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Christiana Figueres : The Elusive Saucepan
Posted on August 7th, 2010 No commentshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWsQscb6lfM
http://unfccc.int/files/press/news_room/application/pdf/100806_speaking_notes.pdf
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has just held its regular half yearly conference to further the working parties of the Kyoto Protocol :-
http://unfccc.int
http://unfccc.int/2860.phpA number of Press commentators have been critical of proceedings, indicating that there has not been much progress at Bonn, and in fact the conference could show some ground having been lost :-
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c9213b40-a180-11df-9656-00144feabdc0.html
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Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway
Posted on August 2nd, 2010 No commentsNaomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway recommend that grassroots Internet writers focus on Climate Change Policy, in this Climate Science Watch interview shot at Netroots Nation 2010.
The subject of government policies to deal with Climate Change borders on the excessively dull – which is why most Internet web loggers (or “bloggers”) don’t want to touch Policy even with a full HazMat suit on.
It’s the kiss-of-interest-death to try to open up discussions on Carbon Taxation, Cap-and-Trade, Cap-and-Share, Cap-and-Dividend, Cap-and-Giveaway, Contraction & Convergence, Kyoto2, Border Tax Adjustments, Clean Development credits, Carbon Intensity and the like.
Only really seriously geeky, mildly obsessive people really want to think about the Big Picture. And many of us get stuck in a corner of unworkable aspiration, where we know something has to change, we fix on just a snippet of the giant problem, and then we find we cannot communicate it well enough for others to understand.
For example – very public insistence that the Coal-burning power generation industry has got to cease trading doesn’t make it happen, despite excellent reasoning and even entire Climate Camps of resistance and protest amongst the activist community.
This is probably because (a) most people don’t understand how banning Coal fits into the bigger Carbon picture, (b) most people don’t know how to go about asking the right people to ban Coal and (c) most of the Coal-burning industry don’t want people to look into their business too deeply so they have invested lots of money in public attitude smokescreens. No, it’s not a “conspiracy”. It’s a documented public relations exercise. Just ask Naomi and Erik.
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One Billion High Emitters
Posted on July 30th, 2010 No commentsReflecting further on a PNAS paper by a group of authors that includes Professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow leads me to suspect that elements of its proposed policy framework are unworkable and may have unintended unethical consequences :-
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/07/02/0905232106.full.pdf+html
It also leads me to conclude that research partly financed by Oil and Gas companies may be part of the Climate Change policy problem – how to reach global agreement on a way forward.
“Sharing global CO2 emission reductions among one billion high emitters”, by Shoibal Chakravarty, Ananth Chikkatur, Heleen de Coninck, Stephen Pacala, Robert Socolow and Massimo Tavoni, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Volume 106, Number 29, 21st July 2009.
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WBGU : Equity, Today : Agreement, Never
Posted on July 24th, 2010 No commentsFile under : “That’s never going to ever happen if the United States of America have anything at all to do with it”.
The illustrious German Advisory Council on Global Change, the WBGU, or “Wissenschaftliche Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveraenderungen” in longhand, have done some excellent work on proposals for a global Carbon framework.
As part of their 2009 paper entitled in English “Solving the climate dilemma: The budget approach” they came to some useful conclusions, but also some startlingly unworkable recommendations :-
http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_sn2009_en.pdf
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Unpicking Kyoto (3)
Posted on June 27th, 2010 1 comment
Unpicking Kyoto
Jo Abbess
20 June 2010CONTINUED FROM PART 1 AND PART 2
PART 3
Linking Climate Change to Trade
America and China are both “Carbon Intensity” first-movers – competing to make commitments that their economic production has falling associated Carbon Dioxide Emissions. The United States, China and Canada all continue to claim that their commitments on Climate Change amount to reductions in “carbon intensity”, rather than actual reductions in levels of emissions. This is a piece of policy propaganda, as proposed by linguistic strategists. A reduced carbon intensity of production would still allow countries to follow a path of economic growth, and increase carbon emissions overall. What is clear is that lower carbon intensities is not enough.
Behavioural economists, who look at both individual behaviour and collective social responses, have concluded a number of useful facts about humankind and its uses of resources. A good summary of what we know is provided by John Gowdy, writing in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 68 in 2008, “Behavioral economics and climate change policy” :-
Some of his policy “clues” point the way.
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Unpicking Kyoto (1)
Posted on June 21st, 2010 1 comment
Unpicking Kyoto
Jo Abbess
20 June 2010PART 1
Introduction
The governments of the world are, by and large, well-informed about Climate Change by their trusted scientific advisers and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, there is a disconnect between this knowledge and concrete policy action. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has not been successful in achieving control of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions through the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Plus, annual negotiations have not reached a form of an agreement to succeed Kyoto, as evidenced by the inconclusive round of talks in December 2009 in Copenhagen. Suggestions of a way forward include a radical re-think about the formulation of the Kyoto Protocol, and the connection of Climate Change to other global concerns.
Kyoto Isn’t Working
For a period during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world economy appeared to reach a stable point, whereby Carbon Dioxide emissions per person (per capita) levelled off. Many of the world’s major economies were switching fuels – from coal to Natural Gas. And some heavily industrialised countries were going through revolutionary change, and reducing their Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions as a result of the ensuing loss of industrial output.
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The Price of Carbon
Posted on April 30th, 2010 2 commentsThe Price of Carbon
by Jo Abbess
20 April 20101. Introduction
Policy strategy for controlling risky excess atmospheric greenhouse gas (Gowdy, 2008, Sect. 4; McKibben, 2007, Ch. 1, pp. 19-20; Solomon et al., 2009; Tickell, 2008, Ch. 6, pp. 205-208) mostly derives from the notion that carbon dioxide emissions should be charged for, in order to prevent future emissions; similar to treatment for environmental pollutants (Giddens, 2009, Ch. 6, pp. 149-155; Gore, 2009, Ch. 15 “The True Cost of Carbon”; Pigou, 1932; Tickell, 2008, Ch.4, Box 4.1, pp. 112-116). Underscoring this idea is the evidence that fines, taxes and fees modify behaviour, reigning in the marginal social cost of “externalities” through financial disincentive (Baumol, 1972; Sandmo, 2009; Tol, 2008). However this approach may not enable the high-value, long-term investment required for decarbonisation, which needs adjustments to the economy at scale (CAT, 2010; Hepburn and Stern, 2008, pp. 39-40, Sect. (ii) “The Consequences of Non-marginality”; MacKay, 2008, Ch. 19; Tickell, 2008, Ch. 2, pp. 40-41). Read the rest of this entry »
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Renewable Synergy
Posted on March 30th, 2010 1 commentThe news is that there is continuing progress towards a fully Renewable Europe. It is, after all, the only means to ensure a sustainable Economy into the future, given the twin blended threats of Climate Change Carbon Mitigation and Peak Fossil Fuels.
Dr Gregor Czisch’s meisterwerk is being translated into English for publication this Summer :-
You would never know from the plainspeaking title just how exciting this is : seriously cheap Energy and peacemaking collaboration all in one shot !
The management consultants PriceWaterhouseCooper (couldn’t they think of a more speakable name ?), have just published their own view on Europe and North Africa combining to provide a one hundred percent renewable Energy solution :-
http://www.pwc.co.uk/sustainability/
http://www.pwc.co.uk/eng/publications/100_percent_renewable_electricity.html
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BP : After the Gas and Oil are Gone
Posted on March 16th, 2010 No commentsTogether with a couple of my peers, I’ve been taking a look at BP’s “sustainability”, both from a business point of view and from a Climate Change point of view.
We’ve just given a presentation, of which I offer you a couple of the slides and the script to accompany them.
The central point of issue is : what will BP do after the Gas and Oil are gone ? There may be decades of reasonable hydrocarbons left to exploit, but how will Pension Funds get their return on investment after that ? Where is the future thinking ?
And what about Climate Change ? Retreating from Alternative Energy back into its core business of Oil and Gas means that BP plc will not be able to make substantial cuts in the Greenhouse Gas Emissions of the products that they sell – which means that sooner or later, when Carbon Energy is rationed, their business will start to implode.
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Little Chicken
Posted on February 7th, 2010 No comments
Now’s the right time to talk about gardening. Not just any old gardening, no. I mean food gardening, urban farming, home cropping, edible landscape-type gardening.
Now is the time to be thinking about enriching your soil for your next bumper harvest.
Get your resilience genes working !
http://www.londonwaste.co.uk/media/Compost%20Bag%20Leaflet_May09.pdf
OR
Get into Transition mode !
In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.
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Some People Never Change
Posted on November 19th, 2009 1 commentSo I’m talking to some people and someone says that people don’t care about the fact they’re wasting Energy, that people just don’t think.
Even though they know about Global Warming and the risks of dangerous Climate Change, and they know about the connection between burning Fossil Fuels and Global Warming, they just don’t care about how much Energy they’re using.
And I know this is heresy to say so, but I said that people shouldn’t have to think about Energy, that they shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about using Energy. I said that the Energy that is provided to them should be Carbon-free and responsibility-free. People shouldn’t be forced to act against their nature. Energy is effectively free at the moment. It’s way cheap, even cheaper than food for a lot of people. So people use it. People love using Energy.
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Carbon Rationing : Energy Rights
Posted on November 8th, 2009 1 commentThe long drawn-out journey towards the inevitable policy of Carbon Rationing took another step closer to sanity with the pronouncements of the good Lord Smith of the Environment Agency.
If we are to guarantee Human Rights for everyone, we have to assert the right to access to Energy for everyone. The only way to do that, given a Carbon-constrained world is to agree on fair shares, and ration power : parcelling the goodness out equitably.
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If It’s That Good, Why Aren’t They Doing It Already ?
Posted on November 3rd, 2009 No commentsWhen discussing Renewable Energy technologies with associates, acquaintances and relatives, I often hear tones of scorn and the invariable question : “If it’s that good, why aren’t they doing it already ?”
This anti-sense meme from Classical (Neoliberal, Chicago School) Economics boils down to a perception problem. The obvious reason why Renewable Energy technologies are not already widely in use is due to the first-mover problem – it takes time to establish and roll out new technologies. People just don’t like change. And they have to get over the “investment bump” – spending the money to install new technologies.
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Time To Stop Playing Along
Posted on September 29th, 2009 No commentsWhen I was asked to review a chunk of the 2008 Climate Safety report from the Public Interest Research Centre, I was less than positive about the social movement building outlined in the recommendations for “mobilisation” of the public (see below).
Tim Holmes, one of the people involved in the Climate Safety report, has started a new web log critiquing the very same issues :-
http://convenientlies.wordpress.com
http://convenientlies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/greenwashing-government/
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Poor People Gonna Rise Up
Posted on August 27th, 2009 No commentsTalking About a Revolution : Tracy Chapman
When are the intellectual and political ranks going to stop trying to apply universal guilt ? The real question to ask is not, “how are we going to get average emissions down ?” You can’t treat all the people in the United Kingdom as one blurred lump. Around 20% of consumers are conscious. Another 20% to 30% are going to be hit directly by any measure designed to put an environmental tax on Carbon, and will have no choice about responding.
Climate Change worldwide is affecting the poorest first and hardest – an expression used by everyone from Nicholas Stern through to Christian Aid. But it’s a stratification of impact that isn’t just global. The poorest in the industrialised countries are suffering hardship too : people who cannot get their homes renovated after floods, people who have to apply for Fuel Poverty assistance.
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We’re Toast, John Prescott
Posted on August 24th, 2009 No comments
It seems that Prezza, our dear beloved Climate Change Chief Negotiator is having an attack of the “Tony Blairs” : back-pedalling on Carbon Dioxide reduction targets :-
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Joan Ruddock : Flashback 2008
Posted on August 5th, 2009 No commentsNotes from PA21 Meeting with the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment
Meeting Date : Tuesday 25th March 2008
Meeting Time : 14:05 – 15:00
Meeting Venue: WhitehallAttendees
Joan Ruddock MP, Under-Secretary of State, Environment
Annette Brooke MP
Tony Hamilton PA21 Chair
Theresa McManus PA21 Secretary
Naomi MattesonNotes from Meeting
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