Inconvenient Thoughts About Rich-World Climate Strategy
Is This a Crash Program? Inconvenient Thoughts About Rich-World Climate Strategy
By Tom Athanasiou
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Monday 26 March 2007
The political situation has changed remarkably in the last six months, not least with regard to climate change. At least that's the case in the rich world, where a whole flock of serious proposals has finally made it onto the agenda:
The European Union has agreed to a joint carbon-dioxide reduction target for its 27 member countries and their 490 million citizens. To wit: the EU is committed to reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020. And if other countries - like, say, the United States - agree to do more, the reduction target goes up to 30 percent. Whatever happens, 20 percent is on the table unilaterally.
The UK has published a draft climate-change bill that will make it the first country in the world to set legally binding carbon targets. The bill will set the UK's targets - for a 60 percent emissions reduction by 2050 and around a 30 percent reduction by 2020 - into statute. It will also inaugurate a new system of legally binding five-year "carbon budgets," designed to make it easy to tell if the UK is actually on track to meet its commitments.
In the US, the House's Safe Climate Act, the Senate's Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act and the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 all define closely related emissions-reduction trajectories. These vary a bit, but just a bit. In general, the US would freeze its emissions in 2010. These would then be cut by roughly 2 percent per year, causing them to return to 1990 levels by 2020. After 2020, the annual cut would rise to average about 5 percent per year, so that, by 2050, emissions would be 80 percent lower than in 1990. And if that's not enough, there's Al Gore's new proposal, which would immediately freeze the level of US emissions and drop it by 90 percent by 2050.
So here are a few questions: Are the differences between these proposals significant, or should they be seen as variations on a theme? And if they are, does this theme deserve the name "crash program?" As in the phrase "a crash program to stabilize the global climate and avoid a climate catastrophe."
Let's say that the answer to the first question is yes. After all, if things go well, the EU could just go on from its first-up 2020 reductions of 20 percent (or 30 percent) to drop 60 percent, 80 percent or even 90 percent by 2050. So it's easy to argue that what really matters in these proposals is that they'd change the game. In the face of a grim current reality in which, globally, coal is booming and greenhouse-gas emissions are rising 3 percent a year, all of them would impose a rapid rich-world emissions peak and put us onto a track in which, one way or another, the holy grail of "decarbonization" was finally being taken seriously.
But let's also say that, at least as currently specified, none of the above proposals, in themselves, qualifies as a crash program. There are three reasons why this is so:
First, a crash program is by definition global, and all of these proposals are restricted to Europe or the US. They are, if you'll excuse my shorthand, domestic rich-world proposals that tell us little about the developing world. In particular, they tell us little about "China and India," which figure large in the "climate protection is unfair and won't work unless the developing countries accept the same sort of emissions limitations as we do" school of anti-environmental Republicanism. So, while these proposals attempt to drive rapid rich-world reductions - reductions that must be in motion before any true crash program can gain traction - none have much to say about how such a program would actually work in the developing world, or what its associated global emissions trajectory would likely be.
Second, none of these proposals - and this is true even if you agree to judge them in entirely domestic terms - in themselves suggest much about the political and moral content of the public-education campaigns that would have to accompany them. But such campaigns would, inevitably, be critical to their prospects. Even if you argue that these are just next-step proposals, you have to prepare people for the global steps that, if you believe the scientists, will have to follow immediately on. Specifically, you have to prepare people to think, coherently and compassionately, about the extremely stringent global-emissions budget that the rich world is going to have to share, fairly, with "China and India." And you have start soon, because it's not going to be easy.
Third, none of these proposals is well-specified with relation to the critical matter of global-emissions trading. When we say, for example, that the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act would require US emissions to drop by 80 percent by 2050, what have we said about how much of that drop must be composed of physical domestic emissions reductions? What have we said about how much of it will be composed of "offsets" purchased offshore? The answer, actually, is unknowable at this stage of the game, but it's clear that there will be a domestic trading system, and, in our post-Kyoto dreams, an international trading system to which that domestic system is linked. So some of it will be composed of offsets; this we know. But what have we said about the implication here, that we'll still be importing emissions space from developing countries that, frankly, are going to need all they can get.
Nothing at All
Now, there are unavoidable limits to what we can say about matters like these, because we just don't know how matters are going to work out. We don't know, for one thing, how the global carbon markets are going to be structured and regulated. We haven't agreed if there are, or should be, limits to how much of its emissions-reduction burden a rich country should be allowed to meet offshore. We don't even know if developing countries will have emissions limits, or how such limits should be expressed.
There's a lot we don't know. Which is fine. The future is famously unknowable. What is not fine is that we're barely bothering to talk about what we don't know. Because just now the attention - all of the attention - is going to "building momentum." And while I don't have anything against momentum, there does seem to be a tradeoff between building it on the one hand and foregrounding inconvenient truths on the other. And there are some pretty stark truths lurking in this mix, which we're going to have to deal with soon. At least if we really intend a viable crash program to stabilize the climate.
Al Gore is now talking about concluding "the next stage" of the global climate negotiations by 2010. Let's wish him luck, because whatever comes next is going to have to include "China and India," and if it doesn't it's going to be crushingly difficult to hold to steep domestic emissions-reductions commitments like the ones suggested above. But despite the vague progress of the post-Gleneagles G8+5 process (the current moment in the international talks) the path to a next-generation climate agreement - the one we need to replace Kyoto with a truly global accord - is still jammed in the same North/South impasse that it's been stuck in for years. At least as far as I can see.
David Miliband, the vigorous young Laborite who's now the UK's environment minister, has been somewhat less coy about the situation than most US politicians. Here's what he had to say about it (in Newsweek International) in February of this year:
If all industrialized countries took on emissions-reduction commitments of 60 to 80 percent, according to the UN, and if they purchased half of their reductions in the developing world, and if the carbon price were at least $10 per ton, then the global financial flows would be of the order of $100 billion per year.
This sort of money could help bridge the gap between high- and low-carbon development. It could help fund the extra cost from carbon capture and storage technology, which reduce emissions from coal-fired power stations by 85 percent. It could make the difference for governments choosing between "cheaper" fossil-fuel power plants and more expensive hydroelectric projects. It could help make solar power a reality.
Now, there are at least two interesting things about this quote. One is Miliband's off-the-cuff estimate that industrialized countries would purchase "half of their reductions" in the developing world. The other is the absurdly low carbon price that he's using to do his admittedly back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Still, he's at least giving us something to work with, something solid enough to support a few observations:
First, "half of their reductions" is a lot. It means that a lot of money would be flowing to the developing world - money that, as Miliband notes, could be used to support a rapid clean-energy transition and therefore make a truly global crash program possible.
Second, it also means that the actual physical-emissions reductions projected for the rich world would be only half of what's now being advertised. Not 20 percent by 2020, but 10 percent; not 60 percent or 80 percent or 90 percent by 2050, but 30 percent or 40 percent or 45 percent.
Third, and this starts getting at the real problem, it means that the rich world is going to feel like it's in crash program mode - after all, it's making these huge payments as well as these huge reductions - when it's not, not really, and even as the South is running smack into the wall of an exhausted global-emissions budget. Which is (and I'm not going to start drawing graphs here) just what's going to happen, because we're now so late in the game that, all else remaining equal, there simply isn't enough remaining atmospheric space for the South to develop to anything like the economic level that the rich countries currently enjoy. Not without blowing the global-emissions budget. Not without a truly heroic effort (as in "crash program") to break the link between carbon emissions and economic development.
The problem is that, particularly in the US, we're not talking - at all - about what's going to have to change. We're barely even talking about the fact that, even as the South hits the wall, it's going to be suffering huge impacts. Because (grim irony here) the poorest people in the world also happen to be the ones most vulnerable to the coming droughts, the rising waters and all the rest of it. And please recall that, even as the South hits, and crashes through, the emissions wall, it's going to be staring across the development gap at a rich world that, though far more energy-efficient than it is today, is still, well, rich.
It's not a formula for the global cooperation that we're going to need.
And the Point?
The point of this story, I suppose, is that squaring a circle is not a simple thing. And that if we want to be making claims to a true crash program, we're not going to do it as easily as seems to be envisioned in even the aggressive new crop of European and American climate proposals. And I say this while knowing full well that these proposals already strain the credulity of honest realists.
Still, they're just not enough. Even if successful, they wouldn't prevent developing world emissions from taking us deep into the danger zone. And they won't support a grand North/South bargain that can break the international climate-policy impasse and bring "China and India" to the table. They won't do, not in the long term and not even in the medium.
Which raises a tough question: What about the short term? Wouldn't it be wise, just for a few years longer, to keep our own counsel, to discuss the issues here, well, discreetly?
Perhaps it would. But given the lateness of the hour, a big think of some sort is clearly in order. Particularly in the US, where the climate movement has become almost entirely inward looking. Questions, clearly, are on the agenda. When, in particular, are we going to start talking about a global accord that might actually work, and what it has to mean in terms of rich-word obligation? And how we're going to explain this obligation in the American heartland? When, in the face of the rising buzz about a coming new age of "US leadership," are we going to start speaking inconvenient truths about US obligation (I'll leave the Europeans out of this for now), which, obviously, has got to have some sort of strong relationship to US leadership? And when I say "speaking," I mean speaking publicly!
At the moment, the answer seems to be ... maybe later. All the attention is on building momentum. And there is virtually no political space, and certainly no funding [...] oriented towards articulating the parameters of a just global framework that might actually work.
The irony here is that the real inconvenient truth - that the rich world has responsibilities and obligations that go far beyond those implied by Miliband's formula - is not welcome even in the political movement that Al Gore, more than any other single individual, has built. And why is that exactly? Because even such a system at that envisioned by Waxman, Sanders, Boxer, and of course Gore - one in which US emission allowances drop towards zero by 2050 - would leave the United States off the hook! And this is true not just because the US would be free to meet its obligations with "emissions offsets" bought offshore, but also, and more fundamentally, because our proper obligations exceed - by far! - the obligation to merely decarbonize our national economy! Our historical responsibility, our wealth, and thus our capacity to act, are simply too high for such an easy road to be the one for us.
The arguments and calculations necessary to show this are beyond the scope of this essay. However, I will say that there are plenty of people in the climate movement who know full well that the argument here, in outline if not in detail, is quite correct. It's not, after all, like the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change, or its talk about "common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities," is a secret. In any case, the topic here is not US obligation, but rather our silence about US obligation, and the need to break it. This obligation, in particular, must be seen for what it really is, an obligation that rich Americans share with the rich elsewhere, one in which they (we?) are called to take up the task of decarbonizing not just our national economies, but the entire global economy. One in which we admit, as well, that we're obligated to protect all those who will suffer the impacts that can no longer be avoided, whether they live in New Orleans or on the Bangladeshi floodplain.
It's a tough situation, far tougher than if we'd acted thirty years ago, or even twenty. It would be interesting to run the numbers and find out. But it's late now, very late. The skeptics stalled us too long. We now need a true crash program, one that will not be economically "optimal" and will therefore, inevitably, be denounced as "draconian." One that will measure the necessary action and its cost, in terms of a global burden that, come what may, can only be shared in a manner that is explicitly, comprehensibly fair.
What must be done? Mostly, just what's being done today. But some of us have to break ranks. Some of us have to start looking ahead. Some of us have to start working to understand, and explain, that national obligations can actually be understood as quantified national obligations. And some of us, at least, have to face the fact that such obligations, calculated in anything like a plausible manner, exceed by far the sorts of sums contemplated by a simple, bottom-up cap and trade system like the one that Miliband, Gore and just about everyone else is contemplating at the moment.
One final clarification. Everything noted above assumes a background political reality in which the global division between rich and poor countries is entirely paramount. But this isn't the whole story. Both rich and poor countries are internally divided into rich and poor classes, and when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the global burden sharing system (that everyone wants to avoid talking about) this is going to have to be taken into account. This is, in the first instance, because "responsibility" isn't enough when it comes to the calculation of national obligations to pay. Capacity counts as well, and everyone knows it. And so does "development need."
I won't go so far as to say that, to stabilize the climate, we're going to have to contrive a global new deal. But I will say that, soon, there's going to have to be a global accord, and that this accord will have to be consistent with a global new deal, one in which not only the international climate regime, but the international trade regime, the international property-rights regime, the international governance regime and a whole lot of other international regimes are bent, if not broken, to accommodate the realities of the climate challenge. And I will say that today's defining silence about this overarching challenge is inconsistent with any true crash program.
The bottom line, in any case, is simple enough. The rich have obligations to the poor, and unless these obligations are put explicitly onto the table, unless they are explained, in both political and moral terms - to the American people as well as to the Europeans and the people of the South - the global political divide is not going to be crossed, not in time.
For an initial tour of the issues, see Greenhouse Development Rights: An approach to the global climate regime that takes climate protection seriously while also preserving the right to human development, at
www.ecoequity.org/GDRs/GDRs_Nairobi.pdf. A more detailed quantitative analysis will be published soon.
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Tom Athanasiou is the executive director of EcoEquity
www.ecoequity.org. Email him at
[email protected].
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