The key question tonight in Queensland is : how safe can we make the house before morning ?

The second key question that should tonight be asked in Queensland Australia is : are the damages from Climate Change likely to be more expensive than changing our energy sources to stop it ?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12294834

“27 January 2011 : Australia floods: PM Julia Gillard unveils new tax : Julia Gillard announces the details of the new tax : Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard has announced a new tax to help pay for devastating floods that she says will cost A$5.6bn ($5.6bn; £3.5bn) in reconstruction. Ms Gillard said the 12-month tax, starting from 1 July, would be levied on those earning A$50,000 or more, and those affected by floods would not pay. “We should not put off to tomorrow what we are able to do today,” she said…”

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/gillard-warms-to-permanent-disaster-fund-20110131-1ab4z.html

“Gillard warms to permanent disaster fund : Phillip Coorey : February 1, 2011 : THE Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is prepared to entertain the idea of a permanent natural disaster fund if it helps win the support of key independents in both houses. But she is not prepared to bend on the details of her one-off $1.8 billion levy to help with flood reparations in Queensland. As negotiations began with independents yesterday before the legislation for the flood measures is tabled in Parliament next week, Ms Gillard would not rule out a permanent fund. ”We’re happy to have a conversation about the longer term,” she said. But the floods, she said, were ”an extraordinary circumstance which requires a response in the short term”…”

See the full meeting here.

In the orange light-filled advertising corner : the oil and gas companies proclaiming new, untold riches beneath the melting Arctic. Technology will make us stronger, less polluting and improve the lives of the countless poor.

In the blue chain-smoking activist corner : Climate Change and Peak Oil are really, really serious, destabilising and horrible and we should all get depressed and go and lie down in a darkened room for a while.

On the other hand, most people don’t fall in one camp or the other. We worry about Climate Change some days, but we’re too pre-occupied with trivia on other days.

We have a natural in-built “happy button”, according to recent research mentioned in New Scientist magazine, so we can’t sustain feelings of doom and gloom for too long unless we’re clinically unwell :-

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727791.000-how-to-be-happy-but-not-too-much.html

We’re born to be sunny, optimistic (Teddy Miliband’s favourite word) and relaxed, only reserving adrenalin and noradrenalin for times of stress.

So why does George Marshall try to convince us that everyone is dangerously susceptible to “apocalyptic” language ?

http://climatedenial.org/2010/09/29/collapse-porn/

People can cope with being given bad news as long as they have some strategy with which to combat the problem.

It’s not wrong to tell people the truth about Climate Change just in case they get scared and worried.

Alarm is a good thing – I’d rather a fellow pedestrian shouted at me to “look out !” if I’m about to be mown down by a car as I cross the street, rather than just watching on and wincing at the crunch moment.

George is telling us to be careful about our choice of language as activists, and warns of “false panics like Y2K”, but I think that one can be overly introspective about tone and fail to paint the larger narrative.

And anyway, raising the alarm produces action, as he himself mentions, and action actually changes things, averts disaster, mitigates against chaos.

“…there is overwhelming evidence that even when people do face problems they are far more likely to work together and seek collective solutions than to panic and riot…”

There is a problem with Climate Change communication – many people are still at the stage of describing the problems in order to engage an unconscious audience. This kind of activity almost invariably fails to move on to the solutions part of the narrative, and leaves people in a Lovelockian down state of mind.

Some Climate Change activists go to the other extreme and become all bubbly about the joys of Carbon Rationing austerity or going for a year without a shower, things like that.

I must admit, I do this from time to time. But I don’t leave the audience without the solutions, the real solutions. Going without electricity and meat isn’t going to solve Climate Change. But radical changes in the ways the whole Society acquires and uses energy and other resources is going to solve Climate Change. And this process has already begun.

We can avert Climate Change. We already have the tools. Now we need to build the narrative from problem to solution, instead of getting stuck in the problem phase.

As soon as the timeline of problem, reflection, discovery, action, solution is complete, people will buy in.

Here’s my answer to George Marshall :-

@GeorgeMarshall

I think you paint a picture of polarised human reaction that is not backed up by evidence.

People don’t all go and hide in caves or pretend they don’t care. People have shades of opinion.

Plus, I think that you are being too dismissive of the facts.

As a computer programmer, I can reliably inform you that Y2K was not a “false panic”. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people like myself spent months correcting computer software to prevent massive turmoil in banking and retail systems on 1st January 2000.

If you correctly inform people of the risks, in a balanced, nuanced way, you can get coordinated reaction that can prevent a crisis.

For example, the swine flu pandemic, which has still not officially ended, was very well-managed.

Many people claim that it was hyped out of all proportion, perhaps by the pharmaceutical companies wanting to up their sales, but that is just not a watertight argument.

Influenza mutates and migrates, and swine flu is still a risk for this winter, which is why the swine flu vaccine will apparently be given with the normal winter flu jab that vulnerable and elderly people receive :-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8012092/Swine-flu-vaccine-to-be-included-in-winter-flu-jab.html

Why is this being done ? Have a look at how the virus is still prevalent – apparently, according to some sources, holding a stronghold position in recently flood-destroyed Pakistan, from where it could explode on the world stage again :-

http://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/Files/Maps/Global_influenzapositive_FluTransmissionZones_week36.png

I consider Michael Ruppert to be a self-serving “Free Speech” fantasist who has jumped on the Peak Oil bandwagon, and creating problems of access to this subject area by being so conspiracist.

I have read quite a few reports on fossil fuel resources and there is considerable cause for concern in my view, as to the continued ability of energy engineers to continue to be able to safely and cheaply produce oil and gas, and even coal.

Ruppert is just getting in the way of the public finding out what is going on. Is he creating a diversion on purpose ? Just whose stooge could he be ? I’d recommend everyone to avoid him and go read the university research reports on Peak Copper, Peak Phosphorus, Peak Petroleum, Peak Uranium and Peak Coal.

I don’t know about you, but I’m missing David Miliband from the political fish-eat-fish top table already.

If he were to ask me, which he won’t, but anyway, if he did, I would recommend that he starts reading up about Energy production and supply, over the next 18 months or so before he gets invited, acceptingly, back into the Shadow Cabinet of the UK Government.

If he were to spend his time on the train between South Shields and Westminster looking into energy security matters, into crustal petrogeology, the Middle East oil fields, Wind Power, solar and marine options, he could make a strong comeback into the limelight – as opposed to the “lemon” light he’s been cast into, thrust into, so far.

If he becomes acquainted with the ways and wiles of engineering and fossil fuels over the next few years, the viability of Renewable Energy solutions, the transport explosion phenomenon and how to control it, then he will be able to offer solid assistance to his younger brother Teddy – who appears to be mistakenly sold on the idea of new nuclear power.

And if Ed Miliband were to ask, (again, which he won’t), I’d say – atomic energy cannot save us; carbon capture technology cannot save us; algae biodiesel can only trickle, even Frankenstein GM algae biodiesel; Peak Oil is almost definitely here; efficiency of use alone cannot save us. We have to go right out for a non-combustion, Renewable Energy future.

http://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.php

A 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

“Hopes of early global warming deal cool : By Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent : Published: August 6 2010 : Hopes that international climate change negotiations would produce a deal this year have been dashed as progress made at last year’s Copenhagen summit appeared to be reversed in the latest talks. Negotiations on a global warming treaty ended on Friday night amid acrimony and accusations of backsliding. Jonathan Pershing, US deputy special envoy for climate change, told reporters: “I came to Bonn hopeful of a deal in Cancún [where governments will hold a meeting in December], but at this point I am very concerned, as I have seen some countries walking back from progress made in Copenhagen.” Other people involved in the talks also spoke of their frustration that principles established at the Copenhagen summit – which failed to produce a full agreement but resulted in a partial accord accepted by the vast majority of governments – were reneged upon. The Copenhagen Accord marked the first time that both developed and big developing countries agreed to place limits on their greenhouse gas emissions. Developed countries committed themselves to absolute reductions by 2020, while developing nations including China, India and Brazil agreed to slow the rate of growth of their emissions. At the weeklong Bonn talks, some developing countries wanted to water down this agreement, by making industrialised countries’ obligations binding while the commitments of developing countries would be voluntary. That arrangement is not acceptable to many rich nations, which point out that the world’s main emerging economies are responsible for nearly 40 per cent of global emissions. China is the world’s biggest emitter, while India is rising up the table fast…”

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/338343,cancun-deal-no-closer.html

“Third round of climate change talks brings Cancun deal no closer : Posted : Fri, 06 Aug 2010 : By : dpa : Bonn – A third round of climate change talks in Bonn has brought little prospect of reaching a new deal at a UN summit in Mexico later this year, as a week of discussions ended on Friday without progress. The UN’s new climate change chief, Christiana Figueres, urged governments to “agree to further compromises” in the coming months in order to “deliver clear and unmistakeable progress” in the city of Cancun…Delegates in Bonn worked on new proposals for partial agreements to be reached in Cancun, but made no progress on binding targets to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, or on the shape of a future deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires 2012. “It’s hard to cook a meal without a pot, and governments are much closer now to actually making the pot,” Figueres said optimistically. “However governments also need to decide what exactly they are going to cook in the pot,” Figueres added. “To receive the desired outcome in Cancun they must radically narrow down the choices that are now on the table.” Individual agreements reached in Cancun could include issues such as forest protection, financial aid to help developing nations adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change as well as the delivery of low-carbon technologies to such countries. However, an overarching agreement would still be necessary to implement any decisions reached in Cancun. Such a deal is looking unlikely to emerge before the 2012 UN climate change summit in South Africa. Developing countries said a lack of transparency regarding the disbursement of emergency funds by rich countries, as agreed in Copenhagen, made it hard for them compromise on any future deals. US climate change legislation has stalled in the Senate, where it has met with fierce opposition, making it unclear to other states to what extent they can expect the US to cooperate on any new pledges…”

http://www.aolnews.com/story/climate-talks-appear-to-slip-backward/1192598?cid=7

“Climate talks appear to slip backward : By ARTHUR MAX : 6 August 2010 : BONN, Germany -Global climate talks appeared to have slipped backward after five days of negotiations in Bonn, with rich and poor countries exchanging charges of reneging on agreements they made last year to contain greenhouse gases. Delegates complained that reversals in the talks put negotiations back by a year, even before minimal gains were scored at the Copenhagen summit last December. “It’s a little bit like a broken record,” said European Union negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger. “It’s like a flashback,” agreed Raman Mehta, of the Action Aid environment group. “The discourse is the same level” as before Copenhagen. The sharp divide between rich and poor nations over how best to fight climate change — a clash that crippled the Copenhagen summit — remains, and bodes ill for any deal at the next climate convention in Cancun, Mexico, which begins in November…Dessima Williams of Granada, who speaks for island states, charged that rich countries were “backsliding” on pledges of help to the poorest countries. Devastating floods in Pakistan, deadly fires and drought in Russia, a food crisis in West Africa — and reports that the first decade of this century was the hottest on record — provided a stark backdrop to the talks. “The situation in all of our countries is worsening,” Williams said. In Bonn, negotiating text doubled in length over the last week as countries put forward claims that had been deleted last year and delegations jockeyed for last-minute advantage before heading into the final stage of negotiations before Cancun…”

You have to remember that items “deleted” in Copenhagen were not agreed by all States. The so-called “Copenhagen Accord” which was only negotiated and “accorded to” by a small number of countries did not fully represent the Copenhagen 2009 conference positions of all the parties to the Kyoto Protocol.

The seesaw politicking between industrialised and developing countries will continue unless they can agree a “no regrets” shape of the “cooking pot” that Christiana Figueres metaphors.

What are the key issues ?

1. Poorer countries want richer countries to finance their Adaptation to Climate Change. Adaptation will include assistance with improving defences against rising instances of Climate Change-aggravated natural disasters such as floods and droughts. They don’t want aid. They want trade. They want the richer countries to accept their historic responsiblity for Climate Change, and pay their ecological debts.

2. Poorer countries want richer countries to finance their Mitigation strategy. Mitigation will include transfer of Green Energy, Renewable Energy technologies so that poorer countries can skirt High Carbon development paths, avoiding the history of High Emissions of richer countries. They don’t want aid. They want trade. They want the richer countries to accept that the poorer countries have spare, unused Carbon Rights that can be sold to the richer countries to offset the richer countries’ high emissions.

3. Poorer countries want richer countries to permit the poorer countries to continue Economic Development. They want such things as the clean water, electric light, good health services, education, industrial production and transportation that richer countries take for granted. They don’t want aid. They want trade. The poorer countries want the richer countries to fairly open up their markets to poorer country products – but currently the poorer country exports to richer countries are undervalued, for a variety of reasons.

4. Poorer countries want richer countries to make firm commitments to reducing richer country Greenhouse Gas Emissions. They don’t want aid. They want trade, but it won’t be physically possible to grow enough new or replacement forest in the poorer countries to permit the richer countries to carry on burning at such high rates.

Currently, the UNFCCC has passed around the hat for “donations” – pledges from the richer countries to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The sum of the collected reductions pledged does not add up to what the Science demonstrates is needed.

Under the policy of “I won’t if you won’t”, China is not prepared to commit to a legally binding emissions reduction trajectory if the United States of America does to commit to a legally binding emissions reduction trajectory. Token gestures will be offered, but no firm progress can be made.

The missing saucepan is Contraction and Convergence, the proposal from Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Institute. If the world could agree to move towards equal per person Greenhouse Gas Emissions rights under a Global Carbon Budget as determined by the Science, in an agreed period of Convergence, then the responsibilities of each country, richer or poorer, could become clear.

Under the Contraction and Convergence framework, everybody would have to do some work, but nobody would risk losing out, have to skim billions from their own Economy to send abroad in the form of Adaptation Aid, or re-assign billions in their domestic budgets to pay for Carbon Credits.

Moving money around, as currently proposed in the multi-billion dollar Mitigation and Adaptation Fund plans, would not necessarily solve any problems. We have numerous examples of money becoming worse than useless in this way – just look back over the history of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Some milestones are inevitable. The world has to spend a large amount of money in the next few decades on re-vitalising energy, regardless of any emissions commitments. It would take similar sums of money to revive the energy sector in a Low Carbon form, creating new opportunities for companies, community projects and engineers.

The world has to increase its “Carbon Sinks” rapidly over the next few decades – principally by stopping deforestation and forest degradation – and conversely reforesting and afforesting new areas. This will take monetary investment, but also reap wide economic paybacks, just like the Green Energy sector.

In order to shore up the global economy, and protect numerous sources of cheap raw resources, money needs to be spent on avoiding devastation from increasingly violent and frequent natural disasters associated with extreme weather. People who cannot farm cannot trade and cannot eat. People who are forced to migrate cannot farm reliably. People who lose crops due to wild weather cannot farm reliably. People in stressed environments cannot afford agrochemicals, so will need to farm organically, and harvest rainwater more efficiently.

Decarbonisation is urgent, and the High Emissions countries have to commit to it, deliberately and effectively. Carbon Trading cannot provide the richer countries with sufficient leeway in “offsets” to carry on emitting at the same rates as today.

If the richer countries start major decarbonisation now, it won’t cost them as much as it will do in a decade’s time.

It’s time to stop haggling and horsetrading over economic development and Carbon Finance, and who is a “developing country” and who isn’t, and get on with emissions reductions in the countries of major emissions origin – the industrialised/industrialising nations – the “major emitters” :-

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Major_Economies_Forum_on_Energy_and_Climate

“The 17 countries participating in the forum account for approximately 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

Naomi 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.

The majority of people are unaware of the compromises being made in their name every day – from the high Carbon fuels used to make their electricity, to the highly-subsidised rotten old gunk that they burn to move their overweight cars around with.

More to the point, the majority of people don’t even care about the energy waste and Greenhouse Gas emissions of their lifestyle arrangements.

And why should they ?

Most Policy seeks to pose the question : should there be a deliberate financing of the Low Carbon Transition ?

But why would ordinary taxpayers be prepared to fork out extra to pay for greening up the power sector ?

Why should people have to pay more for Low Carbon food, clothing, technical gadgets and low impact chemicals ?

The only time most people feel the affects of Policy is when they find that the cost of things changes. And so that’s the only time they care about it.

So, while people accept, on the whole, that we, as a society, should reduce our Carbon Dioxide emissions, they’re not ready to think about what needs to happen to make that happen, and they probably aren’t going to like it, even if they do.

Investing in the Low Carbon Transition effectively means putting wealth creation on hold for a few years, while the whole Economy invests in Low Carbon Energy, energy efficiency, Low Carbon building renovations and changing a whole raft of chemical processes, agricultural practice and transportation systems for freight and passengers.

A recession is a great time to start implementing the Low Carbon Transition – people will barely notice the altered financial framework – the jam will come a couple of years later than expected, but it will be worth it in the long run.

The Low Carbon Transition is all about thinking for the long-term, making genuine investments, now, for long-term decarbonisation. And this investment will bring significant returns. That’s why the Big Boys (and Girls) are investing in wind farms.

Short-term concerns about tax payments and returns on savings will always trump the Low Carbon Transition in the minds of the ordinary person, even though the Big Players know where their future bread will be buttered.

Any Climate Change Policy that bumps up the prices of goods, power, fuel and services for the ordinary citizen won’t be acceptable – so that rules out Carbon Taxation, Cap-and-Trade…in fact most policy wonk proposals.

Most people aren’t interested in Policy, that’s why most Climate Change bloggers don’t talk about it. Most recommendations for Policy from the Economists make them look like eggheads or airheads, or just fantasists. Naomi and Erik call it “magical thinking”.

The average response from the cabbie in the street is “Just tell us how much it’s going to cost us, will you ?”

I talk about Policy because it’s important to rule out those schemes that are simply unworkable, inoperable, unfair or unethical.

Some Climate Change Scientists are becoming “activist” in their outlook, and have started daring to recommend Policies.

But do Climate Change Scientists, or even government people, really understand the limits and liabilities of modern Economics in handling the Low Carbon Transition ?

Here is James Hansen’s latest communication, wherein he recommends a “carbon fee”. I have the highest respect for Jim. He is a plainspeaker, a truly ethical fellow, smart, brave and a great researcher. However, I cannot see how this proposal could work. My most important first question is : exactly how does he think that people could be made to agree to it ?

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20100730_Norway.pdf

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/

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.

Global Climate Change negotiations have continually suffered from the obvious entirely preventable obstacles posed by splitting the world’s nations into two camps, “Developed” (“Annex I” under the Kyoto Protocol) and “Developing”.

The Annex I countries were asked to take “historic responsibility” for their excess Greenhouse Gas emissions and finance emissions reductions, either within their own borders, or elsewhere via the “flexible mechanisms” of Carbon Trading based on “Clean Development” in other countries.

Such is the disparity between the emissions of the world’s rich and the world’s poor, the Kyoto Protocol recognised that there were “common but differentiated responsibilities” between the two groups of nations towards achieving global emissions reductions.

However, even in 1997, when Kyoto was inked, it was clear that development trends in some countries would push them from non-Annex-I to Annex-I category pretty soon – however, the map would not be re-drawn to take account of this effect.

Thus, we have what I call “China Syndrome”, policy opinionators blaming China’s massive emissions increase for everything that’s wrong about Global Warming. You must have heard the narrative that goes : “China builds one/two/several coal-fired power stations a week/month, so how on Earth can we stop Global Warming ?”

Chakravarty and his colleagues take a somewhat different approach to responsibility for Climate action, which has some merit – blame the rich – in every country, no matter which.

They establish how Carbon Dioxide emissions are related to income in every country, then look at the distribution of emissions amongst the populations of four broad regions of the world.

They then set a cap on emissions, targeting the roughly one billion highest emitters, and identify which countries would have which proportion of these high emitters.

Thereby they set a target for “burden-sharing” amongst each country according to its density of high emitters.

Now, if you didn’t get that, don’t worry. That is my first issue with this framework – it’s quite complex. And as we all know by now, complexity means non-conformity. How could the international Climate conferences agree something like this, depending as it does on strongly contestable assignments of responsibility, based on massaged interpretations of data ?

The second problem that I have with this proposal is this – those countries with high levels of exceedingly poor people would find it problematic to exert regulatory pressure on the small number of their exceedingly high emitters.

The capacity of poorer nations to enforce emissions reductions on its elite rich is presumably quite low – considering that those in political power are probably going to be the richest.

In fact, the wealthiest people in a country are often deeply connected with the governance of the country. Often, the rich are the rulers.

And the rich don’t want to change their own lifestyles of consumption. A country handed a Carbon emissions reduction target on the basis of the behaviour of its wealthiest, would probably determine that the poor should reduce their emissions rather than the rich. The poor would be forced to adapt instead of the rich.

Chakravarty and his colleagues do attempt to address this issue by looking at what it would take to eliminate the deepest poverty in the world at the same time as cutting emissions globally. They say, “We…place a floor on emissions of the world’s lowest CO2 emitters and demonstrate that climate mitigation and alleviation of extreme poverty are largely decoupled.”

So the emissions reductions that nations would have to adopt would only need to change marginally in order to guarantee development space for the poorest.

But this still does not answer the main problem – if you give a country an emissions target that relates to the wealthy powerful, how can you be sure that the poor won’t be delegated to suffer the consequences ?

Obviously, achieving the aim of the alleviation of intense poverty is a noble one. But it could be done without this framework, and it might not be achievable through this framework.

It is my conclusion that the poorer countries would be given too high a demand for emissions reductions under Chakravarty’s proposal.

They wouldn’t necessarily have the capacity to act, or the political will to act in the way asserted.

Far, far better would be the Contraction and Convergence framework, designed and promoted by Aubrey Meyer at the Global Commons Institute, which would allocate equal per capita emissions rights for everyone, everywhere.

Fair shares, and all that.

The wealthiest nations would not have a complaining leg to stand on. They could not protest that they were being handed unfairly high responsibilities for emissions reductions.

And the poorest in the poorest countries would not be handed a ransom note for the sins of their elites.

So why are Chakravarty, Pacala, Socolow and all pursuing a biased framework ?

At the end of the paper, we read,

“ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank…S.C., S.P., R.S., and M.T. are supported by the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton University, funded by BP and Ford Motor Co. A.C. acknowledges support from the Energy Technology Innovation Project, which is financially supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a gift from Shell Exploration and Production and unrestricted grants from BP
Corporation. H.d.C. thanks the Princeton Environmental Institute for its hospitality and numerous colleagues at Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands and participants of COP13 in Bali for fruitful discussions.”

Could this be a case of “obfuscate and derail” ?

Could the Oil and Gas companies be supporting complex Carbon emissions framework research and development in order to slow down global policy agreement ?

This could be similar to their suspected reasons for supporting Carbon Trading – evasion of personal responsibility.

The Oil and Gas companies love the international Climate Change negotiations, for Oil and Gas companies are virtually invisible in the debates on policy.

Where no finger of blame is pointed, no duty will be assigned. It’s as simple as that. Fact of life and human psychology.

It is time that the major mining and energy companies were brought into the international Climate Change discussions, as significant actors in the global Economy, and responsible for some of the “burden-sharing”.

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
http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_sn2009_en.html

Consider for one moment the implications of the following graph for proposed future emissions :-

The first question one could ask is, “why does the red curve for industrialised countries drop so fast ?” And the answer for that would be that the WBGU propose an immediately effective “convergence” of carbon emissions rights.

As of today, they say, we should treat everyone has having the same rights to emit, and that means that those who are over-emitting need to cut their emissions the fastest.

Of course, that will never happen. The United States of America will never agree to it.

Besides which, a principled policy of “equity today” is impossible to achieve in practical terms. Even though the wealthy industrialised countries nominally have the greatest financial capacity to act on carbon emissions, they also have the highest lock-in to high-carbon systems, which will make action more expensive than in other parts of the world.

The WBGU partly address this problem by proposing that lack of achievement in industrialised countries can be compensated for by Carbon Trading with developing countries, who will have emissions rights to spare :-

But have you seen how much Carbon they expect to be traded ? It’ll never happen. The rate at which the Carbon Markets are building will never support those kind of traded flows of emissions rights. America has a partial Carbon Market in operation, but not an overall federal commitment – and failing generally to get Climate Change legislation.

Australia is still struggling with the politics of developing Carbon finance, and the European Emissions Trading Scheme has been plagued by volume-pricing “elasticity” issues. China’s Carbon Market is lightyears away, and there are numerous abuses of the globally dispersed markets that are in place already, including fake permits, tax dodges and market “swamping”.

The Clean Development Mechanism, the chief “flexible mechanism” of Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol, isn’t working very well, and the World Bank cannot see high levels of new certified Carbon being made available to market in the near future.

So, the WBGU proposal looks highly unlikely from the practical point of view, but what about the ethics behind it ?

The reason why the WBGU propose “equity, today” is to circumnavigate a common skirmish of accusation around what is known as the “grandfathering” of Carbon emissions rights.

The industrialised countries start their Carbon Descent from a position of high emissions, and many organisations agree that this effectively means that the industrialised countries have been granted free emissions rights over and above their fair share “entitlement”.

Other groups that take this approach include EcoEquity with their framework they call “Greenhouse Development Rights”, which has been adopted by many Non-Governmental Organisations.

Pinning down countries like the United States of America over this issue would be near-nigh impossible for this one simple reason – there is another way of looking at the situation.

The Americans have been operating on the basis of “Economic Production is Good” for over 60 years. They haven’t had an agenda of “Greed is Good”. Instead, they have been living by the simple rules of meritocracy, the “American dream” of personal advancement and the benevolent, if patronising, concept that economic development can help the whole world. Their economic expansion has not been a moral issue, they’re not guilty of any crimee, and they would not permit anyone to try to make it so.

It’s no use trying to pin “historical responsibility” on countries such as the United States of America. Back in the day, nobody realised that excessive Carbon Dioxide emissions could be so dangerous, so nobody should be to blame for past behaviour.

Why should “the polluter pay” ?

The WBGU shoot themselves in the foot when they suggest that in addition to incredibly high rates of Carbon Trading, which would cost America a lot of money; that America and its industrial peers should also donate huge sums of money for “adaptation” funds, money that would also be used to halt deforestation in the Global South.

America won’t play, because it won’t pay. And it definitely won’t pay twice. There’s no way to get the American administration to accept that they owe the world.

There’s also no way that the WBGU proposals can be tinkered with to give more acceptable numbers. The number of parameters in any global Carbon framework has to be kept to the absolute minimum. No use of ethical reasoning will hold sway.

The only logical, agreeable framework for the United Nations decarbonisation treaty will be the straight-forward proposals of Contraction and Convergence, whereby the world will approach equity, tomorrow, under a safe global carbon budget, at rates that can be easily accommodated in the global economy.

America will not agree to anything less. And without America, a global treaty cannot be made.

Unpicking Kyoto
Jo Abbess
20 June 2010

CONTINUED 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” :-

http://www.sciencedirect.com

Some of his policy “clues” point the way.

In section 5.5, he writes, “Policy Clue 2: the ability to cooperate with unrelated others is an almost unique characteristic of the human species”. And then in section 5.8, he writes, “Responding to the climate change threat depends on returning to the level of human cooperation that prevailed in pre-industrial societies. Humans may be unique among mammals in the extent of their cooperation with others, but it is also true that humans are almost unique in the extent to which they are willing to annihilate members of their own species that do not belong to the “in” group. Experiments and observation show that people are more willing to cooperate with “like” others than with outgroup persons. The task of climate change policy is to make our entire species the “in” group. This was Georgescu-Roegen’s admonishment for sustainable behavior: “Love thy species as thyself.”"

It will remain vitally important to continue Climate Change negotiations on a global scale, emphasising all sectors of society and business, and emphasising the common risks. We’re doing Climate Change policy not just for the poor, and not just for the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh and the Maldives; we’re doing it for ourselves, and that includes the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh and the Maldives, because they are us, and we are them.

But cooperation is not all that is required. In section 5.6, Gowdy writes, “Policy Sub-Clue 2a: cooperation depends on the ability to punish free-riders…These findings and other gametheoretic experiments are valuable in informing climate change policy. [Joseph] Stiglitz (2006) calls for using the international trade framework to impose penalties on countries (such as the U.S. under the Bush administration) that refuse to cooperate in reducing CO2 emissions. He suggests that Japan, Europe, and other signatories of the Kyoto agreement should bring a WTO case against the U.S. for unfair trade subsidization arising from U.S. energy and environmental policies. “With a strong international sanction mechanism in place, all could rest assured that there was, at last, a level playing field” (Stiglitz, p. 2–3).”

This is a strong articulation that Climate Change should be linked tightly to trade, which makes a lot of sense. In the referenced article “A New Agenda for Global Warming”, published by Economists’ Voice, July 2006, Joseph Stiglitz argues for a global carbon tax, which has been contested from many quarters, for a variety of reasons. However, other parts of his proposals seem indispensable : enforcement, cooperation and using the World Trade Organisation as the vehicle.

Copy of Economists’ Voice Joseph Stiglitz article

“The first step is to create an enforcement mechanism to prevent a country like the United States, or any country which refuses to agree to or to implement emission reductions from inflicting harm on the rest of the world. It is, perhaps, predictable that it would be the United Sates, the largest polluter, that has refused to recognize the existence of the problem…Fortunately, we have an international trade framework that can be used to force states that inflict harm on others to behave in a better fashion. Except in certain limited situations (like agriculture), the WTO does not allow subsidies—obviously, if some country subsidizes its firms, the playing field is not level. A subsidy means that a firm does not pay the full costs of production. Not paying the cost of damage to the environment is a subsidy, just as not paying the full costs of workers would be. In most of the developed countries of the world today, firms are paying the cost of pollution to the global environment, in the form of taxes imposed on coal, oil, and gas. But American firms are being subsidized—and massively so.”

Stiglitz goes on to propose “border tax adjustments”, that countries should impose import taxes on American products, but that proposal has received very short shrift from a wide audience, particularly those that argue that American manufacture is much less carbon intensive than (for example) Chinese; yet China as a whole emits far, far less than America, so an import tax would be perverse.

Without setting a global carbon tax, or creating carbon border tax adjustments, it would still be possible to create the “level playing field” that Stiglitz proposes, through several mechanisms in the trade system :-

1. Green Trade

The vast majority of international trade is conducted through contracts of procurement, between companies/firms, or from public sector organisations and companies/firms. It would be possible for the World Trade Organisation to assert that procurement contracts should be based around “green trade” principles as a very basic start. What “green trade” means would need to be ironed out, but it would be easy to make a start. Many local authorities in the United Kingdom have a “green procurement” policy that dictates a large proportion of their spending. This is an excellent model to adopt on the global level.

2. Abolish Fossil Fuel Subsidies and “Dirty” Energy Investment

Since energy is considered a basic utility in most developed countries, its provision is assured by global subsidies on Nuclear, Oil, Gas and Coal energy, offering tax breaks and public infrastructure and plant investment. For example, the United Kingdom Government is likely to offer public money for the liability insurance required from the building and operation of a new fleet of nuclear reactors.

The G20 economic leadership group has made it clear that they would consider phasing out subsidies to fossil fuel industries, and this could become the basis for a more general understanding about what should be invested in and what should not.

A very practical first step would be to ban new coal-fired power plants.

3. Development Rights

In some cases, the exploitation of fossil fuel and other mineral resources causes a “curse” to fall on the countries of extraction – the citizens of the country suffer environmental pollution, but very little in terms of monetary benefit from the exploitation of those resources, often conducted by foreign companies. Examples could include the Niger Delta, Iraq, West Papua, Colombia, and even coal mining areas in industrialised countries. The “resource curse” usually results in a reversal of social and economic development – yet the world has undertaken to uphold the Millenium Development Goals and other targets.

The World Trade Organisation could insist on “conflict-free petrol” or “social development Natural Gas” as a recognition of global development rights.

A lot of the debate around the Kyoto Protocol focuses on development rights – should the global carbon budget be shared per person ? Meaning that poorer, undeveloped people get the opportunity to sell carbon, and the right to continue to grow their economies.

If development rights were enshrined in global trade rules, overcoming the “resource curse”, then this would answer many of the UNFCCC calls, without recourse to universal carbon budgeting.

4. Green Development

The poor have the right to follow an economic development path – but they also have the right to follow a green economic development path. The poor have a human right to access to green energy, and access to green markets.

The way that green energy is delivered to the developing countries will have to be different to the way that energy has been organised in industrial countries – which has been so wasteful and polluting.

For example, in rural Africa, India and China, green electricity may be highly localised and not available on a national grid.

For global support of the growth of green energy systems, international trade must “pay back” for the raw resources from developing countries. Transnational and global companie should be required to pay a certain percentage of their profits towards green electrification in developing countries where they source their cheap raw materials.

The poor need access to green markets. This is best achieved by expanding the Fair Trade system to incorporate green principles.

If these four principles were undertaken, it may not be necessary to enforce border tax adjustments on carbon (which would punish developing countries, perversely), or set a global carbon tax (the effectiveness of which is questionable).

It might even get the Doha Development Round talks re-started :-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doha_Development_Round