In this brief but pointed essay in Earth Island Journal, EcoEquity’s Tom Athanasiou reviews some of the widely known, but rarely acknowledged, public secrets of the climate crisis. Like, for example, that the climate crisis is essentially a crisis of development and justice.

The second edition of the Greenhouse Development Rights  book is now available for download.

* Download  the entire second edition here
* Download a nicely composed brief executive summary (6 pages) here.
* Download  the longer version of the executive summary (10 pages) here.
* You can read a detailed list of the changes that have been made since the first edition was released (December 2007) in Bali.

When published, this was the most ambitious of our “country reports.”  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.

Read more and download the report on the Greenhouse Development Rights website.

EcoEquity’s director, Tom Athanasiou, on the occasion of a fundraiser for International Rivers, here gives an eight minute overview of the climate challange, as he sees it.   It’s not a great bit of video, but it’s concise, that’s for sure!  The slides (there are two) are of course from the Greenhouse Development Rights presentation.   Here a recent version.

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.” (more…)

In this report, we briefly consider six approaches to a post-Kyoto climate regime, all of which claim to be fair.  We evaluate each of them on its own terms, and also in terms of its ability, or potential ability, to deliver the all-important quality that we call “developmental equity.”

Read and download this paper on the Heinrich Boell site (external link)

In this  report, we expanded our analysis of the Vattenfall Proposal.  It was an interesting exercise, because, with this proposal, Vattenfall stepped beyond generalities and (a first for the business sector, as far as we know) and made a specific, quantitative proposal for a global burden sharing framework that it quite explicitly claimed to be fair.
It turned out that we did not agree. But the proposal still merits a bit of attention.

Read and download this report from the Heinrich Boell website (external link)

There is change coming to Washington.  The question is if it will be change enough, and when it will arrive.  And right now, well let’s just say that reasonable men and women can differ about the demands of climate realism, and its relationship to the logic of Beltway politics.   As opposed to, say, the science.  Or the demands of justice.

Which is why we wrote [this brief essay].   (more…)

First up, the climate talks are not going very well. After a rousing start in Rio in 1992, from which we returned with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the negotiations have been anything but inspiring. 1997’s Kyoto Protocol defined the rich-world actions – the first steps – that would put meat on the Convention’s bones, but the details were not ideal, and as the years passed, well, let’s just say that things didn’t quite work out as hoped. And now, twelve years on, Copenhagen is rising on the horizon. (more…)

Recently, EcoEquity’s Tom Athanasiou was invited to write this Point of View for Orion.   To write, that is, 600 words on global climate justice.  It wasn’t easy.

According to a report by the a-list team at Climate Analytics that was just published in Nature Reports, we’re not even close to being on track for success in Copenhagen.  Which is to say that an aggregated analysis of Annex 1 commitments (which “would be in the range of 8–14 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 if current commitments were followed through”) and non-Annex 1 “deviations from baseline (which are assumed to be 4% by 2020) yields the conclusion that we are in trouble deep, with virtually “no chance of limiting warming to 2 °C (or 1.5 °C) above pre-industrial temperatures.”

(more…)

Oxfam has long been a supporter of the Greenhouse Development Rights project, but this is something new!  Hang Together or Separately is a major report from Oxfam International in which the Responsibility and Capacity Index is leveraged in a new and creative manner.   (And see here for 30 minute press conference (at the Bonn talks in June) where the report was released.)

The focus of the proposal here is a Global Mitigation and Finance Mechanism designed to operationalize a “double duty” in which the rich countries, on the one hand, reduce their combined emissions by at least 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and, on the other, provide $150 billion per year — “at the very least” — to incentivize large-scale emissions reductions in developing countries and finance adaptation. (more…)

Half way through the Copenhagen year, there came the Technical briefing by the Chair of the AWG-LCA on historical responsibility as a guide to future action to address climate change.   Not a snappy title, but a big event, and the UN secretariat captured it on video, and if you’re any kind of climate equity scholar (or activist), it’s well worth watching, and not just because Martin Khor, now of the South Center, does such a fine job with the difficult job of explaining “negative emissions.”   Other highlights include Henry Shue, and Bolivia’s Angelica Navarro, and China’s Teng Fei, and India’s Prodipto Ghosh, all giving their views on this suddenly visible, enduringly critical issue.

We’re not claiming that historical responsibility is the be-all and end-all equity principle, or that it can alone bear the weight of the fair-shares effort sharing system that we need.   But it’s one side of the coin (the other is capacity) and this was, in a sense, its official coming out.   Also note:  For an excellent textual summary of the event, see the Third World Network’s Developing countries call for historical responsibility as basis for Copenhagen Outcome, by Matthew Stilwell & Lim Li Lin.

Also note: The real action took place a few days after the briefing, during a tense procession in which these same countries, among a total of 37, lent their names to formal call — expressed as a  proposed amendment to the Kyoto Protocol — for the industrialized countries to reduce their combined emissions by over 40% by 2020.

This  fine and important report, by Andrew Pendleton and Simon Retallack of the British Institute for Public Policy Research, was funded by the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Germany.   It is unusually useful, particularly in its concise and focused approach to the key question of … well … fairness in global climate finance.   It comes highly recommended, and not just because it speaks so very well of the GDRs approach.   Rather, it goes beyond the basic GDRs analysis to explore a number of possible approaches to using the Responsibility and Capacity index.   In practice!

Just in case you were starting to relax (or sink back exhausted into your chair) here’s a little wake up call, from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US). Seems that the recent rate of increase of CO₂ emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes has been accelerating — their global growth rate recently increasing from 1.1 to 3.0 percent a year. Why? Because some the world’s poor (think China) are getting richer, but that we haven’t managed to break the link between economic growth and emissions. As the PNAS editors say, “the results have implications for global equity.”

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. (more…)

Sunita Narain, of New Delhi’s Center for Science and the Environment, has long been a leader in the battle for global climate justice. Which makes it all the better to have her weigh in with this rather sharp editorial. If you’re tired of recent fashion of blaming China and India for the crisis (both countries have far less historical responsibility and far lower per-capita incomes than, say, ours) you might want to take a look at this short, bracing call to return to basics.

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.  (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)