Hot Stuff Archive

• 08-19-2010
• Copenhagen Accord pledges are paltry

• There is of course an ongoing, bitter debate about the Copenhagen Accord, about what it is and what, in the end, it will finally mean.  Briefly, it comes to this: Does the Accord’s “pledge and review” architecture open a new way forward, one that can succeed even given the sorry state of America’s climate politics and, for that matter, American democracy?   Or  does it  rather invite us into a future in which the rich and the responsible escape their proper obligations, and by so doing condemn the poor and the innocent, and eventually the rest of us as well, to the suffering and violence of extreme global warming?

  The final resolution of this debate will take time, and, it seems, a great deal of acrimony.  But one matter, at least, is already clear.  The Accord’s “pledges” are entirely inadequate to the goal of avoiding “dangerous climate change.”  This is a matter of broad consensus among the analysts, who have published a variety of cogent commentaries on the Copenhagen pledges.  But a recent article in Nature, straightforwardly named Copenhagen Accord Pledges are Paltry, is the most notable of the quantitative analyses, and the one among them that’s actually required reading.

  (more…)



• 07-28-2010
• Martin Khor on Climate Equity

• If you’ve been following the international climate-equity debate, you probably already know that Martin Khor, former director of the Third World Network and now head of the South Centre, has been one of the driving figures, and you will probably be familiar with his views. But concision is its own reward, and the new issue of the South Centre bulletin contains a short piece in which Khor lays out his position in a very clear, and useful, manner.

  The piece, Climate Deal Needs Equity In Carbon Space, is framed as a comment on a recent conference, organized by the Tata Institute for Social Sciences and held in late June in Mumbai India. This conference, which was focused on exploring the the “carbon budgeting” approach to global burden sharing was interesting indeed — see the brief comment here. But Martin’s comments are of broader interest. Note, in particular, that he reports that [Indian Environment Minister Jairam] “Ramesh indicated that India will take the lead in the UN climate negotiations in using the carbon budget to develop the paradigm of equitable access to atmospheric space and how this is to be put into operation.”

  All this may seem pretty abstract to those in, say, the US, where the Administration’s attempt to pass climate legislation has failed, and rather pathetically, but it is not. This will be a long game, and if we’re going to win it, we have to bring climate change down from the sky and reveal its implications, in people’s daily lives. This, like it or not, will take you to the land of the “equity debate.”



• 07-26-2010
• Equity, Energy Access, and Global Carbon Space

• If you take a look at Global Carbon Budgets and Equity in Climate Change, an extremely interesting and forthright set of papers and reflections compiled by India’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences, you’ll see that the “equity debate” is alive and well, at least in the developing world.

  Equity, Energy Access, and Global Carbon Space, the paper by Surya Sethi, is particularly interesting. Sethi was for many years a member of India’s climate negotiating team, and while this is no long the case, his views still carry real weight. And what views they are! The fundamental questions of climate justice are neatly listed here. The injustice that would follow from any accord that allows the wealthy to continue to “occupy” more than their fair share of the atmospheric space is quickly explained. A tidy case is made for a regime of dual obligations, one in which the long-time over-polluters of the North are assigned “negative entitlements” that can only be discharged with “signicant actions within their borders and action beyond their borders, with finance and technology.” And, critically, a bit of bile is reserved to excoriate the reality of intra-national injustices within the South, injustices that allow southern elites to “hide behind their poor.” (more…)



• 06-09-2010
• Energy [R]evolution

• We’re pleased to note that Greenpeace Internationals new Energy [R]evolution study finds a prominent place for the Greenhouse Development Rights approach to global, fair-shares, cost sharing. This, to be sure, is a largely techno-economic study, but Greenpeace does not imagine that rapid technological change will occur in the absence of a major commitment to equity and fairness.

  With equity, though, and using only existing technology, the skys the limit.

  The Energy [R]evolution demonstrates how the world can get from where we are now, to where we need to be in terms of phasing out fossil fuels, cutting CO₂ while ensuring energy security. This includes illustrating how the worlds carbon emissions from the energy and transport sectors alone can peak by 2015 and be cut by over 80 percent by 2050. This phase-out of fossil fuels offers substantial other benefits such as independence from world market fossil fuel prices as well as the creation of millions of new green jobs.

  The report homepage, where you can download the full report, can be found here. The logic of its use of GDRs is simple:

  But although the Energy [R]evolution envisages a clear technological pathway, it is only likely to be turned into reality if its corresponding investment costs are shared fairly under some kind of global climate regime. To demonstrate one such possibility, we have utilized the Greenhouse Development Rights framework, designed by EcoEquity and the Stockholm Environment Institute, as a way of evening up the unequal ability of different countries to respond to the climate crisis in their energy polices.

  For an example of the press coverage, see for example this article from Reuters.



• 03-26-2010
• Naomi Klein on Carbon Debt

• In this fine, wide-ranging speech, delivered Feb 25 under the auspices of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Naomi Klein did an excellent job of introducing the carbon debt approach, as it has come to be known.

  I won’t attempt to summarize her presentation, or to enumerate its many virtues, but I will say that Klein’s approach to the problem of rich-world climate obligation is not without its problems. Note, for example, that her discussion is framed entirely in North / South terms, and that it focuses more or less exclusively on the responsibility of the North to the South. There’s not a word here about the rich / poor divide, or about the southern elites, or about class, or about the problem of capacity, which this site of course believes to be the second half (the first, of course, is responsibility) of the Who Pays equation.

  To say this is to broach a key set of political and strategic questions. Add them to the list that Klein lays out here and you’ll have a good bit of the international obligations debate laid out before you. Not all of it, to be sure but given that she goes so far as to broach the criticism that she received for using the language of reparations, its a pretty good start.

  By the way, Klein ends her talk with an interesting claim, one very relevant to the Who Pays debate, one that quite adroitly flips the terms of reference here in a manner that just might be very helpful indeed:

  When we talk about climate reparation, we talk about those scary numbers, like $600 billion, what gets peoples back up is the idea that this money is going to come out of their pockets, but why should that be? Why should it come from regular taxpayers? With the right kind of taxes and penalties, the oil and gas sector, big coal, agribusiness, and the banks that finance them, the players that actually are responsible for both climate change and underwriting the climate-change denial movement, can be made to foot this bill. The polluter should pay.



• 02-10-2010
• The Robin Hood tax

• There’s lots to be said about Copenhagen. One of the key points, however, is too seldom made — the fogs have gotten thinner. In particular, it is now obvious, at least to those who care to know: unless “we” come up with a fair and reliable source for the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that is going to be needed, not only for the climate transition, but also to invest in a lives and dignity of the poor, around the world, then we’re toast.

  Fortunately, there are lots and lots of ways to source such funding, and one of the most straightforward, as this little film explains, is the tax formerly known as the “financial transactions” or “Tobin” tax.

  But no more…



• 01-14-2010
• The 350 ppm Carbon Dioxide Challenge and How to Achieve it

• There are many within the climate movement who, if truth be told, would prefer it if the lefts now deeply serious, and increasingly sophisticated, engagement with the climate challenge were to be, well, soft-pedaled. The left, after all, is still dangerous place to be, particularly in the US.

  We do not rank ourselves within this tendency. For one thing, we do not believe that the climate crisis can be managed without real (if not absolute) economic justice, and this alone puts us on the left. For another, the question that most concerns us is global emergency mobilization, and at this point were not at all sure that the existing social formation (to quote Immanuel Wallenstein) is up to the job.

  In this context, The 350 ppm Carbon Dioxide Challenge and How to Achieve it, a little essay by one Renfrey Clarke, can only be praised. It contains a few nuances that we could quibble with, but the overall framing of Clarkes argument, and his angry tone, are entirely justifiable. And, frankly, he is a reasonable man:

  To argue that the capitalist system cannot afford to deal with climate change is thus at least technically wrong. The system has paid a similar or much greater cost in order to meet previous challenges. The central reason why the nettle of climate change is not being grasped is that private capital is exactly that private, required to produce profit for specific people and corporations. Combating climate change means profits foregone, in the case of oil left in the ground and stranded assets, in the case of coal export facilities made idle. Both the oil and the coal trains are owned by particular corporations, able to lobby politicians, influence media outlets and fund political parties and candidates.

  There is nothing here to disagree with.



• 12-02-2009
• The climate scoreboard

• This scoreboard isn’t perfect. For one thing, it doesn’t really show national proposals – a term that implies that countries are suggesting levels of effort for others as well as for themselves. These are actually pledges, not proposals. And for another thing, national pledges are in no way compared to national fair shares — what countries should be doing. But leave aside these two little “details,” and this isn’t a bad scoreboard.



• 12-01-2009
• The Copenhagen diagnosis

• If you’ve been hearing that the science has gotten worse since the IPCC’s last assessment report, but lacked for a single report that pulled the details together, you’re in luck. The Copenhagen diagnosis, subtitled “Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science” is written by an all-star team of top researchers, and it’s just what the doctor ordered.

  (more…)



• 10-20-2009
• Solving the climate dilemma: The budget approach

• This recent report, from an esteemed German research shop with the acronym WBGU, is, despite its dry title, an important milestone on our collective path to the Big Climate Reckoning. Though you should be warned that Mark Hertsgaard, in Grist, reviewed it under the title A scary new climate study will have you saying Oh, shit!

  Rather than rehashing Hertzgaard’s nice introduction to this report and its principle author, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, let me simply add that, in essence, Solving the climate dilemma puts forward a version of the “carbon budget” analysis explored in another important paper, Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2C, published in April in Nature by Malte Meinshausen and friends. See our discussion of that paper here.

  What’s important in this new study is that, in it, an influential group of top-tier scientists sets out to draw explicit political conclusions — about the shape of the necessary global climate accord — that are consistent with the implications of the budget approach, as they see them. More particularly, they set out to advocate a budget-sharing system that, they believe, is fair enough to serve as the basis of a global emergency mobilization. (more…)



• 10-20-2009
• From Greenhouse Development Rights to Glenn Beck

• This blog post is called Maurice Strong, Agenda 21 and more from Lord Moncton. It’s on a site called Soldier of Liberty and it pretty much speaks for itself.

  How long does it take for this sort of thing to get really boring



• 10-13-2009
• The Economics of Emergency (i.e., 350)

• This utterly fantastic new report — The Economics of 350: The Benets and Costs of Climate Stabilization — is quite impossible to praise too highly.

  The only criticism we have is that it is a mitigation-side only analysis that doesn’t take the costs of adaptation (insofar as adaptation is even possible) into account. Oh, and that it has little to say about the all-important questions that rotate around the costs that are here so nicely analyzed — e.g., who pays them, and how But this isn’t a real criticism, just a note about the tight focus of this report.

  The two lead authors — Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton — are affiliated with the “E3″ network, Economics for Equity and the Environment, and are among the best environmental economists in the business. Their co-authors are similarly illustrious, and their ambitions are high. An impressive team all around, and three of them wrote their own introduction to the report on Grist. Read it here.

  The goal of the report is to turn an clear eye to the core economic problem of the climate crisis, and it does so in a manner that is both illuminating and incisive. Two 350 scenarios are discussed, one of which, James Hansen’s, seeks a return to 350 ppm CO2 by 2100, and requires “negative emissions” to pull off the feat. The other, the reference trajectory used by the Ackerman group, is less ambitious, and takes until 2200 to do the deed. Like so:

  

  (more…)



• 10-02-2009
• UN calls for global Marshall Plan, cites GDRs prominantly in the process

• The 2009 edition of the UN’s World Economic and Social Survey — it’s subtitle is “Promoting Development, Saving the Planet” — is an important document, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it fundamentally and comprehensively takes a development approach to solving the global climate crisis. In particular, according to its authors at DESA, the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, it:

  sees little benefit in ad hoc incremental actions, spelling out instead the potential of a big investment push to deliver on both reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping communities to cope with climate change, and calling for more truly integrated policy responses to development and climate challenges. It does not shy away from describing the enormity of the adjustments that will have to be undertaken by countries at all levels of development if progress is to be made; or from insisting that the advanced countries will have to deliver resources and leadership on a much larger scale than has been the case to date.

  (more…)



• 09-29-2009
• Van Jones endorses Greenhouse Development Rights, is fired

• Van Jones, a high-profile victim of US Administration timidity, may not longer be Barack Obama’s green jobs guru, but he’s still ours. In this context, we note that his bestselling book, The Green Collar Economy, endorses Greenhouse Development Rights (see page 164) in glowing terms. Why, because GDRs…

  recognizes that the desperately poor around the world have a right to develop themselves economically, even if they add slightly to carbon emissions. In other words, they have a right to bring themselves up to a dignified level of consumption. Meanwhile, it is the rich who must now bring their emissions and consumption down to a dignified level.



• 09-29-2009
• “Planetary Boundaries” loom

• In a new approach to synthetic environmental science, a prestigious research team fronted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre‘s Johan Rockstrm has just published a fascinating paper on “planetary boundaries,” in Nature, under the title of A safe operating space for humanity.

  Planetary boundaries are “values for control variables that are either at a safe distance from thresholds for processes with evidence of threshold behavior or at dangerous levels for processes without evidence of thresholds.”

  To meet the challenge of maintaining the Holocene state, we propose a framework based on planetary boundaries. These boundaries define the safe operating space for humanity with respect to the Earth system and are associated with the planets bio-physical subsystems or processes. Although Earths complex systems sometimes respond smoothly to changing pressures, it seems that this will prove to be the exception rather than the rule. Many subsystems of Earth react in a nonlinear, often abrupt, way, and are particularly sensitive around threshold levels of certain key variables. If these thresholds are crossed, then important subsystems, such as a monsoon system, could shift into a new state, often with deleterious or potentially even disastrous consequences for humans.

  This paper is short, and definitely a “must read.” The nine “boundaries,” by the way, are climate change; rate of biodiversity loss (terrestrial and marine); interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; global freshwater use; change in land use; chemical pollution; and atmospheric aerosol loading. The three areas in which we are already over the line are, unsurprisingly, climate change, rate of biodiversity loss, and interference with the nitrogen cycle.

  Like so:

  

  The Nature paper, and a collection of expert comments on it, is available here. A much more detailed scientific paper can be found here.



• 09-16-2009
• Obama to propose eliminating fossil fuel subsidies?

• The rumor (at the moment, it’s September 17th) is that next week at the G20 meeting, President Obama is going to propose an international agreement to end fossil-fuel subsidies. This would be brilliant, if it was done properly, and would go a long way towards rectifying the wealthy world’s typical unwillingness to consider “alternative” approaches to climate finance.

  And there is, indeed, hope that it will be done properly. The New York Times reports that Michael Froman, the White House’s deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, said in a Sept. 3 letter that:

  The move away from subsidies should be managed to protect those most vulnerable to price increases… The G-20 should commit to take the lead in eliminating non-needs based fossil fuel and electricity subsidies and to provide technical assistance to non-G-20 countries taking steps to reduce fossil fuel and electricity subsidies.

  (more…)



• 08-26-2009
• Adaptation costs have been radically underestimated

• This shouldn’t be news. We should have known this all along.

  Actually, many of us did. Particularly those of us who do not steer our stars by the pragmatism of the moment. And those of us in the more vulnerable parts of the world.

  The small island states come particularly to mind, as does Africa, the unlucky continent where the full impacts of climate-induced desertification will be felt first. In such places as these, the various estimates of “adaptation costs” (as if all impacts could be “adapted” to at any price) have long been regarded with skepticism, if not contempt.

  This includes the UNFCCC’s own official 2007 estimates, embedded in the UNFCCC Secretariat’s INVESTMENT AND FINANCIAL FLOWS TO ADDRESS CLIMATE (2007, see table IX-65. And see as well its 2008 update), which though it long contained the highest authoritative adaptation cost estimates (rising to $49 to $171 billion per year in 2030) still turned out to be low-balling the problem. (more…)



• 07-27-2009
• The Bill

• This little film …

  … isn’t perfect, but damn is it good.

  Four minutes and 22 seconds, in German with English subtitles, but watch it anyway.

  Kudos to Germanwatch , and if anyone wants to pay for an English version, don’t hesitate to call.



• 07-27-2009
• 300,000 deaths per year, and that’s just for starters

• A recent report from Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum tells us that climate change is already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year. And if we go beyond simple death to count the number of people that are already impacted, the number swells to 300 million. The report, Human Impact Report: Climate Change The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis, projects that increasingly severe heatwaves, floods, storms and forest fires will be responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths a year by 2030, making it the greatest humanitarian challenge that the world now faces. Which, frankly, is saying something! (more…)



• 07-13-2009
• The Remaining Emissions Budget

• On April 30^th, Nature finally published something \we’ve wanted to see for a long, long time – a peer-reviewed paper that integrates the latest science towards the very pragmatic goal of defining a entirely citable, global emergency emissions reduction trajectory. The paper is called Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2C (download it here) and it’s written by a team led by Malte Meinshausen, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which has in recent years been the source for much of best scientific work on precautionary emissions trajectories. Also on the author’s list is William Hare (better known in as Bill Hare, particularly within the climate movement) – both Bill and Malte have long been key members of the Greenpeace International climate team.

  What Meinshausen et. al. have done is define a comprehensive probabilistic framework which calculates the total amount of CO₂ that can be emitted between 2000 and 2050, relative to any given chance of meeting, but not overshooting, a particular temperature target. If you’re interested in high chance of meeting a safe target – or at least the most widely supported of plausibly manageable targets – which would hold the global average temperature increase to 2C above pre-industrial levels target, that budget is extremely small. More precisely, the 2C target corresponds to total 2000-50 emissions of about 1000 Gigatons of CO₂, a number to be compared to the approximately 300 Gt that were emitted between 2000 and the end of 2008. (At which point the annual emissions rate was about 36 Gt CO₂ per year). (more…)



• 06-15-2009
• Annex 1 targets are NOT on track

• 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 814 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…)



• 06-11-2009
• Oxfam — Hang Together or Separately

• 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…)



• 06-08-2009
• The “historical responsibility” issue blows wide open

• 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.



• 04-03-2009
• Fairness in global climate finance

• 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!



• 01-19-2009
• The Growth Rate of CO2 Emissions has Tripled

• Just in case you were starting to relax (or sink back exhausted into your chair) heres 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 worlds poor (think China) are getting richer, but that we havent managed to break the link between economic growth and emissions. As the PNAS editors say, the results have implications for global equity.



• 12-16-2008
• 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. (more…)



• 10-10-2008
• No More Kindergarten Approach to Climate

• 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.



• 07-21-2008
• 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. (more…)



• 07-15-2008
• 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. (more…)



• 07-14-2008
• The G5 Statement

• If youre a regular visitor to this site, you know that our focus is a fair global climate regime. Indeed, we believe that, before theres 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…)



• 06-26-2008
• 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.



• 06-04-2008
• Oxfam: Rich Must Pay the Bulk of Climate Bill

• Oxfam has just taken a big step, and it wasnt easy, and they deserve heaps of kudos for it. It has called for a mandatory adaptation funding regime (were talking global here) thats 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 ineveitable impacts of climate change) are determined by historical responsibility for the impacts of climate change, and by ability to pay. (more…)



• 02-28-2008
• 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. (more…)



• 02-05-2008
• The Debt of Nations

• The notion of “ecological debt” has been tossed around for a long time, but until the publication of The Depth 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.” (more…)



• 01-08-2008
• 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.



• 01-02-2008
• Jared Diamond steps to the edge

• Diamond, of course, is the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail 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.



• 01-01-2008
• Stop Climate Chaos Manifesto

• We’ve got a lot going on here in the US, but somehow we don’t quite have anything like the Stop Climate Chaos coalition. If you don’t believe it, take a look at the SCC policy platform, which you can find here. Not only has this huge coalition — which includes development and ecumenical groups as well as self-identified greens — committed itself to fighting to keep total warming below the 2C line (total surface warming, since pre-industrial times), it also draws conclusions. Like that, for example, if we’re to hold the 2C line, global emissions must peak within 10 years. And that

  “Given that the industrialized countries bear historical responsibility for climate change and that the rest of the world lacks access to the resources needed to build low carbon economies, it is essential that the former begin now to provide the necessary financial and technical resources to help rapidly industrialising countries commence mitigation strategies.” (more…)



• 12-28-2007
• 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. (more…)



• 11-12-2007
• Hiding Behind the Poor

• Greenpeace India just released this brief, fantastic 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.



• 09-21-2007
• 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 … (more…)



• 07-12-2007
• Two Degrees, Once Chance

• Have you been wanting one good pamphlet that says it all Well, keep waiting, because there isn’t one. But there is, now, one pamphlet that contains a clear, precise, compelling overview of the impacts that we’re likely to suffer if the temperature is allowed to rise above 2C degrees. “Two Degrees, Once Chance” was, by the way, written by a group of British development organizations, and it has its priorities clear: the impacts will strike hardest on the weakest and most vulnerable. The world must act with urgency.



• 05-15-2007
• We Can Do This with Renewables!

• And, once again, we have to repeat the basic point that we can decarbonize the global economy with renewables and efficiency. God knows it would be good if we could let this alone for a while, but with the nuclear lobby’s recent rise from the couch it seems like we’re going to have to go another round on this. So thanks to the World Wildlife Fund for another fine romp through the fundamentals. The report, by the way, is called Climate Solutions: WWF’s Vision for 2050. That’s a date that seems to be on everyone’s mind these days.



• 05-15-2007
• Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis

• We all know, at this point — by which I mean that we should all know — that climate change is going to set off a vast new wave of migration. Development groups are even debating, grimly and quietly, how to think about a future in which their job includes evacuating people people, lots of people, from lands that can no longer support them. And it’s not just climate. Many of today’s forced immigrants are the victims of “develpopment” itself. Not up to speed on the issue Start here.



• 03-20-2007
• Waxman’s Safe Climate Act

• Well whaddaya know There’s life in Congress, or at least in California. This, at least, is the conclusion we draw from Rep. Henry Waxman’s Safe Climate Act. Of course it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance, at least not yet. But this’ll change if the scientists, as seems likely, continue their barrage of bad news. Note that the Safe Climate Act:

  * Actually defines a meaningful emissions reduction trajectory! “Beginning in 2011, it cuts emissions by roughly 2% per year, reaching 1990 emissions levels by 2020. After 2020, it cuts emissions by roughly 5% per year. By 2050, emissions will be 80% lower than in 1990.”

  * Emphasizes the auctioning of permits, rather than their give-away to existing emitters, and establishes a “Climate Reinvestment Fund” by which the proceeds from the auctions could be used to maximize “the public benefit and promoting economic growth, including supporting technology research and development, compensating consumers for any energy cost increases, providing transition assistance for affected workers and regions, and protecting against harm from climate change, such as safeguarding water supplies, protecting against hurricanes, and mitigating harm to fish and wildlife habitat.”

  Not perfect, but a hell of a lot better than some of the other trail balloons now floating out of Washington.



• 01-15-2007
• Avoiding Catastrophe

• This is interesting, and not just because it cites our work. The Climate Equity Project, a reality based supporter of the cap and share approach, did this survey of recent science, new data, and emissions scenarios designed to avoid catastrophic climate change for Friends of the Earth Australia in late 2006, and it’s still very much worth reading. Think of it as a sort of Reader’s Digest to the bad news. After all, who’s got the time to keep up

  Late breaking news: Jim Hansen’s team has a relevant new report that could well have gone into Avoiding Catastrophe. It sports the snappy title of Dangerous human-made interference with climate: a GISS modelE study, and it argues (surprise!) that the ticking of the clock is getting pretty loud. Particularly interesting on positive feedbacks.

  Hansen hasn’t given up yet, but he gets blunter every year. So should we.



• 12-05-2006
• The Protocol that came in from the Cold

• The Montreal conference was a big deal not because it marked a turn in the climate war (we’re still losing) but because it may, if we we are very lucky, make a turn possible. The Bush people came to throw gravel in the gears, but they were unsuccesful, and perhaps even humilitated. (Can you be humiliated if you don’t notice) Even more importantly, the future is now, finally, on the official negotiating agenda.

  For the details, see this review essay, written by the climate team at the Wuppertal Insitute. It’s the single best summary of COPMOP1 and its significance that we’ve seen. They leave out the rubber ducks though.



• 10-30-2006
• A Stern Talking To

• This, of course, is a link to the the Stern Review, the UK government report on climate change economics that, we may all devoutly hope, marks the end of the pretense that sober economic analysis justifies further delay before launching serious attempts at mitigation. It also marks a low point — if such is possible — in the careers of the barking dogs we know as “climate skeptics.” Particularly notable was the “industry spokeman” who dismissed the report — by a former World Bank Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President! — as “fun with numbers.”

  Bark they may, but the caravan has moved on.



• 10-24-2006
• Living Planet 2006

• Regular readers of this site will be excused if they think it’s all climate, all the time. And, in truth, we really do think that climate plays a special, decisive role in the environmental crisis. But as this latest from the Global Footprint Network makes gruesomely clear, the larger story is also moving on to its inevitble denouement. Particularly notable in 2006′s report is the attention to national disaggregation — humanity is no longer being treated as a single monolithic group. So that a visit to this report will reward you with maps like this one, which you won’t find at your local Rand McNally.

  

  (larger version of this map target here)



• 09-21-2006
• McKibben’s Warning

• You gotta give it to Bill McKibben: he has political instincts! So if you missed this little piece, here’s your second chance. It’ll give you nice snapshots to both the Waxman and Jeffords bills (the ones we need to support for all we’re worth) and it wraps these pointers in the simple honest truth. Now that national climate legislation is inevitable, “the temptation will be to simply pass something, most likely the “feeble” McCain-Lieberman bill. In fact:

  “If the Democrats manage to pick up one or both houses of Congress in November’s election, there will be a real chance to actually pass a law. That’s an opportunity. And that’s also an enormous danger, because if we lock into the wrong plan now, it may be years before we revisit the issue again. And years are what we don’t have.”



• 09-18-2006
• Gore’s Big Speech

• One wag called this speech the “lost reel” of An Inconvenient Truth. Whatever you want to call it, you have to admit that Gore’s invocation of the “Nuclear Freeze” movement, and his call for a carbon emissions freeze, were pleasing to the ear. But the real news, at least as far as we’re concerned, was in Gore’s Big Rhetorical Climax, where he stepped out of the climate sandbox and made the connections:

  “In rising to meet this challenge, we too will find self-renewal and transcendence and a new capacity for vision to see other crises in our time that cry out for solutions: 20 million HIV/AIDS orphans in Africa alone, civil wars fought by children, genocides and famines, the rape and pillage of our oceans and forests, an extinction crisis that threatens the web of life, and tens of millions of our fellow humans dying every year from easily preventable diseases. And, by rising to meet the climate crisis, we will find the vision and moral authority to see them not as political problems but as moral imperatives.”

  That’s the hope all right.



• 07-06-2006
• Trouble in Europe

• As everyone who has been following the European Emissions Trading System no doubt already knows, there’s trouble brewing. The problem is that, rather than auction off the permits, or allocate them on the basis of some rational set of equity principles, the folks in Brussels have engineered a “dysfunctional” system in which emissions permits go to the powerful, on the basis of past emissions or, uh, power.

  The result, as all climate newhounds know, is a glut of allocations (hot air) and a drop in the price of carbon in Europe from the already low level of 30 Euros a ton to even lower, deep discount, bad-joke levels. Which you can read about in this admirably brief and direct report from a think tank called Open Europe.

  None of this would be so bad if it was just a sign of birthing pains. But rumors indicate that the EU is not rising to the occasion, and that the next round of allocations won’t be much smaller. Cross your fingers, and hope that “European Leadership” has a bit of wind left in its sails



• 04-18-2006
• China and “Our Oil”

• Have you noticed the new fashion for China Bashing If you haven’t, be assured that the drums are beating. The underlying story here is, as always, complex, though it sure seems to have a lot of do with US dreams of a new cold war, and even of Containing China. Or, if you indulge in the coarser varieties of business journalism, it’s the story of China (and India) taking “our oil.”

  In this context, check out the Energy Information Administration’s reference projections for future oil consumption. Click here for the PDF or, if you have Excel installed, here. The numbers are pretty amusing. For one thing they show total global oil consumption rising from 78.2 million barrels a day in 2002 to 119.2 million barrels a day in 2025, which, by the way, is not going to happen. But they also show that increased US consumption in that brief period will be 7.6 million barrels a day, while China’s will be 9.

  Think about that in per-capita terms and you’ll get the joke.



• 02-20-2006
• Justice and Honesty in New Orleans

• New Orleans still has more to teach us, and this little piece by Melissa Harris Lacewell, author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought is a good place to look for another lesson. Faced with a haphazard (if not willfully incompetent) reconstruction that’s leaving the city’s poor black community in even more precarious straits than it suffered before the storm, Lacewell calls for a “restoration” that really is designed to make the victims whole.

  There will be more hurricanes, more relocations, more — let’s face it — climate refugees. It’s time, as the “adaptation” debate heats up, to think more viscerally. And a bit of effort spent mining these same veins is just what’s needed.



• 01-03-2006
• On the Commons

• The Tomales Bay Institute, organized a few years ago to promote and reinvigorate the theory and culture of the commons, seems like it’s picking up some traction. There’s a lot of activity on the site, and we can recommend two postings in particular as starting points: (more…)



• 11-17-2005
• News Flash: Poor More Likely to Die from Climate Impacts

• Careful new calculations indicate that global warming contributes to 150,000 deaths and five million illnesses every year, and that this rate could double by 2030. Why Because we’ll see increased infectious disease outbreaks, respiratory illnesses, flooding, and other calamities. And here’s the real news, straight from the Washington Post: “Most Victims are Poor.” Even more shocking,” “Those most vulnerable to climate change are not the ones responsible for causing it.”



• 10-08-2005
• Worst Case Scenarios

• The future, of course, is unwritten. It may even turn out to be both just and liveable — if we’re both smart and lucky. On the other hand, it’s getting easier to imaine worst case scenarios — not to mentin nonlinearities and “threshold events” — which is exactly what hard-eyed Mike Davis does in Has the Age of Chaos Begun And if you want another, check out The Heat Death of American Dreams.



• 02-04-2005
• The Great Game

• The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research is Germany was already known for original thinking before it released Keep Cool: Gambling with the Climate, a board game that may, only a few decades hence, seem less comic than prescient. In the Risk-like world of Keep Cool, it’s even possible for, say, the developing countries to drive the climate over the edge, hoping all the while for the rich world to pay enough to make that destruction unnecessary. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it



• 02-01-2005
• Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change: The Book

• Now that the tide seems to be turning, at least a wee bit, it’s a good time to recall the bad old days – like, say, two years ago – when most folks in the US “climate community” were still discretely minimizing the urgency of the situation. That, of course, was before Jim Hansen started telling us we less that ten years to bring global emissions to a peak. And before Al Gore brought the rhetoric of “planetary emergency” into common usage. And it was, less famously, before “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change,” better known as “the Exeter Conference,” provided the occasion by which the scientific community, by whatever mysterious process that scientists use when deciding these sorts of things, finally decided to set aside its traditional reserve and start speaking frankly.

  If you think there’s a whiff of panic in the air, you’re right. If you want to know the details, this is the place for you.



• 01-15-2005
• WWF’s New 2C Study

• If you’ve spent any time at all on this site, you know that we’re partisans of the “Two Degree Limit” school, and that we argue that an average planetary warming of greater than 2C would threaten us with global, not merely local, climate catastrophe. In this new study, WWF (also members of 2C school) go onto the bad news, reviewing a number of recent modeling studies that indicate that we’ll hit 2C between 2026 and 2060, and that when we do the Arctic will warm three times as much. The consequence will be hard to exaggerate, and the lesson clear — 2C is too much.



• 01-13-2005
• Speaking of Trade War

• In this report, a few of our German friends come right out and think the unthinkable. Indeed, in Implementing the Kyoto Protocol Without the United States: The Strategic Role of Energy Tax Adjustments at the Border, Frank Biermann and Rainer Brohm of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research go so far as to argue that, if the U.S. remains indefinitely outside a future greenhouse regime (assuming we ever get one) even existing world trade law would permit the European Union to enact “well designed” and “comprehensive” border adjustments against its exports.

  Want some freedom fries with that



• 01-09-2005
• How Rich are You Anyway?

• As it becomes obvious that there will be no rapid decarbonization (not, at least, on the scale needed to avoid a global climate catastrophe) unless “the rich” pay the costs of that rapidity, the question of who is rich, and how rich, is taking on a strange new importance. Which is why we like this little calculator. The data behind it, by the way, is taken from the work of Branko Milanovic, whose new book Words Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality sets the gold standard, when it comes to, well, measuring international and global inequality.



• 11-18-2003
• Am I Meaningfully Participating Yet?

• The Chinese government is preparing to impose minimum fuel economy standards on their burgeoning auto fleet, standards far more stringent than those in the US. To be clear, the new standards aren’t intended to address China’s rapidly rising carbon emissions, but rather to force foreign automakers to introduce the latest hybrid engines and other technology into China, fast, in hopes of easing the nation’s swiftly rising dependence on oil imports. Which, actually, makes excellent sense. And the situation is not without its humorous sidelights. Here’s one: the New York Times article, China Set to Act on Fuel Economy; Tougher Standards Than in US, reports that “two executives at Volkswagen, the largest foreign automaker in China” .. told the Times that “They had no choice but to agree.”

  Those damn Market-Leninists!



• 11-15-2003
• Landmark Study from Old Europe!

• The German Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change (WBGU) has just released Climate Protection Strategies for the 21st Century: Kyoto and Beyond, and it’s a milestone. For one thing, it calls for a 2C “guardrail” to prevent dangerous climate change. For another, it promotes an idea which has long and unjustly been marginalized by calling for “Contraction and Convergence” to be the basis of the post-Kyoto regime.

  This is a big step forward for a major quasi-governmental think tank, even a European one, but it remains to be seen how much traction these ideas will win. Even if the E.U. were to adopt the WBGU’s proposal for convergence to equal per capita rights in 2050, the South’s response would remain uncertain. (more…)



• 10-15-2003
• After Cancun

• You know that the international trade talks are in trouble. What you may not know is that Cancun saw the emergence of a newly coherent Southern negotiating bloc – the “Group of 21″ – and that it may (cross your fingers) portend good news spreading even as far as the climate talks. Ok, maybe that’s a stretch, but here’s an interesting analysis by Focus on the Global South’s Walden Bello, who by the way just won the Right Livelihood Award. In it, Bello discusses “the possibility that the Group of 21 can serve as the engine of South-South cooperation that goes beyond trade to coordination of policies on investment, capital flows, industrial policy, social policy, environmental policy.”



• 10-15-2003
• The Perfect Firestorm

• Mike Davis isn’t the only writer to say “global warming” while commenting on the California fires, but his Perfect Firestorm is probably the only essay to link the outsized economic damages to “stupid development,” or to note that “Republicans tend to disproportionately concentrate themselves in the wrong altitudes and ecologies.” Read this one; it’s short and anything but sweet.



• 09-28-2003
• Strange Augusts Yet to Come

• Perhaps you’ve read Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts. More likely you’ve looked at the cover photos, grimaced, and turned away. But do take a look at Our Summer Vacation: 20,000 dead wherein Davis ties this past August’s wave of European heat death to the more routine suffering of the poor and the forgotten, and then shares his personal greenhouse nightmare: a positive feedback caused by the now almost inevitable melting of the Arctic ice cap.

  Speaking of August, 2003′s was the Northern hemisphere hottest on record, and according to the Earth Policy Institute’s Janet Larson, whose detailed numbers nice supplement Davis’s, it actually accounted for 35,000 deaths.



• 09-15-2003
• More Death and Suffering: This Just In!

• Speaking of greenhouse body counts, the estimate of 160,000 deaths a year has been in the news lately, thanks to a new report from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The majority of these deaths occur in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where people are more vulnerable to malnutrition, malaria, and diarrhea as hotter temperatures settle in and floods and droughts become more common.

  This figure demands to be put in perspective. Here’s one place to start: the World Health Organization estimates that indoor air pollution causes 1.6 million deaths per year. That’s an even power of ten greater than the greenhouse body count, and this time the situation is crystal clear: the killer here is poverty, pure and simple.



• 08-15-2003
• Argentina and Chile Endorse Per Capita

• In the small but significant step department, the Presidents of Argentina and Chile have come out for a per capita climate accord. It’s not China, but it’s welcome news in any case!

  Think of it: only 30 years from Pinochet to Per capita!



• 08-15-2003
• Climate System (and Scientific View of the Climate System) Shifts Rapidly

• Physics Today has just run an unusually salient history of science article, The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change, which among much else focuses on how rapidly the research community’s perception of the risks of rapid climate change is changing. Got that And note that a longer article, focusing on rapid one-way climate shifts, is available here.



• 08-12-2003
• The London Guardian Draws Conclusions

• If the WMO press release is too understated for your taste, try the articles that George Monbiot and John Vidal have been publishing in the Guardian recently. Particularly notable are:

  * Monbiot’s Shadow of Extinction which presents evidence that the great Permian extinction may have been caused by a mere 6C degrees of climate change. (July 1st)

  * Vidal’s Global Warming may be Speeding Up, which evocatively argues that this summer’s global drought/heatwave could indicate that the warming has already begun to accelerate. (Aug 6th)

  * Monbiot’s With Eyes Wide Shut, which reviews some of the more terrifying of the recent science, and suggests that we are, perhaps, living in a dream. (Aug 12th) All three of these articles cite a recent workshop where top atmospheric scientists, including Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Bert Bolin, former chairman of the IPCC, concluded that the masking effect that aerosols are having on the warming could be far greater than previously thought, and that, therefore, the IPCC’s estimate of the “high end” danger could turn out to be far too low. For more on this, see First, the Bad News in the current issue of Climate Equity Observer.



• 07-15-2003
• The Big Wrap Up

• This Strategic Assessment of the Kyoto-Marrakech System was jointly prepared by an impressive list of European climate policy researchers, gathered together under the “Climate Strategies” umbrella. You’ll definitely want to start with the (mercifully short) synthesis report and then, to drill deeper, download the underlying “modules” (why not just call them papers) from the British Centre for Energy Policy and Technology. All, curiously, except Benito Muller’s “Module 4″ on Framing Future Commitments, which isn’t downloadable. Instead you get it (a free PDF) by emailing www.oxfordenergy.org (at information@oxfordenergy.org), and we, actually, recommend that you do. Take a special look at page 68, where Benito lays down his notion of the “twin taboos” (one Northern; one Southern) that underlie the current impasse, and at the appended comments (starting on page 123) by Anju Sharma of India’s Centre for Science and the Environment.



• 07-15-2003
• The Truth about McCain Lieberman

• The Myth, of course, is that any serious effort to control emissions is bound to bankrupt us. The reality, as shown, once again, by two authoritative studies of the McCain Lieberman proposal, is far different.

  The better known of the two is the Emissions Trading to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the United States: The McCain-Lieberman Proposal, better known as “The MIT study, which showed that the per-household “welfare loss” would typically be a mere $50 to $175 in 2010, rising to about $100 to $350 per household in 2020. And this, please note, was the original McCain Lieberman proposal, before it was watered down to win more vote.

  Still, that would be enough to hurt the poor, so we felt better when the Tellus Institute released its Analysis of the Climate Stewardship Act. Tellus’ analysis, while entirely consistent with the MIT study, also assumed targeted policies designed to promote efficiency and renewables, and concluded that, in fact, net savings to consumers accrue from 2013, and would reach $48 billion annually in 2020.

  Keep these studies in mind the next time you hear some blowhard from the Competitive Enterprise Institute sound off about the so-called economic realities.



• 06-15-2003
• Can we defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb?

• In this fascinating, accessible presentation, James Hansen, one of our most respected climate scientists, argues that we’re much closer to “dangerous anthropogenic interference” than the IPCC’s work would suggest: “The dominant issue in global warming, in my opinion, is sea level change and the question of how fast ice sheets can disintegrate. A large portion of the world’s people live within a few meters of sea level, with trillions of dollars of infrastructure. The need to preserve global coast lines, I suggest, sets a low ceiling on the level of global warming that would constitute DAI.” The funny thing is the Hansen is still an optimist. Or, rather, he thinks we still have time. Just. This one is a must read.



• 06-15-2003
• World Meteorological Organization Warning

• In the midst of the summer heat wave, the UN World Meteorological Organization issued an unusual press release that clearly ascribed recent extreme weather events to climate change. WMO cited record temperatures of over 40 degrees C in the South of France, a record number of tornadoes in the US, and pre-monsoon heat waves in India that were up to five degrees higher than average.



• 06-03-2003
• The New Apollo Project

• There’ve been lots of efforts to form a “blue green” labor-environment coalition in the US, but none ever looked as promising as The Apollo Alliance, which just might have legs. Apollo’s focus is on creating jobs and energy independence, two goals that would benefit tremendously from an effective drive for renewables. And Apollo’s time, clearly, is right.

  To be sure, there’s almost no attention given, in the Apollo frame, to either global warming or international justice, but that’s because Apollo is shooting for the moon, not the stars. And hey, it’s a first step. For more info, check out Apollo’s media center. Amanda Griscom’s Declaration of Energy Independence, originally from Grist Magazine, is a nice place to start.



• 06-03-2003
• Emissions Inequality Rising

• Only fifteen percent of the population lives in the high-income countries, but they use 50 percent of the world’s energy and emit 50 percent of its anthropogenic CO2. These grim figures are not unfamiliar, but they are now corroborated by a UNFCCC analysis based on the increasingly sophisticated “national communications” required by the climate treaty. (June 2003)

  The UNFCCC analysis, Rich countries see higher greenhouse gas emissions, lays out the news pretty clearly: the rich world, which stabilized its greenhouse gas emissions during the 1990s, will likely see these emissions rise again by the end of the current decade. Indeed, the combined emissions of Europe, Japan, the US and other highly industrialized countries could grow by 17% between 2000 to 2010, despite domestic measures currently in place to limit them.



• 01-09-2001
• Reality Check in China

• The US DOE Energy Information Agency recently published a rollup of 1990 to 1999 carbon emissions for most countries. As you can easily see from the tables collected on the Carbon Dioxide Emissions page, the bottom-line realities are pretty clear.

  Take a look, for example, at the table named World Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Consumption and Flaring of Fossil Fuels . It shows that China decreased its CO2 emissions by about 17 per cent from 1997 to 1999 and is now back at its 1992 emission level. It also shows that since 1990 the U.S. increased its fossil fuel related carbon emissions by 12 percent, Canada by 18 percent, Norway by 27 percent, Japan by 14 percent… You get the idea.

  Go to the coal table and you’ll see the main reason why China’s emissions have dropped – it has radically reduced its subsidies for, and thus its consumption of, coal.

  Quick, someone tell Washington. And while you’re at it, tell them that they have a good opportunity here to one-up the Chinese. We could not only we could not only phase out fossil fuel subsidies, we could take care of the workers who will be hurt when we do so.



• 01-09-2001
• John Holdren: Per-Capita by 2015 or 2020

• John Holdren is a pretty important guy. He’s a professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard, where he directs the Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, and that’s just for starters. He’s also a member of the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (or at least he was under Clinton, we haven’t checked) and he chaired its panel on Energy R&D Strategy for the Climate Change Challenge.

  All of which makes it significant that Holdren publicly advocates a phased transition to a climate regime based on per-capita carbon emissions allocations …