the world. And that this paralysis is extremely convenient, to recalcitrant elites everywhere. 

Still, the situation is quite unstable. Look again at the top of Kartha’s graph, and know that we’re probably not going to ride up that puce line, not the way the science is going, not without a legitimation crisis of major proportions!  And because we won’t, we’re going to do something new. Exactly what in it will be is not clear at the moment, but I at least have found an odd balm in the current U.S. debate.  I particularly like Dave Robert’s analysis — that the real problems are the Senate and the economic crisis, and that our policy disputes are secondary. And Bill McKibben’s, because it tell us that, as a matter of strategy, we must tell the truth — “we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get.” Taken together, I read them to imply that we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to speak freely. 

Even I, with my left-green beliefs about how global economic justice is a precondition for a viable global climate regime, even I am free to speak my mind, without worrying that I’ll squirrel the deal for my realist friends in Washington. True, I have to be careful about how I talk about costs (as in the aggregate global cost of saving our civilization, which, frankly, is going to be a bit high), but beyond that I can relax. Today’s Republicans already believe, or claim to believe, that environmentalism = socialism = the U.N. = dictatorship, and that Sweden is Hell on Earth. Given this, how much harm can it possible do to add one more small wrinkle to the mix — like a frank discussion of the impasse
in the global negotiations?

First, though, I gotta say these reports only strengthen the scientific case.  For example, the IPCC’s 2007 Forth Assessment Report says that sea levels could rise by between 0.6 and 1.9 feet by 2100, but recent studies have suggested that this is far too optimistic.  The NAS reports incorporate this newer research and concludes that sea levels could rise by as much as 6.5 feet in during this century.

Second – and this is the point – I was a bit surprised by the way the NAS approached the problem of calculating the US emissions budget.  The standard methodology in the climate world is to estimate a remaining global budget (which is hard) and then to work out the “share” of this budget that properly belongs to each country (which is harder).  And you have to admit this approach makes sense; after all, when the US – or any country – “takes” a budget, less is left for everyone else; which is why climate, fundamentally, is a sharing problem.  Anyway, I expected to find some version of this approach in the NAS reports.  How else could they calculate a recommended US budget? 

The NAS authors, however, manage to sort of use the budget approach without actually spelling out the global budgets that they are leveraging in their analysis, or saying anything about how these should be shared.  Rather, they approach both global and national budgets indirectly, by way of a recent study by the highly-respected Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, that at the end of the day simply aggregates “bottom up” estimates of what the US and other countries can reasonably (e.g. cost effectively) be expected to do. 

The method is simple.  The studies calculate the US emissions budgets implied by domestic emissions cuts of 50% and 80% below 1990 emissions levels, cuts that yield 2012 – 2050 cumulative budgets of 203Gt CO2-equivalent and 167Gt CO2-equivalent respectively.  These numbers (compare them to 266Gt, which would result from a continuation of the 2US’s 2008 emissions level) are then correlated to global studies, such that the authors can say (page 28), apropos their most stringent case (450 ppm CO2-equivalent) that …

“atmospheric GHG concentrations can only be kept below 450 ppm CO2-eq if the United States and other high-income countries, along with China, India, and many other low- and middle-income countries around the world, take aggressive actions to reduce emissions staring within the next few years.”

In other words, NAS commends a 2012-2015 US budget of 203Gt-167Gt CO2-equivalent as “reasonable,” but this budget is never discussed, or justified, with respect to the global budget.

Which means that the NAS is able to note that it is reasonably consistent with emerging US policy, and with an ambitious global target, without once discussing why they have reached this conclusion, or what it implies about global budget sharing, or indeed about why the budget that remains to be shared is so damn limited.  It’s as if bottom-up national budgets made some sort of scientific sense.  As is, more particularly, they could calculated without raising sticky question like historical responsibility and burden sharing. 

Why would this approach strike the good folks as NAS as reasonable?   Because today’s overarching climate policy problem is widely seen as finding the best way to rapidly build momentum towards global decarbonization.  And because this is widely taken to imply not talking, or at least not talking loudly, about how serious the climate problem really is, and concentrating, instead, on “getting started.” 

In this sense, the NAS approach is consistent with the “pledge and review” approach that the US is pushing in the international negotiations, an approach in which countries offer up the policies and measures that they can contrive or justify domestically, and we’re left, after the fact, to work out what these pledges add up to.  And to hope for sunnier negotiations ahead. 

Not surprisingly, this method supports both the thrust of the science and the thrust of US policy.  The question, though, is if the proposed US emissions budget is fair, and if it would be seen as fair, and if by being seen as fair it would be conducive be to the sort of international accord that we actually need, one that has a “high probability” (in IPCC’s lingo) of actually avoiding dangerous climate change.  Here, the only thing that the reports can say is that their recommended US emissions budgets would be 450 CO2-eq consistent if all the major emitters take aggressive action in the short term.  

Bottom line: it’s a pragmatic methodology, but it’s also a strange one.  Science for strange days. 

The good news is the recommended numbers explicitly exclude international offsets!  See page 29: “Note that these goals are presented as limits for cumulative US domestic emissions (rather than through international offsets.”  The bad news, and it’s unfortunately the flip side of the good news, is that the recommended domestic action is taken as the sum of US obligated action.

This is a key point. The problem is that, from an international perspective, it’s not the size of US domestic effort that is, finally, the issue.  It’s rather the size of the US’s combined domesti
c and international effort.   But in the NAS terms, there is no international effort.  Or rather, there might be, but it’s not really mentioned.  The only relevant discussion (that I could find) is a discussion of how international offsets would result in international transfers (on top of domestic reductions), but if and only if (the report is clear here) there’s no “double counting.” 

The only point at which the author’s make an explicit comparison to a fair-shares global framework proposal is on page 31, where it is noted that, according to the German Advisory Council on Global Change, an equal per-capita approach allocates the US a budget of 35 CO2-eq over the same 2012-2050 period.  Obviously, this is a much smaller US budget than the one the National Academies recommend, but the issues here are not discussed.

In sum, the NAS analysis is odd and opaque, and when it refers to the sort of global emergency emission reduction trajectory that we actually need (450 CO2-equivalent isn’t a bad marker, though it’s still a lot more than 350 ppm, as in www.350.org) it repeatedly states that current US policy is plausible consistent with that trajectory (a weak claim) only if it is accompanied by “immediate, aggressive, and comprehensive global GHG emissions reduction efforts.”  But would they be?  It’s unlikely, not unless US domestic reductions dropped to the very lowest end of the recommended range – without international offsets! – and if this drop was accompanied by a very significant commitment to international mitigation and adaptation, a commitment that the NAS takes as being outside its proper purview. 

Other than this, though, it’s a good report!

A few weeks after it ended, chatting to a friend about some stupid comments I’d overhead during that long last night, he said that “everyone gets a pass for anything they said during the first week.”  The first week after Copenhagen is what he meant — a time of exhaustion and near despair in international climate circles. 

I bring this up because some of the stupid things that were said during that first week are still with us. There were plenty of them, of course, but this post doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive. It’s just about China. 

Copenhagen, of course, was not a success. But it did change the game, in particular by establishing a framework in which both northern and southern countries are stepping forward to “pledge” to mitigation actions of various kinds. As they do, scientists and institutes around the world are tabulating the pledges, normalizing them, calculating their implied aggregate impact on global temperature, and — inevitably — drawing conclusions about which countries are doing their “fair share” and which are free riding on the efforts of others. 

Such conclusions can be complicated. What, after all, should a national emissions pledge be compared to? A projection of business-as-usual emissions? If so, which one? A measure of per-capita “emissions rights?” If so, what about the fact that the “atmospheric space” is already exhausted? A fair-shares national obligation? If so, how will such an obligation be calculated, and on the basis of what principles? Historical responsibility? If so, starting when?  Capacity to pay? If so, how should such capacity be defined? How should the obligations of rich countries be compared to those of poor? And what about the rich people within poor countries? Or for that matter the poor people within rich ones? Such “intra-national” injustice can’t be ignored, but how should it be accounted?

Such questions, fortunately, are answerable. In fact, the terms by which they can be resolved — a “fair enough” accord based upon “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” — are at this point reasonably familiar and well understood. The question is if the dynamic of the negotiations can be shifted from one in which countries jockey for short-term advantage to one in which they seek new forms of cooperation. And who must do what before such a shift is possible. 

In this context, the central debate can finally be pushed to center stage. Which countries are carrying their own weight, and which are not? And how, really, can we tell? The question is now on the floor, and the need good answers is palpable. So, too, is the need to clear the fog, which is thick indeed.

On the other hand, there comes a point where the numbers almost speak for themselves. Consider the following two charts, which tell a complex tale in a simple manner that, while not ideal, does serve to highlight the main point — U.S. emissions, cumulated over time, are greater than China’s, but at the same time the U.S. is pledging to smaller cuts.

The first chart is responsibility, i.e., contribution to global warming, cumulated from 1900. (The total[1] or the United States is 338 GtCO2, and for China is 124 GtCO2.) The second chart is a reflection of pledged reduction effort for the year 2020 in GtCO2. It compares the U.S. goal of reducing emissions by 17 percent with China’s goal of reducing emissions intensity by 40-45 percent. Both figures are defined relative to 2005 levels, and are pledged for the year 2020. (The US pledge translates[2] to approximately 0.8 GtCO2 of effort in 2020, and the China pledge is calculated[3] to amount to approximately 2.5 GtCO2 in 2020, or approximately 3 times the United States effort)

These charts are not, if I may put the matter gently, consistent with the common, post-Copenhagen story of China’s climate policy, which has it that, in the words of British climate secretary Ed Miliband, China “held the world to ransom” in an attempt to prevent a climate treaty. Nor is this an incidental point.

The blame game

Why did was Copenhagen so disappointing? It’s a tough question with lots of possible approaches. Alternatively, it may be that Copenhagen’s failure was simply China’s fault. This explanation, alas, has grown legs. It demands discussion, beginning with Mark Lynas’ widely read, and rather fantastically misleading How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room. Here, as a reminder, are Lynas’ key paragraphs:

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialized country targets, previously agreed as an 80 percent cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why — because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”. The long-term target, of global 50 percent cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen …

With the deal gutted, the heads of state session concluded with a final battle as the Chinese delegate insisted on removing the 1.5C target so beloved of the small island states and low-lying nations who have most to lose from rising seas. President Nasheed of the Maldives, supported by Brown, fought valiantly to save this crucial number. “How can you ask my country to go extinct?” demanded Nasheed. The Chinese delegate feigned great offence — and the number stayed, but surrounded by language which makes it all but meaningless. The deed was done.

It sounds pretty bad, and no doubt it was. In any case, it’s easy to see why Lynas’ fly-on-the-wall account was so compelling, particularly to desperate northerners, environmentalists of course but also, and more generally, all those who are already primed to see China as an implacable mercantilist threat to their preferred style of capitalism. The real question, though, is if his summary interpretation — “This is fast becoming China’s century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower’s freedom of action” — is an accurate one.

Caution is in order, as always in the face of politically convenient arguments. And certainly Lynas’ conclusions are much in line with the North’s strategy of hiding behind the emerging economies. See for example Snubbed In Copenhagen, E.U. Weighs Climate Options, a Reuters piece that told us that “Officials acknowledge privately that the mandatory system for enforcing emissions curbs created by the 1997 Kyoto protocol is doomed because China won’t accept any constraints on its future economic growth, and the United States won’t join any agreement that is not binding on Beijing.”

Still, it’s not enough to point out that Lynas’ argument is useful to the North. Or even to remind ourselves that by many measures China is already making greater efforts than the wealthy countries of the North. It’s also necessary to go to the core of Lynas’ argument, which as he recently put it, is that “Copenhagen has opened up a chasm between sustainability and equity.” Why? Because, though “NGOs that ideologically support equity defend the right of developing countries to increase their emissions for two to three more decades at least,” in fact, “there is no room for expansion by anyone.”

In Lynas’ view, this “chasm between sustainability and equity” is a pitiless divide, which no amount of pro-poor solidarity can bridge. In fact, it’s an implacable truth of our carbon-constrained future that not only China, but also India, and South Africa, and Brazil, and Mexico, and indeed the entire “emerging” world is at the edge of an near-impossible future. If the climate is to be saved, the South will have to put its developmental aspirations onto the betting table, and it will have to do so soon.

It is fact the case that “there is no room for expansion by anyone”? Then welcome to the future as a suicide pact. For it is highly unlikely that the developing countries, and the emerging economies in particular, will have their plans so rudely checked. But what’s the alternative? This is a good question, much discussed by those who’ve been following the burden-sharing debate that’s raged through the climate community in the last few years. Unfortunately, this debate does not seem to be familiar to Mark Lynas. Which, perhaps, is not entirely his fault. In truth, the northern climate movement has quite failed to explain the structure of the global climate justice problem to the broader population. Or even to itself.

What exactly is this problem? Only that we’ve reached the limits to growth, and done so in a world that’s bitterly divided between haves and have-nots. That, despite decades of warnings, the wealthy nations have neglected to demonstrate that low-carbon development paths are actually possible. That they’ve instead pursued business-as-usual economics, and, within the climate negotiations, have stonewalled on the oft-repeated demand, made not just by the Chinese but by the entire developing world, to accept meaningful reduction commitments. That, against this dark background, China — a proud country that has for all its many faults lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty — has emerged as the chief voice of a southern bloc that has consistently refused to accept the choice between developmental justice and climate stabilization.

The South dilemma is easy enough to visualize.  Consider the “G8 style” emissions pathway that provoked China’s backroom confrontation with the North. The details of this pathway are that: 1) global emissions peak soon (about 2020) and decline by 2050 to 50 percent below 1990 levels; and 2) Northern emissions simultaneously decline to 80 percent below 1990 levels. Now ask yourself — why might China’s rejection of such an offer be reasonable? The answer lies in arithmetic: The remaining global emissions budget is so small that, despite a relatively ambitious program of northern emission reductions, southern emissions must still peak soon, and then drop almost as rapidly as global emissions themselves. Further, they must do so while the people of the South are still struggling to escape poverty, and more generally to invent new, dignified, and sustainable models of life.

The climate crisis is, in other words, a crisis of development.

It’s necessary to be very clear here. The problem is not that poverty alleviation, or even just forms of sustainable development, are now impossible. The problem is rather that they have not been compellingly demonstrated. Indeed, the wealthy countries, through their reluctance to reduce their own emissions, have quite convincingly demonstrated to the developing world how undesirable — if not actually impossible — such paths must be. The simple fact is that, today, the only proven routes up from poverty still involve an expanded use of energy and, consequently, a seemingly inevitable increase in fossil-fuel use and thus carbon emissions.

Moreover, the South’s reticence, understandable within a G8-style pathway, is all the more compelling in the context of a global 350 target. Here, even if the North’s emissions drop at a sustained rate of 10 percent a year, to approach zero in 2050 (an ambitious goal by any measure), the South would still be left with a reduction pathway that is scarcely less stringent. How it can be negotiated is one of the biggest and most pressing questions on the geopolitical agenda, one that this note will not attempt to answer. But I must at least stipulate that, unless the South comes to trust the North’s willingness to accept its fair share of the necessary effort, whatever it turns out to be, honest emergency pathways will remain forever out of reach.

Return to China, which despite wealthy enclaves still has many, many people living in poverty. Consider that the targets that the Chinese expunged from the Copenhagen Accord would have important developmental implications. And that the South has for years made it clear that it will simply not allow itself to be trapped into sacrificing development for climate protection. Remember that, during the run up to Copenhagen, the South repeatedly insisted that the North accept a science-based reduction target at the “upper end” of the IPCC’s 25 percent by 40 percent range (from the 1990 baseline, by 2020). And that the North, for its part, attempted instead to enshrine a global reduction pathway that would have implicitly constrained southern development, and to do so without itself adopting science-based targets of any kind. Then ask yourself, again, exactly what (other than its failure to properly explain itself, which was egregious indeed) was so unreasonable about the Chinese position.

The answer is not obvious.

Note: For a much more detailed and quantitative discussion of the trajectories here, and of the dilemma that climate destabilization poses for the developing countries, see this.

[1] This is the total fossil CO2 emitted by the United States and China, respectively, since 1900, as reported by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) of the United States Department of Energy. If one were to look back only to 1950 (rather than 1900), then the tally would be 260 GtCO2 for the US, and 122 GtCO2 for China.

[2] The Energy Information Agency of the US Department of Energy forecasts in their Annual Energy Outlook 2010 that 2020 fossil CO2 emissions in the US will be 3.2 percent lower than they were in 2005, this under a reference case (i.e., a business-as-usual scenario) in which the United States does not enact national climate policy. The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2009, projects an even greater decline of roughly 5 percent over the same period. Emissions were already 8.9 percent lower in 2009 than in 2005 owing to the ongoing economic recession, but both EIA’s AEO2010 and the IEA’s WEO2009 projects a modest rebound for the United States over the coming decade. To meet the 17 percent pledge, therefore, the U.S. will need to reduce emissions below the expected 3.2 percent “reference” reduction by a further 0.8 GtCO2. (If one instead goes with the IEA’s projection of a 5 percent reference reduction, the additional required mitigation would be about 0.7 GtCO2.)

[3] This estimated was calculated by the UNFCCC Secretariat and documented in their Preliminary Assessment of pledges made by Annex 1 Parties and voluntary actions and policy goals by a number of non-Annex 1 Parties. (This leaked document was widely circulated, and made available). The Secretariat’s 2.5 GtCO2 estimate of the abatement effort implied by the Chinese pledge is calculated relative to a constructed reference case (not the IEA WEO2009) that explicitly excludes the effort associated with China’s existing energy intensity policy. As the Secretariat explained, “The level of emissions in the [IEA WEO2009] reference scenario … is among the lowest compared to the other studies available. … [It] already includes the effects from some of the pledges and voluntary action in cases where the relevant legislation and policies are put in place. This includes, among others, a large part of the E.U. 20 percent reduction target, Norway 30 percent reduction target, Australia’s 5 percent reduction target and China’s current policies, notably the 20 percent energy efficiency improvement target.”

William Chandler (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) is more explicit: “The current energy intensity policy … can legitimately be described as severe, even draconian. The policy imposes hundreds of detailed industrial efficiency standards to a degree unparalleled in any other country in the world.  The policy has forced closure of tens of thousands of factories, power plants, and production lines that failed to meet the standards.  It is unimaginable that such a policy could ever be enacted in the United States, much less be continued for another decade. It’s a non-trivial error to call it a “reference case,” as the IEA has done.” See Memo To Copenhagen: Commentary Is Misinformed-China’s Commitment Is Significant.

The more pressing question, though, is whether Copenhagen was a failure when judged against, not what is necessary, but rather what was possible. This is a much more difficult question, and it has far more to do with judgment than with calculation. And, here, very little is obvious.

At the moment, I’m willing only to risk a few initial thoughts. The first is that Copenhagen is a great deal more than the Copenhagen Accord. And that from the point of view of public education and movement building, it was an obvious success. Everyone, from Barack Obama on the one hand, to Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the South’s “G77 plus China” negotiating bloc on the other, from me to, I’m willing to bet, you as well, dear reader, knows one hell of a lot more about the climate crisis, and its politics, than we did a year ago.

Not that we didn’t already know that climatic destabilization is triggering a planetary emergency. This has been obvious for years. The difference now is rather that — thanks to the 350 movement — and here I mean not only the folks at 350.org but also Mohamed Nasheed, the President of the Maldives and a whole lot of terrified scientists, we know we know it. And that we know it with appalling, quantitative confidence.  

The bad news is that, after Copenhagen, we also know that the elites are manifestly not up to the task of saving the world. That what is needed, as the Copenhagen street had it, is “system change not climate change,” and that lacking system change, our governments are quite incapable of organizing a decisive response to the climate crisis. The bad news, more particularly, is that if we in “civil society” are to do better than our putative leaders, if indeed we are to successfully force them to break their own chains of powerlessness, we’re going to have to break out of the “dysfunctional system” frame, which blames everyone and no one, and actually dare to assign a bit of responsibility for the Copenhagen fiasco. The bulk of which, alas, will have to go to the wealthy world.

We know, most of us, more about the demonstrations than we do of the negotiations, so let’s attend to the latter. Consider that the hundreds of inside-game NGOs grouped under the banner of CAN, the Climate Action Network International, who came to Copenhagen having prepared, as best they could, to play all the way through the endgame. They even had a scenario analysis close at hand, one that grouped  the possible outcomes into categories like Breakthrough, Foundation, Greenwash, and Collapse.  It was a useful exercise — scenario analysis often is — but the power of the Copenhagen drama, as it finally came down, defeated all attempt at easy characterization. I supposed that, if you had to pin it down, the outcome came down somewhere between Greenwash and Collapse. 

The semi-official movement frame is “not done yet,” and all told, looking at the Copenhagen Accord and the 2010 negotiating schedule, it seems fair enough. Obama himself took the same line, in a late-night press conference that was actually pretty badly received, calling the Accord a “meaningful agreement”, but adding that “this progress is not enough,” and “we have come a long way, but we have much further to go.”  Which is a fairly obvious point, given that the Accord, such as it is, seems (see for example the Climate Scorecard) to condemn us to about 3.9 degrees C of warming. This is the “Four Degree World” scenario, and it’s an fairly magnificent understatement to say that we want to avoid it at almost all costs. 

But of course Copenhagen was not the end of the game. The negotiations will continue, as will the organizing, and with the next major conference scheduled for Mexico City in November of 2010, they are quite certain to have a major impact on the United States. And if, in the meanwhile, we in America can manage to pass halfway decent climate/energy legislation, we may yet discover that the Obama strategy — which John Holdren, his chief science advisor, characterized during Copenhagen as, simply, “getting started” — offers a plausible way forward, one that can make progress even in a nation ridden by insane right-wing ideologues.

Or maybe not.  The difficulty here is that understanding can too easily degenerate into accommodation. Yes, we are paralyzed by Republican oppositionism, and yes this constrains our choices, but the fact remains that, by refusing to accept anything like our proper share of the responsibility for the global crisis now threatening to overcome us, we make the dithering and dysfunction inevitable. Which of course brings us to the equity side of the story, and here there are several key points to report.  

One is that, in a signal development, several self-defined vulnerable country blocs emerged in Copenhagen to play extremely significant roles, and managed to do so while protecting not only their local interests, but also the interests of the developing countries as a whole. The first of these blocs, of course, was AOSIS, the Association of Small Island States, which face rising seas and, in extreme cases like Tuvalu, actual short-term inundation. But Africa, which has discovered the extent of its own vulnerability, also played a critical role, and by so doing helped to protect the South as a whole from being blamed for Copenhagen’s failure to deliver. 

Not that the right-wing press won’t blame it anyway, but at the risk of appearing ridiculous, I’ll add that it’s getting hard for even the most jaded of our pundits to overlook the injustices and tragedies that the people of Africa now face.  For while the African people are among the world’s most innocent, in terms of their historical contributions to the climate crisis, they will also be among the most brutally impacted, and this is an injustice too obvious to be easily set aside. Witness the open letter that Desmond Tutu sent to all heads of state during Copenhagen, a letter that noted that:

If temperatures are not kept down then Africa faces a range of devastating threats such as crop yield reductions in places of as much 50 percent in some countries by 2020; Increased pressure on water supplies for 70 – 250 million people by 2020 and 350 – 600 million by 2050; The cost of adaptation to sea level rises of at least 5 – 10 percent of gross domestic product.

With these sorts of prospects at hand, it’s difficult to be too sympathetic to the North’s domestic political problems. Which is why I believe — and this might perhaps just be wishful thinking — that the rich world will fail to effectively evade responsibility for Copenhagen. There are counter-arguments, of course, and gross media distortions by the score, but so far the failure to reach a better deal is not being blamed wholly on the South. And given that the large “emerging economies” signed onto the Accord, it’s unlikely that it will be. 

Indeed, given the wealthy world’s failure to adopt strong domestic emission reduction targets, and its equally egregious failure to put a decent mitigation/adaptation support package onto the table, the Copenhagen endgame — in which the emerging economies agreed to the Accord while the weaker and more vulnerable states balked — may well have been the best possible outcome.  (Watch the final, 3:10 a.m. plenary here; you won’t regret it!)

In this regard, it may not be absurd to hope that, as Copenhagen passes into history, the overall framework by which we understand rich-world commitments will shift in significant ways. For one thing, and despite a clear desire to do so (it inconveniently requires them to “act first” to significantly reduce their emissions) the rich countries did not quite succeed in sidelining the Kyoto Protocol.  Copenhagen, to be sure, laid out a two-track negotiating process, including a “Convention track” in which both the U.S. and China can, perhaps, both be eventually coaxed into accepting their fair shares of the global effort,  but the “Kyoto track” has also been extended. This gives us a clear mandate — to continue the battle to force the wealthy countries to make commitments on the scale demanded by the science, and by their own historical responsibility and capacity to pay — and just as importantly it gives us a context within which to do so.

The road ahead is clear enough. The next big date is Feb. 1, 2010, by which time countries of all kinds are expected to pledge their emissions reductions. When they do, the battles will predictably, and quite properly, flare up all over again.

For the moment, let me add only that Copenhagen, for all its disappointments, marked a turning point. The need for a global emergency mobilization is obvious, and with it, a set of social and political challenges that can no longer be denied. These challenges will get clearer in the days and years ahead, but the essential situation is already before us, ready to be discovered — with the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon now critically limited, we face the greatest resource-sharing problem of all time. 

The climate problem, in other words, is and remains an international justice problem. It’s more than this, of course, but justice is nonetheless the key. If we fail to solve it, it will be in large part because we refused to see it as such.

The problem has been particularlly acute with respect to the developing world’s refusal to quietly accept the wealthy world’s many and various moves to evade its obligations.

In fact, the Africans have good reasons for their uncompromising positioning.  To see why, read the public letter that Desmond Tutu just released.  It is below in its entirety. 

It was sent to all heads of state and Christian leader

Your excellency

I write urgently to you after meeting last night with the Chainperson of the G77 at his request.  This is after the walkout from the UN Climate Talks which have deadlocked.

Abasssador Di-Aoing showed me papers quoting from the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report which declaired that Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate chnage and climate variability.  In all four regions of Africa (West African, South African, East African, and Saharan) and in all seasons the median temperature rise lies between 3 degrees C and 4 degrees C, roughly 1.5 times the global mean response.

Africa’s major economic sectors are vulnerable to current climate sensitivity exacerbated by factors such as endemic poverty, complex governance challenges, limited access to capital, infrastructure and technology as well as ecosystem degradation and other disasters and conflict.

If temperatures are not kept down then Africa faces a range of devastating threats such as crop yield reductions in places of as much 50% in some countries by 2020; Increased pressure on water supplies for 70 – 250 million people by 2020 and 350 – 600 million by 2050; The cost of adaptatoin to sea levle rises of at least 5 – 10% of gross domestic product.

I think this is common cause. We are facing impending disaster on a monstrous scale. To keep temperature increase in Africa to below 1.5 degrees C requires a global goal of less than 1 degree C; keeping it below 2 degrees in Africa would require a global goal of less than 1.3 degrees C. that is the crux of the matter. A global goal of about 2 degrees C is to condemn Africa to incineration and no modern development. And the nof course there is the matter of funding mitigation and adaptatoin.

The Africans do not want to be spoilers. They know that we are in this together. We have but one earth home. If we do not reach a legally binding deal that takes account of all that has been outlined above then we are all doomed. We can swim or sink only together. The AFrican group wants a deal, a fair  ambitious and legally enforceable deal. If the issues that I have delineated above are not dealt with fairly and generously, attributes that have characterised most of the developed world, then it were better to havce no deal than to have a bad deal.

This is a moral issue, it is a matter of justice for especially the weak and most vulnerable and the developed world is noted for seeking to do what is right and good.

I pray that my appeal to you will not fall on deaf ears.

God bless you,

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.

 

The problem has been particularly acute with respect to the developing world’s refusal to quietly accept the wealthy world’s many and various moves to evade its obligations.

In fact, the Africans have good reasons for their uncompromising positioning.  You can see why in this, a public letter that Desmond Tutu just sent to all heads of state and Christian leaders.  Here it is in its entirety:

Your Excellency

I write urgently to you after meeting last night with the Charperson of the G77 at his request.  This is after the walkout from the UN Climate Talks which have deadlocked.

Ambassador Di-Aping showed me papers quoting from the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report which declared that Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and climate variability.  In all four regions of Africa (West African, South African, East African, and Saharan) and in all seasons the median temperature rise lies between 3 degrees C and 4 degrees C, roughly 1.5 times the global mean response.

Africa’s major economic sectors are vulnerable to current climate sensitivity exacerbated by factors such as endemic poverty, complex governance challenges, limited access to capital, infrastructure and technology as well as ecosystem degradation and other disasters and conflict.

If temperatures are not kept down then Africa faces a range of devastating threats such as crop yield reductions in places of as much 50% in some countries by 2020; Increased pressure on water supplies for 70 – 250 million people by 2020 and 350 – 600 million by 2050; The cost of adaptation to sea level rises of at least 5 – 10% of gross domestic product.

I think this is common cause. We are facing impending disaster on a monstrous scale. To keep temperature increase in Africa to below 1.5 degrees C requires a global goal of less than 1 degree C; keeping it below 2 degrees in Africa would require a global goal of less than 1.3 degrees C. That is the crux of the matter. A global goal of about 2 degrees C is to condemn Africa to incineration and no modern development. And the nof course there is the matter of funding mitigation and adaptation.

The Africans do not want to be spoilers.  They know that we are in this together.  We have but one earth home. If we do not reach a legally binding deal that takes account of all that has been outlined above then we are all doomed. We can swim or sink only together. The African group wants a deal, a fair, ambitious and legally enforceable deal. If the issues that I have delineated above are not dealt with fairly and generously, attributes that have characterized most of the developed world, then it were better to have no deal than to have a bad deal.

This is a moral issue, it is a matter of justice for especially the weak and most vulnerable and the developed world is noted for seeking to do what is right and good.

I pray that my appeal to you will not fall on deaf ears.

God bless you,

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.

 

Photo: www.chucknorris.com

I especially like this bit:

In this conference, they’re going to try to take our money and send it to third-world countries because of, since we spend so much oil and these other countries have suffered, then we’re going to give our money to these third-world countries.

But then there’s this:

“Neil, we have people here starving in our own country,” Norris said. “You know, my foundation, I have families, who are making $9,000 a year — the kids I’m teaching. Why aren’t we trying to help the poverty in our own country?”

… which demands to be taken a bit more seriously.  

I mean, how can it be that Chuck Norris, for crying out loud, is trumpeting his populist, pro-poor creds as a way of opposing international climate action? And why is the U.S. climate movement not widely seen as standing up for the American poor? And why is it so damn easy to paint greens as elitists? And is it not the case that, having gotten themselves typecast as middle-cast wonks, U.S. greens are now afraid to state the obvious truth — that it is only fair, as well as necessary, for the U.S. to pick up its share of the internation tab.

I posted the Chuck Norris question on the U.S. Climate Action Network list, which, by the way, can also engender a bit of ennui from time to time. Quick to respond was a fella who’s pretty well known up in Cascadia, though he wasn’t speaking on the record, so I won’t ID him:

This has gone badly sideways on us. I battled a group of teabaggers at a Gore book tour lecture in Portland last week. The class undertones were brutal: well-dressed, comfortable, calm people with their $60 tix filing inside the venue; struggling, ragged-looking people outside SCREAMING about the green fatcats and their grand climate conspiracy.

In response, Paddy McCully, the Executive Director of the Berkeley-based International Rivers (who’s entirely willing to go on the record) took the occasion to model a bit of snarky realism:

I think we can expect the ‘why are we sending money overseas when we aren’t helping the poor here’ rhetoric to be seriously ramped up by the tea-baggers. It’s perfect for them — xenophobic, nationalistic, populist, self-interested, self-contradictory (they don’t actually want money to be spent on the poor), anti-Obama, anti-Gore, anti-liberal elite, anti-science, anti-’pouring money down foreign rat holes,’ anti-deficit increasing etc. etc.  And now Norris has caught onto it presumably Glenn Beck won’t be far behind. And no amount of rational (or symbolic/emotional) argument will stop it. 

In terms of broader public messaging in the U.S. I don’t think it’s even worth engaging on the international financing issue. Much better to stick to green jobs, energy security, technological competitiveness, natural disasters hurt the poor etc.

Which, when to think about it, is a pretty strong claim!  Because if we don’t “engage” on the international financing issue, there’s basically zero chance that the international negotiations are going to pick up any real momentum anytime soon. Which, of course, means failure. Which is exactly what our friends on the lunatic right want.

Meanwhile, back in the White House, the Obama team is going to try to thread the needle. Unable to avoid Copenhagen, the U.S. is preparing a financing offer that, while entirely inadequate in global justice terms, and tragically weak in the face of the new scientific consensus, at least gets the ball rolling. Maybe a billion dollars a year in international mitigation and adaptation assistance, and maybe in a few years, if things go well, some creative international finance on top of that. Nothing much really, not anytime soon, though obviously, the tea-baggers are still going to go nuts.  

What’s not obvious is what we’re going to do in response.

One thing we could do is make rational arguments. They soon surfaced on the USCAN list. First up was NRDC, with “Poor energy policy and climate change hurt the poor in the U.S.”  Lots of examples here, of course — health costs, dangerous weather and storms, and failing to “tap into the green jobs potential.” A nice pointer to a new study that with “strong implementation of energy efficiency measures the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) act, which passed the House in June, could create as many as 1.9 million jobs between 2010 and 2020.” 

Then came Oxfam American, which noted another study, which “visually maps out climate impacts and vulnerable populations identified in 13 U.S. southeastern states (from Arkansas to Virginia),” and shows that “Acting on climate will benefit the poor in the U.S. because the poor in the U.S., just like the poor overseas, will be hit worst by the effects of climate change. Poor and vulnerable communities have little ability to prepare for and recover from climate-related disasters, no matter where they live.”

Good stuff, no doubt about it. And there’s no question that these arguments must absolutely be mainstreamed soon. “Green jobs” in particular, are critical, and the right knows it. Witness the sad tale of Van Jones. 

But I’m left feeling that something big is missing here. Something like populist rage. Something internationalist, but also exuberant in its eagerness to defend the not-so-rich people of the U.S. of A. Something that connects the dots, that does not hold climate protection apart, as if it were the proper concern of only those “well-dressed, comfortable, calm people with their $60 tix.” 

How about a loud national movement for free public transportation, for example? One paid for by congestion pricing schemes? How about bringing back Cap and Dividend, or something like it? How about progressive tax reform designed to lift up the poor and fund the climate transition at the same time? How about Big Green starts talking about America’s international responsibilities, in a way that vividly draws the link to our responsibilities to our own poor? How about we hear about unemployment in the third world from time to time? How about a new politics of solidarity, that refuses false distinctions between American needs and the needs of strangers? How about a class analysis of ecological footprints?

How about we step outside the climate sandbox, once and for all?