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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.

Climate Code Red
The case for a sustainability emergency

For only the second time in our organizational lifetime, we're turning this, our prime real real estate, over to a report that we did not write ourselves. But Climate Code Red (just released by Friends of the Earth Australia) is a report that we might have written -- in some ways a report that we wish we had written -- and that's close enough.

To be more precise, we've always prided ourselves on staying close to the science. But reading this report, it occurs to us that perhaps we've slipped just a wee bit. For while we always take pains, when referring to the 2C temperature target, to clearly state that such a warming would be anything but safe, we do use it as a reference point, and sometimes, indeed, it seems that we accept its inevitability.

David Spratt and Philip Sutton, the two Australian climate analysts behind this report, will have none of it. Indeed, they 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. And 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 can find no obvious flaw in his recent argument that we’ve already passed the “tipping point,” and we commend Climate Code Red to all those who feel competent to weigh in with an opinion, and indeed to those who would simply see the implications of this claim drawn to their logical conclusion.

That conclusion, as you will have guessed, 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 blunt, 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.

Towards A Defensible Climate Realism

There's 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]. And why Green For All has been emphasizing the links between the recession and the potential of green redevelopment -- see Billy Parish's great intro here. And why Friends of the Earth US has launched a campaign to "fix or ditch" the Lieberman-Warner bill. And why a coalition of American climate and development groups has launched a Climate Equity Campaign to push the issue of climate change, and specifically the need for adaptation and clean energy funding for developing countries, as an issue in this year’s presidential election.

In all this we wish to emphasize two related points.

* The first is that we must hold out for climate legislation that auctions 100% of all emissions permits. For more on that, see FOE's Windfalls in Lieberman-Warner Global Warming Bill: Quantifying the Fossil Fuel and Potential Nuclear Industry Giveaways and of course our own little essay.

* The second, as obvious but rarely discussed, is that even the best of the climate bills now wending their way through Congress promise only to return US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and that this is far, far less than the 25% to 40% reductions that were the center of the Bali debate. Which is notable because the latter figure hails from the IPCC and has at least a comprehensible relationship to the kinds of emissions reductions that are going to be necessary soon.

This too is a focus of Towards A Defensible Climate Realism, and it's one you have to bear in mind if you want to really understand the importance of the auctioning debate.

HOT STUFF

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

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 criticising 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 cours, 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."

Hey Look! Another EcoEquity!

We have, for most of our institutional lifetime, worked to find justice in the unpromising fields of the global climate debate. The Ella Baker Center in Oakland California searches in the even more unpromising lands of urban America. But hey, we couldn't be more friendly to Ella Baker, or to its Green Job Corp initiative. Or for that matter to its notion of the "Three Es" -- which would be Equity. Economy, and Environment.

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.

Hot Stuff Archive ...