Welcome to EcoEquity.org

A Call for Leadership: A Greenhouse Development Rights analysis of the EU's proposed 2020 targets

This the latest and most ambitious of our “country reports.” Published in October 2008, it contains a detailed analysis of the EU’s climate policy, as well as concrete proposals for moving forward into a principle-based climate regime that might actually work.

Here's the lead...

An impasse threatens the international climate negotiations. This impasse – and its implications for the European Union – derives from the fundamental fact that the climate crisis confronts us in a profoundly unequal world. Moreover, the climate crisis is extremely grave; it actually requires that, somehow, we launch a global emergency mobilization to stabilize the climate. Yet such a mobilization, which would be daunting under the best of circumstances, must come while billions of people, overwhelmingly but not exclusively in the South, are still struggling to escape poverty.

This is a critical complication, greater even than those engendered by the crashing waves of financial and geo-political instability that, alas, seem to characterize our times. Its importance cannot be overstated. Nor can its most obvious implication: despite the progress that has been made since Bali – most visibly in the various financing proposals which have now been formally tabled – a further effort, and a bold one, will be needed if the impasse is to be broken in time. And this effort will have to originate in the wealthy world. It will, almost certainly, and against all odds, have to originate in Europe.

More ....

A Peak on the Horizon

There are essentially two paths forward from here, both of them passing through Copenhagen and then heading on to a global peak and, subsequently, a rapid decline in greenhouse-gas emissions. The first, an extremely dangerous “business-as-usual” path, is one in which we fail to act, decisively and in time, and thus commit ourselves to disruptive, frightening, and extremely expensive near-future “adjustments.” It is the path to avoid, though given our history – in Toronto in 1988, in Rio in 1992, and again in Kyoto in 1997 we declared climate objectives that we then only half-heartedly attempted to meet – it may well be the best that we can hope for.

More ....

The G5 Statement

If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you know that our focus is a fair global climate regime. Indeed, we believe that, before there’s any real chance of stabilizing the climate, there will have to be a fair burden sharing deal, one that the developing countries can really support. In the absence of such a deal, developing country negotiators can all to justifiably conclude that they have more to lose than to gain from any really serious engagement with a global regime that, after all, must significantly curtail access to the energy sources and technologies that historically enabled growth in the industrialized world.

We were, then, both struck and pleased by the statement issued by the “G5 countries” (Brazil, Mexico, India, South Africa and China) after 2008’s G8 meeting in Japan, for it contains this:

“Negotiations for a shared vision on long-term cooperative action at the UNFCCC, including a long-term global goal for greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions reductions, must be based on an equitable burden sharing paradigm that ensures equal sustainable development potential for all citizens of the world and that takes into account historical responsibility and respective capabilities as a fair and just approach.

It is essential that developed countries take the lead in achieving ambitious and absolute greenhouse gas emissions reductions in accordance with their quantified emission targets under the Kyoto Protocol after 2012, of at least 25-40 per cent range for emissions reductions below 1990 levels by 2020, and, by 2050, by between 80 and 95 per cent below those levels, with comparability of efforts among them.”

Emphasis added. And, yes, this will be easier said than done. But at least the air is beginning to clear. For more this dispatch from the Third World Network.

The Right to Development in a Climate-constrained World

If you're looking for Greenhouse Development Rights book, The right to development in a climate constrained world, you can find and download the first edition here. Or, for a high-res version, and more, go to the Greenhouse Development Rights page.

Note that a major revision is forthcoming, but not yet available. However, the executive summary is complete, and it's the first really adequate short explication of Greenhouse Development Rights. Download it here.

HOT STUFF

... an opinionated, occasional, selection of the literature

Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?

You may have already heard tell of this, a rather astonishing scientific paper by Jim Hansen and his team, but chances are that you haven't read it, or even skimmed it. So consider this to be another chance, one you shouldn't pass up. This, after all, is a paper that says that we need a "phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2," and if there has been more easily understandable call for an emergency energy transition, we haven't heard it.

Here's a bit of the paper's conclusion, from Yale Global Online, written by Hansen himself:

"Our conclusion is that, if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, CO2 must be reduced from its present 385 ppm (parts per million) to, at most, 350 ppm. We find that peak CO2 can be kept to about 425 ppm, with large estimates for oil and gas reserves, if coal use is phased out by 2030 (except where CO2 is captured and sequestered) and unconventional fossil fuels are not tapped substantially. Peak CO2 can be kept close to 400 ppm, if actual reserves are closer to those estimated by "peakists," who believe that the globe is already at peak global oil production, having extracted about half of readily extractable oil resources.

This lower 400 ppm peak can be ensured, assuming phase-out of coal emissions by 2030, if a practical limit on reserves is achieved by means of actions that prevent fossil-fuel extraction from public lands, off-shore regions under government control, environmentally pristine regions and extreme environments. The concerned public can influence this matter, but time is short, the industry voice is strong and climate effects have not yet become so obvious to the public as to overwhelm the disinformation from industry moguls."

"Industry moguls." Nice words to hear from a scientist, eh?

Climate Code Red: The case for emergency action

We raved about Climate Code Red when it first came out as a report, and we're not going to stop now that it's a book. And the fact that the book is hard to get in the US doesn't make much difference. Get a friend in Australia to send it to you! Or go to the book site and try your best. Here's what we said about the original report:

David Spratt and Philip Sutton, the two Australian climate analysts behind this report, insist that we've already crossed the line, and that the problem now is to engineer an emergency global mobilization and to "cool the earth" as quickly as humanly possible. Their argument, alas, is not a rhetorical one that will be easy to deny. In fact, it's for the most part quite measured. It's certainly strongly rooted in the science (much of which has come out since the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report) and almost entirely free of gratuitous political spin.

We can’t say that James Hansen – for this paper begins as a digest of the tumult and measured alarm that emanates like a shock wave from Hansen’s team – is certainly right. But we find no obvious flaw in his recent argument that we’ve already passed the “tipping point,” and commend Climate Code Red to all those who would see the implications of this claim drawn to their logical conclusion.

That conclusion is that it's past time for business as usual. That it's time to face the facts, to ring the alarm, to invent a politics of emergency mobilization. Obviously, it's an inconvenient conclusion, and to justify it the focus shifts from Hansen's science to Churchill's blunt talk, and ultimately it's the latter man’s pugnacious presence that seals the deal. Which isn’t to say that Climate Code Red is an artifact from the past, as if World War II was a sufficient metaphor for the coming challenges. Spratt and Sutton aren’t fighting the last war, but preparing for the next. As must we all.

Full disclosure: Climate Code Red, by the way, has some nice words for Greenhouse Development Rights. See page 138.

A Green New Deal: Joined-up policies to solve the triple crunch of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices

Now here's something interesting! An actual use of the term "Green New Deal," which has been knocking around for years now, and in the title of a report written by group of veteran British climate and social justice campaigners that ought to know what they're talking about.

The precise definition of the "triple crunch" here is a bit too topical for our tastes (we're not sure that the credit crisis deserve equal billing with climate change) but this is a pretty small point. The main claim here is that "These three overlapping events threaten to develop into a perfect storm, the like of which has not been seen since the Great Depression," and it's well worth considering, particularly since it may be right. And because, if it is, the stakes will be extremely high.

The Green New Deal, in this formulation,

... entails re-regulating finance and taxation plus a huge transformational programme aimed at substantially reducing the use of fossil fuels and in the process tackling the unemployment and decline in demand caused by the credit crunch. It involves policies and novel funding mechanisms that will reduce emissions contributing to climate change and allow us to cope better with the coming energy shortages caused by peak oil.

More precisely, the "Green New Deal"

... consists of two main strands. First, it outlines a structural transformation of the regulation of national and international financial systems, and major changes to taxation systems. And, second, it calls for a sustained programme to invest in and deploy energy conservation and renewable energies, coupled with effective demand management.

We don't agree with every nuance , but this report, called by its authors "the first attempt to address the nature of broader financial and monetary reform necessary to create the investment framework needed for the energy transition to avert dangerous climate change," is certainly worth reading.

Mike Davis: Welcome to the Next Epoch

If you don't know Mike Davis' work, start with an Amazon search. He's the author of some of the most interesting books of the last few decades, including, most recently, Planet of Slums and In Praise of Barbarians. Or just click though to this fine little essay, published on Tomdispatch, which appears to be called Living on the Ice Shelf.

Yes, you're too busy to read. But you're not too busy to read this.

The Greening of the South

Here's something interesting -- a well-informed and honest article from a significant British magazine (Prospect) that looks hard at the core political challenges of global climate stabilization and then draws some actual conclusions. And it's written by Simon Retallack, who knows his way around both the climate policy debate and the climate movement.

Retallack, now head of Climate Change at the UK's Institute for Public Policy Research, did not come blithely to the Greenhouse Development Rights perspective, which he here recommends. He's way too much of a realist for that. But Retallack, as it happens, is an honest realist, one who rejects most of the goods currently being sold under that label as being long, long past their use-by dates.

Per-capita emissions come into his argument. How could they not when they're five times as high in the US as they are in China, which is supposedly eating America's lunch. But the real issue, now absolutely clear, is not equalizing emissions but rather phasing them out. And quickly. The real issue is redefining prosperity, or at least development, in a climate-constrained world.

By the way, Retallack's take on emissions trading is particularly interesting, especially given that he has deep roots in the British climate movement. He's not an academic policy wonk, but neither is he an automatic enemy of emissions trading. And his contribution here is to focus on criticizing the alternatives to trading. It's not a definitive move, but it's an overdue one, and he deserves credit for making it.

So place Retallack within the swelling ranks of those who welcome the critique of "false solutions," but insist as well that it's time to take the next step, to propose financial mechanisms capable of supporting rapid global mitigation and adaptation. The ranks of those who recognize that, come what may, the climate end-game is going to be played out soon, within the institutions of this our very capitalist world.

Which reminds us of Susan George, a long-time global justice leader and theorist who's also been staring into the climate abyss, and drawing her own difficult conclusions. It's well worth your time to listen to those conclusions, which you can do here.

The Debt of Nations

The notion of "ecological debt" has been tossed around for a long time, but until the publication of The debt of nations and the distribution of ecological impacts from human activities, which, we hasten to note, was published in the Proceedings of the American National Academy of Sciences (here) has such a convincing attempt been made to quantify it.

For interesting reviews, see here and here. And note well the bottom line: "At least to some extent, the rich nations have developed at the expense of the poor and, in effect, there is a debt to the poor." Thus spoke coauthor Richard B. Norgaard, an ecological economist and UC Berkeley professor of energy and resources. "That, perhaps, is one reason that they are poor. You don't see it until you do the kind of accounting that we do here."

What kind of accounting? One that leveraged data from the World Bank and the UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, that focused on six areas: greenhouse gas emissions, ozone layer depletion, agriculture, deforestation, overfishing and converting mangrove swamps into shrimp farms, and which limited its purview to the years since 1961.

What's the size of the debt? According to this estimate, it's more than $1.8 trillion, which is in turn more than the entire third world debt.

Military vs. Climate Security

Want a bit more on money? How about this: "For every dollar allocated for stabilizing the climate," says Miriam Pemberton, the author of a new report from Washington's Institute for Policy Studies, comparing the US military and climate-protection budgets, "the government will spend $88 on achieving security by military force." And the United States spends 50 times as much arming the world as it does helping other countries address global warming."

There's more detail, of course, much more. For example, technology transfer, which surfaced as such a key issue at the recent Bali talks. Here, as it happens, "The U.S. government budgeted $20 to develop new weapons systems for every dollar it requested to develop new technologies to stabilize the climate."

Not that this is likely to come as much a surprise. The surprise would be if the next US administration makes much of a change in these dismal, even suicidal ratios.

Jared Diamond steps to the edge

Diamond, of course, is the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fair of Succeed, a book that illustrated, in excruciating detail, the myriad varieties of blindness that human societies have over the years chosen over what we might call environmental realism. Elites, in particular, have a long track record of willful, and ultimately suicidal self regard, and it's the attention that Diamond paid to this fact that made his book such a milestone.

This little op-ed unfortunately sets that key point aside. The divisions mentioned here are only divisions between rich nations and poor, as if the divisions between rich and poor within nations were not equally decisive. Still, it was good to see Diamond's bald claim that ...

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world."

... in the august pages of the New York Times. It was a fitting welcome to the new year. And it was, of course, a warning.

Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million

Bill McKibben can be counted on to explain critical truths in simple ways, and in this case he had some help from his editors at the Washington Post, and from James Hansen, who took advantage of last year's meeting of the American Geophysical Union to argue that we're already over a key Earth-system tipping point.

There's a lot of analysis behind this (check our Hansen's web page if you want to see how much) but McKibben, a seasoned journalist, get's just the right quote: "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm." And, of course, the current level of 383 ppm is well past 350. Does this mean that we're doomed? McKibben's answer is "not quite," and it's the right one. But there's no more time to waste.

"Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life. "

Maybe too huge. The problems of global equity alone may be too much -- the Chinese aren't going to stop burning coal unless we give them some other way to pull people out of poverty. And we simply may have waited too long.

But at least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know. "

Hiding Behind the Poor

Greenpeace India just released this brief, fantastic report report at the climate COP in Bali (December 2007). It deserves huge kudos, and a great deal of attention, for it shows that India -- in claiming that its emissions are too low to demand mitigation -- is actually relying on misleading average emission data. Which is to say that India's elites are "hiding behind" their own poor. The authors show this in just the right way, by doing their homework. They break India's population down into what, for lack of a better term, we might call "emission classes," and -- surprise -- it turns out that there are about ten million people within India who have emissions above, and sometimes far above, the sustainable global average.

Highly recommended and, we hope, a sign of the times.

Startling new analysis from Lehman Brothers

Well, it seems that surprises are still possible! Not long ago, Climate Progress, Joe Romm's excellent blog, contained a pointer to a new report by Lehman Brothers -- the investment bank -- with the unpromising title of "The Business of Climate Change II." But promising it was! And among much else, it contained the following startling words:
"The United States, the European Union, Japan, and Russia are estimated to have accounted jointly for nearly 70% of the build-up of fossil-fuel CO2 between 1850 and 2004. Developed countries are also, directly or indirectly, responsible for much of the destruction of the world's carbon sinks, most notably its forests. By contrast, India and China are estimated as having contributed less than 10% of the total. Developing countries are already making the point that the 'social' cost of carbon -- and therefore the total abatement cost -- is as high as it is because of past emissions. Hence, they argue, the developed countries should be paying for the amount by which the 'social' cost of carbon is higher than it would have been but for their actions ...

[T]hose nations responsible for the bulk of the release of CO2 into the atmosphere in the past could agree to pay for these responsibilities by paying into a global warming 'superfund'. That fund could in turn be used to reduce the amount that would otherwise be paid by the emerging countries in respect of their future emissions -- or, of course, to pay for example for research and development, or adaptation." Lehman Brothers? Calling for a "global warming superfund"? And strongly implying that nations should pay into it on the basis of their historical emissions?   Clearly, the winds of realism are blowing more strongly than we had imagined.

EcoEquity in the news

Turns out that the mass media may be a wee bit more permeable in other countries than here in the ole US of A.  Witness a nice little piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, on the ocassion of a speaking tour by our own Tom Athanasiou. It's called Rich will have to help poor to save climate, which sort of gives the game away, doesn't it? The piece, by a journo names Wendy Frew, is also notable for containing the dulcet phrase "coal is the enemy of mankind."   Not bad for Australia!

Oxfam: Rich Must Pay the Bulk of Climate Change Bill

Oxfam deserves heaps of kudos for this report   It calls for a mandatory adaptation funding regime (we're talking global here) that's on the right scale, or at least the right order of magnitude, one in which national obligations to pay (to help poor and vulnerable communities adapt to the now inevitable impacts of climate change) are determined by historical responsibility for the impacts of climate change, and by ability to pay.

The report is called Adapting to climate change: What's needed in poor countries, and who should pay, and here's their own intro to it:
"Climate change is forcing vulnerable communities in poor countries to adapt to unprecedented climate stress. Rich countries, primarily responsible for creating the problem, must stop harming, by fast cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions, and start helping, by providing finance for adaptation. In developing countries Oxfam estimates that adaptation will cost at least $50bn each year, and far more if global emissions are not cut rapidly. Urgent work is necessary to gain a more accurate picture of the costs to the poor.

According to Oxfam’s new Adaptation Financing Index, the USA, European Union, Japan, Canada, and Australia should contribute over 95 per cent of the finance needed. This finance must not be counted towards meeting the UN-agreed target of 0.7 per cent for aid. Rich countries are planning multi-billion dollar adaptation measures at home, but to date they have delivered just $48m to international funds for least-developed country adaptation, and have counted it as aid: an unacceptable inequity in global responses to climate change."