CEO is the online newsletter of EcoEquity, an NGO founded last year to explore the demands of climate equity, and beyond that of justice in a finite world. Every organization needs its issue, and ours is a particular aspect of environmental (or is it distributional?) justice -- the need for equitable access to limited environmental space. It's a big issue, and global warming is what's putting it on the map, or at least on our map.

Ergo, CEO.

The idea here is a deceptively simple one: in both Europe and the South, the per capita alternative is well known and widely discussed. But in the US, well let's say that, for all our expertise, and all our activism, we never quite get around to frank, public discussion about the core of the climate problem, which is, after all, that we the rich have already taken up all of the space.

And yet that discussion is a fascinating one. There are large principles and transfixing details, and after the disappointment of The Hague they form a picture that is pressing indeed. Which is where we come in. We're going to try, by whatever means we can contrive, to bring the global debate about equity and the future of the climate regime home to America. It's a difficult job, particularly given the insularity that will likely come with the new regime, but we're hardly alone with it: as we'll show in the COP6 report below, the pitch of the equity debate is rising around the world.

Where to begin? With the obvious, that the idea of "climate equity" is strange to American ears, and that this isn't just a consequence of our fairly rigid political culture, but also of the fact that, until recently, the American friends of climate equity kept uneasily to their closets. Public talk about greenhouse warming was, almost by definition, talk about IF it was a threat, and when we talked privately, it was about all the devices -- mechanical and economic and cultural -- that would make it manageable.

If only they could be tried.

But what would it really take? What's really going to have to happen before the solar dream becomes something like reality? That's the question today, as it has been for a long time. And on this question there has been altogether too much silence, altogether too much "realism."

Which is why, dear colleagues, this may not be such a bad moment after all. At least the friends of equity are coming out of their closets. Take a look, for example, at EQUITY AND GREENHOUSE GAS RESPONSIBILITY, a piece published last September 29th in SCIENCE, in which a group of American academics, several of them founders of EcoEquity, argue that a climate regime based on per capita rights is the only one that can plausibly be claimed as sustainable, or as realistic. (SCIENCE isn't free on the web, but the original, longer version is, at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~rael/equity.html.)

The pure form of the proposal here is "a transition to per capita rights." Given that, though, there is a whole lot to talk about. We can talk, though the radicals among us may not like this, about the widespread sense that these rights have to be tradable. We can talk about Contraction and Convergence, which is the name by which "per capita" generally goes in Europe, where its been tirelessly promoted by Britain's Global Commons Institute (http://www.gci.org.uk). We can talk about the Sky Trust proposal (hhttp://www.aecs-inc.org/Skytrust/index.html ), or the emerging rush of "hybrid proposals," all of which tincture per capita with other, presumably more palatable ingredients in recipes varying from "income adjusted per capita rights" to targets defined by calculating "the ratio between a country's per capita GDP and its emissions." If we run out of things to talk about, we can always talk about history.

The important thing is that we talk. Because if anything became clear at The Hague, it's that the Kyoto process as we know has fallen into deadlock. To be sure, Kyoto is only a first step, but who, after COP6, saw the way to a second? And then came the American election, a strange historical marker if ever there was one. It's easy, just now, to be pretty discouraged.

But we've chosen, instead, to draw a bit of hope from these two rather inauspicious events. And why not? As old doors close, new ones may open. Many of us are searching anew for the bottom line, and what if it turns out to be only a commonsense sort of fairness? What if the framework really is crucial, and what if it must be one that people around the world can see the justice of? What if, in the end, global emissions can only rapidly contract if Northern and Southern are SIMULTANEOUSLY being drawn into explicit convergence?

CEO, then, is going to argue, with
* Airy ethical logic,
* Hard-nosed green realism,
* Praise of solar/hydrogen,
* Effusive praise of activism,
* Interviews with key players,
* Theories of environmental space,
* Jeremiads on ecological debt,
* Guest editorials on Environmental Justice,
* Integrated economic and climate models,
* Critiques of economic and climate models,
* Dreams of Just Transition,
and just about anything else we can come up with, that the way forward is a phased transition, within the Kyoto process, to a second-generation climate regime based on per capita emission entitlements.

Are we nuts? Not really. Even Jan Pronk, the Dutch Environmental Minister who served as President of COP6, has argued that (tradable) per capita entitlements are the only logical basis for developing world emission- reduction commitments. (For an NGO take on Pronk's words, see http://www.climatenetwork.org/eco/3.0900.time.html. For the details, see http://www.earthtimes.org/jul/environmentthekyotoprotocoljul25_00.htm.)

It's a fine and clever idea: silence for now, and later we'll square the circle. But it's not going to work, is it? Because as we saw at The Hague, the Kyoto negotiations have fallen into what Worldwatch Institute's Christopher Flavin calls a "complexity trap." To which we will reply (in an future issue) that indeed it has, and very much as a consequence of the choice, for it was a choice, to keep the per capita alternative off the negotiating table. The complexity trap, in our view, is a symptom of avoidance.

Perhaps avoidance was the right choice. We don't know. What we do know is that, whatever happens now, the negotiating schedule has the debate over developing country commitments beginning soon, no later than 2005. The date could slip, of course, right along with the rich world's progress towards its Kyoto emission reduction targets. Which is why sooner or later we're all going to have to deal with the elephant in the room. To wit: the fate of the Earth climate is tied, deeply and most inconveniently, to the fate of the poor.

Our goal, then, is to make per capita principles a prominent and respectable aspect of the US climate debate. We take up this goal because, while we know that the costs of emissions reductions have been vastly overstated, and while we believe that a solar revolution is indeed waiting in the wings, we do not believe that markets and technology will suffice. We take it up because America, dreamland of the 20th century, is now the nation with the largest carbon debt of all. We bring it up because America has a special obligation to sharply curtail its emissions, and thus to help open environmental space for the developing world.

And that's enough for now. Well, almost enough. We still have to tell you that CEO isn't always going to be so hortatory, and that it's not going to come out all that often either, at least not initially. Say a bi-monthly, or a quarterly. Slow moving but worth keeping an eye on, just like the climate negotiations.

Hope you stick around.

Tom Athanasiou, Paul Baer
EcoEquity Coordinators

And by the way, our initial board is...

• Eugene Coyle, PhD, Ecological Economics, "public servant"
  
• John Gershman, Asia/Pacific Editor, Foreign Policy in Focus
  
• Donna Green, UC Berkeley, Energy and Resources Group
  
• Dan Kammen (chair), Associate Professor, Energy and Resources Group
  
• Juliette Majot, Executive Director, International Rivers Network
  
• Patrick McCuilly, Campaigns Director, International Rivers Network
  
• Richard Norgaard, Professor, Energy and Resources Group; President, International Society for Ecological Economics
  
• Susan Ode, Program Coordinator, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives

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