Key Posts

• The Climate Talks: Could an equity tipping point be on the horizon?

• On April 29^th, at the UN Campus in Bonn Germany, the post-Copenhagen negotiations began in earnest. There were two surprises. The first was that the mood was good. Most everyone was on their best behavior. Even the US delegation was in charming mode. This will no doubt change as we move closer to the Paris winter of 2015, where the next big showdown will take place, but still, it was a relief, and a good sign.

  The second surprise is that, with the whole meeting dedicated to shaking out new ideas, we actually got a few. These included an encouraging proposal from AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States, to immediately focus the short-term ambition agenda on international support for scaled-up renewable and energy-efficiency deployment. And (the subject of this post) they included the emergence of a global strategy – still tentative, but increasingly defined – for breaking the deadlock on “equity.”

  The background here is that the equity agenda continues to haunt the climate negotiations, as it has done since their inception. Nor is this just a matter of North / South bloc-politics-as-usual, though it’s certainly true that “equity” has been a political football since the earliest days of the climate talks. The real problem is that 1992’s UN Framework Convention of Climate Change very clearly obligates the developed countries to “take the lead” in facing the climate problem, and, when all is said and done, they have simply not done so. Even worse, the whole “development” project – the only project that has recently managed to lift significant numbers of people out of poverty – is being thrown into crisis by the scale and severity of the climate threat. In this context, the slogan is clearly right – equity is indeed “the pathway to ambition.” Absent a working agreement on its principles and implications, it will be extremely difficult to shift the negotiations onto anything like a high-ambition track. In may even be impossible.

  View Full Text »

• May 8th, 2013


• Everybody Knows

• Climate Denialism has peaked. Now what are we going to do?

  It was never going to be easy to face the ecological crisis.  Even back in the 1970s, before climate took center stage, it was clear that we the prosperous were walking far too heavily.  And that “environmentalism,” as it was called, was only going to be a small beginning.  But it was only when the climate crisis pushed fossil energy into the spotlight that the real stakes were widely recognized.  Fossil fuels are the meat and potatoes of industrial civilization, and the need to rapidly and radically reduce their emissions cut right through to the heart of the great American dream.  And the European dream.  And, inevitably, the Chinese dream as well.

  Decades later, 81% of global energy is still supplied by the fossil fuels: coal, gas, and oil.[1]  And though the solar revolution is finally beginning, the day is late.  The Arctic is melting, and, soon, as each year the northern ocean lies bare beneath the summer sun, the warming will accelerate.  Moreover, our plight is becoming visible.  We have discovered, to our considerable astonishment, that most of the fossil fuel on the books of our largest corporations is “unburnable” – in the precise sense that, if we burn it, we are doomed.[2]  Not that we know what to do with this rather strange knowledge.  Also, even as China rises, it’s obvious that it’s not the last in line for the promised land.  Billions of people, all around the world, watch the wealthy on TV, and most all of them want a drink from the well of modern prosperity.  Why wouldn’t they?  Life belongs to us all, as does the Earth.

  The challenge, in short, is rather daunting.

  The denial of the challenge, on the other hand, always came ready-made.  As Francis Bacon said so long ago, “what a man would rather were true, he more readily believes.”  And we really did want to believe that ours was still a boundless world.  The alternative – an honest reckoning – was just too challenging.  For one thing, there was no obvious way to reconcile the Earth’s finitude with the relentless expansion of the capitalist market.  And as long as we believed in a world without limits, there was no need to see that economic stratification would again become a fatal issue.  Sure, our world was bitterly riven between haves and have-nots, but this problem, too, would fade in time.  With enough growth – the universal balm – redistribution would never be necessary.  In time, every man would be a king.

  View Full Text »

• April 1st, 2013


• A new interpretation of “Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities”

• If you take a real bird’s-eye view of the climate negotiations – one in which only the largest features are visible – then you might say that they began in earnest with 1992’s negotiation of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.  The next big event was the Kyoto Protocol, which was agreed in 1997.  Then came Copenhagen in 2009 and the following daze, which finally lifted in late 2011 with the Durban Platform, which provided for “a Protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force, applicable to all countries” to be negotiated by 2015 and to go into effect in 2020.

  Those negotiations are now proceeding in earnest, and they’re taking place within civil society networks as well. One of those networks, the most established and extensive of all those working within the climate talks, is the international Climate Action Network, which consists of over 700 NGOs from around the world.  And CAN, as it is called, has now agreed on its own positions, which will be the basis of its lobbying and outreach as we approach the big year 2015.  These positions are represented by two “submissions” to the UNFCCC secretariat.  The submission to “Workstream 1” (which covers the post-2020 regime that is now being negotiated) is here.  The submission to “Workstream 2” (which covers the effort to increase ambition prior to 2020) is here.

  View Full Text »

• March 5th, 2013


• Book Review: Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth
• Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, James Davis, with a foreword by Doug Henwood. PM Press 2012   
  (Click here for a shorter version of this review on Earth Island Journal)

  There are four essays in this slim volume, one on left catastrophism, one on green catastrophism, one on right catastrophism, and one on zombies. I’m most interested in the left and the greens, though we do need to keep an eye on the right. As for the zombie craze, doesn’t it just come down to the fact that modern life feels like people keep trying to eat your face off?

  Doug Henwood’s preface sets the stage nicely. He immediately makes a point that all green pessimists should keep always in mind: “Catastrophe can be paralyzing, not mobilizing.” In fact, it usually is. The challenge is to remember this even as you face the real and present catastrophe that’s now visible on the horizon.[1] It’s a dilemma, no doubt about it, but the way forward, whatever it is, is going to have to take both its horns into proper account. The question is how.

  Catastrophism comes at a good time for the green movement, which is in a period of rapid change. The key point here is that, even as we struggle to come to terms with the latest climate science, we need to remember (see particularly James Davis’ essay) that catastrophism is the “native terrain” of the right. The baseline point here is that right-wing politics is all about natural limits (scarcity, austerity, etc) rather than social ones (even in a world of limits, we’d be fine if we shared the commonwealth).  This is not to say that environmentalism itself is biased toward the right – just the contrary – but it has flirted with catastrophism for a long, long time, and along the way it has had a number of unfortunate dalliances, particularly with right-wing populationism and xenophobia.

  View Full Text »

• January 31st, 2013


• Tom Athanasiou speaks . . .

• For some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, I can stand to watch this.  Which is in much contrast to just about every other recording I’ve ever seen of myself.

  Except for my foot.

  This, by the way, is from Sane Society, a new, small, ambitious internet talk show hosted, in Berkeley, by Tom Palmer.   See the show’s channel here.

• January 15th, 2013


• Equity: The Pathway to Ambition

• Well, the annual climate talks began again today.  This time they’re in Doha, the capital of Qatar, which has the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

  Equity is, of course on the agenda.  The surprise — at least it’s a surprise for some — is that its no longer a peripheral issue.  With the negotiations now tasked with setting the stage for a 2015 negotiations breakthrough, equity is getting some real time in the spotlight.  In that context, you might spare a moment to read The pathway to Ambition, the “equity opener” which was just published in the opening edition of the Climate Action Network‘s ECO newsletter.   I quite agree with it.  In fact, I confess, I wrote it.

  The unedited version is just a wee bit sharper.  Here it is below.

  “Is equity really the pathway to ambition?  ECO is here to say that it had better be.  Without equity, nothing else will work.  Which is to say that nothing else will work well enough.  Without equity the story of the climate transition will be a story of “too little, too late,” and as the scientists are anxiously  telling us – see, recently, the World Bank’s Turn Down the Heat report – this is a story without a happy ending.

  Let’s admit the public secret that we all already know – equity will either be shaped into a pathway to ambition or inequity will, assuredly, rise before us as an altogether unscalable wall.  We can see how this would happen.  The US — while insisting that it’s pushing bravely past the sterile politics of an obsolete North / South firewall – has managed to purge CBDR (and RC) from all official texts.  But to what effect?  Has it noticed that a supermajority of Parties understand the absence of new equity language as an affirmation of the original, and take the Convention’s language to remain entirely operational?  Has it noticed that actions provoke reactions?

  Todd Stern, still the head of the US delegation, has rejected the Annexes as “anachronistic,” and has gone on to call for “the differentiation of a continuum, with each country expected to act vigorously in accordance with its evolving circumstances, capabilities and responsibilities.”  It’s a good idea, though alas it suffers by its association with the US’s aggressive – and often abrasive – drive to destroy 1997’s Kyoto Protocol.  Coming into Doha, ECO can only wonder if this unfortunate picture is about to change.  With Mr. Obama’s re-election, there’s a chance to reset Washington’s international strategy.  There won’t be many more.

  View Full Text »

• November 26th, 2012


• The North-South divide, equity and development

• 

  The What Next Forum in Sweden has just published a nice, up-to-date overview of the Greenhouse Development Rights effort-sharing  framework. Many thanks to Niclas Hällström for pushing the GDRs team to put it together. Weighing in at about ten thousand words, The North-South divide, equity and development – The need for trust-building for emergency mobilization is now the best single introduction and overview of GDRs around, and we’re very glad to have it.

  We’re particularly glad because this essay contains an extended discussion of how GDRs – as an “equity reference framework” – could help us navigate a trust- and momentum-building transition to the high-ambition mobilization that we so desperately need.

  By the way, this new GDRs overview is part of a book-length collection of rare relevance called What Next Volume III: Climate, Development and Equity.  Take a good look at the Table of Contents page.  There’s lots of excellent stuff here.  In particular, Kevin Anderson’s Climate change: going beyond dangerous — Brutal numbers and tenuous hope is absolutely required reading.  And Dale Wen’s piece on China — China and climate change — Spin, facts, and realpolitik — is excellent.  If you still have Mark Lynas’ supremely unhelpful post-Copenhagen screed — “How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal?  I was in the room” — floating around in your head, Dale’s piece will help you to purge it for good.  And Matthew Stilwell’s Climate finance – How much is needed?, which is extremely useful.  And don’t miss A global programme to tackle energy access and climate change, by Tariq Bauri and Niclas Hällström.  This is a key piece of the puzzle.

• November 11th, 2012


• “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” — Bill McKibben’s call for a carbon divestment movement

• – Tom Athanasiou, July 21, 2012

  The new issue of Rolling Stone has a major essay by Bill McKibben, called Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math. It’s a must read, for a number of reasons. The big one is that McKibben’s call for a “carbon disinvestment” movement – aimed at breaking the hammerlock that the fossil cartel has on our civilization – is a big step forward. It’s not the only step we need to take (more on this below) but it would make a huge difference.

  First up, Terrifying New Math is a fine science-for-civilians essay on the recent “extreme weather,” which has been monumental. In fact, the summer of 2012 may well turn out to be a decisive turning point in the climate war. Not to put too fine a point on this, but the deniers have obviously peaked, at least in the US, at least for now. Not that they’ve given up – or run out of funding – but at least they’re now in the rear view. I for one doubt that they’ll be taking control of the debate again.

  Anyway, there’s a lot of extreme-weather color in this essay. Who knew that this spring, when it rained in Mecca at a temperature of 109 degrees, it was the hottest recorded downpour on the books? And McKibben does a great job of quickly moving on to key numbers, and then drawing some substantive conclusions.

  The numbers are key to the story. McKibben chose three:

  View Full Text »

• July 21st, 2012


• Global Climate Justice gets its 15 Minutes: The UN workshop on “Equitable Access to Sustainable Development”

• A few weeks back, deep in a diplomatic warren in Bonn, Germany, the UN climate negotiations convened their first major session since December’s “breakthrough” in Durban, South Africa.  It would be a bit of an understatement to say that Bonn didn’t go well.  See this rollup or, if you’re braced for the details, see the Climate Action Network’s coverage and commentary, and the Third World Network’s coverage and commentary, and the IISD’s summary.  The UNFCCC Secretariat will also be doing a report; no doubt it will be soon.

  

  The “Youngos” in action

  Despite the dead air of the Maritim conference hotel, Bonn was notable, for two reasons.  It was another halting step in our gradual collective awakening into the maddening grind of post-Copenhagen reality.  And – the topic here – it was the occasion for a formal, day-long, plenary workshop on the topic of “Equitable Access to Sustainable Development” (hereafter “EASD”).  The equity workshop (the video stream, in two parts, is here and here; the TWN’s summary is here) was agreed to and scheduled at Durban, and – if we’re clever and very lucky – it may someday be remembered as a step in the great post-Copenhagen reboot.

  View Full Text »

• June 4th, 2012


• Book Review: Michael Klare’s “The Race for What’s Left”

• The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources

  by Michael T. Klare
  Metropolitan Books, 2012, 306 pages

  When I mentioned to a friend that I was reviewing Michael Klare’s new book, his response, which I found surprising, was: “What’s Klare got to say that Richard Heinberg didn’t say a long time ago?”

  Actually, I wasn’t really that surprised. The idea of “peak oil,” the field wherein Heinberg made his name, has largely passed – at least within greenie circles –  into a larger and more metaphorical notion of “peak everything.”  Moreover, “peak everything” has itself become a kind of common sense, and thus (like all common sense) a bit of a danger.  An opportunity, if nothing else, for unfocused, slack thinking.

  So, does Klare bring anything new to the table? The answer, I’m afraid, is “yes and no.”

  Klare, like Heinberg, is a “peak everything” guy.  He’s talking about the whole range of fossil fuels — gas, oil, and coal, in both conventional and unconventional forms.  And he’s talking lumber; and foods of all sorts; and iron, copper, tin and the other standard metals; and specialty metals like tantalum and platinum; and “rare earths” like neodymium and lanthanum (think “Prius”); and nuclear fuels like uranium; and just about everything else.

  View Full Text »

• May 7th, 2012


• BASIC experts: Equitable access to sustainable development

• It’s unwise to predict the future, particularly the future of the climate negotiations.  But if you believe that their outcome is critical, and that it will bear heavily upon our common future, then you’ll hope that Equitable access to sustainable development, a long-in-the-making report by climate and climate-equity experts from India, China, Brazil and South Africa, will be taken seriously.

  The EASD report was released on December 3^rd in Durban, just about the time that the talks started hotting up, so it’s unlikely that most negotiators had time to read it with any care.  But if Durban goes at all well, if that is it manages to save the Kyoto Protocol and to otherwise open the door to serious consideration of a next-generation climate accord, one that’s actually fair enough to support real ambition, then this report will, eventually, be recognized as a turning point.

  The South’s Ministers, at least, will take it seriously.  They know the problem of “equitable access to sustainable development,” and that it must be solved if there’s to be a successful global climate regime.   And, at this point, it may also be reasonable to hope that, after Durban, the environmental NGOs will finally begin to face the challenge of fair-shares global burden sharing.

  The governments of the North are another matter.  The Europeans, certainly, do not imagine that the demands of sustainable development can be put aside, and even the United States, despite its political crisis, is in some kind of motion.  Not that the Obama team will welcome this reassertion of the equity agenda.  That would be too much to hope for from the “realists” that brought us the Copenhagen-era push for Pledge and Review.  But at the same time, it seems clear that the orthodoxies of traditional realism no longer charm as they once did.  They have become cover stories, and this no realism can survive.

  View Full Text »

• December 5th, 2011


• Linked Fates — “Occupy” and the climate negotiations

• Anyone who claims that the fate of the climate talks is bound to the fate of the Occupy movement better expect a bit of skepticism in return. Now, if it were Occupy and the Climate Justice movement, that would be a different story! Both are complex social movements, and both are driving hard for economic justice. Their overlap is inevitable. But the negotiations themselves? What have they to do with economic justice? What have they to do with the great divide between “the 1%” and “the 99%”?

  It’s an easy question to ask. Too easy, actually.  It’s a question that raises others…

  Beyond vague talk about “the most vulnerable countries and people,” few of us are really prepared to approach the climate crisis as a justice problem. So it should be said that it didn’t have to be this way. If justice had long been a major part of environmental politics, we’d be in better shape today. But it hasn’t been, not until recently, and the truth is that Big Green still isn’t really on board with justice environmentalism. In fact, it’s fair to say that today’s progressive enviros are the inheritors of a long tradition, and that it’s not a uniformly admirable one. The climate politics mainline, in particular, has long focused, almost exclusively, on the technical side of the transition problem. Not that there’s any hope without a technology revolution, but must it come packaged with a refusal to understand, let alone confront, the economic divide that’s at the core of the global climate-policy deadlock?

  Things are changing now, or at least they could. But the past matters.

  Remember Copenhagen? Remember the vitriol of the blame game that followed Copenhagen? Do try, because soon we’re going to see what, if anything, we’ve learned in the two years since that great debacle. As I write this, Durban, South Africa (the next Conference of Parties to the Climate Convention) is coming right up, and it will almost certainly join Copenhagen on the long list of grim, poorly-reported failures to make the international breakthrough that we so badly need. As Durban approaches, and then passes, we’re all going to have to decide what the hell we think is actually going on.

  View Full Text »

• November 2nd, 2011


• Just substitute your national flag…

• 

• August 7th, 2011


• Who’s doing more to reduce emissions, the North or the South?

• The “comparability of effort” debate is hotting up, and there’s no cooling on the horizon.

  This debate is fundamental to the “blame game.”  Recall, for example, the cold shower that was Copenhagen, and the storms of China-bashing that followed.  The blame for the debacle, you see, belonged to the “emerging economies,” who refused to carry their shares of the global stabilization burden.  Or so it was said by legions of disappointed, overly-certain pundits across the political spectrum.

  Someday, it will be easier to make solid judgments about who’s doing their share, and who’s free riding.  Before that fine day dawns, though, two things will have to happen.  First, the national pledges of action that countries – northern and southern, large and small – have committed to deliver to the UN Secretariat, the pledges in which they lay out their emission-reduction action plans, have to get a whole lot easier to read and compare and interpret.  Second, we have to reach at least a rough international consensus on what different countries, at different levels of development, should do, in the light of historically-informed and principle-based comparisons that take, say, wealth and responsibility into account.

  View Full Text »

• June 14th, 2011


• Tax Justice as Climate Justice

• Originally published by Yes! magazine

  You don’t have to leave America to go to the Third World.  I, for example, live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and here, as in all northern megacities, crushing poverty surrounds the comfortable precincts.  I can’t call it “extreme” poverty, for of course it cannot compete with the despair endemic to, say, the north African drought zones.  But when an organization like Remote Area Medical feels compelled to bring its traveling free clinic to The Oakland Coliseum (now, officially, the Oracle Arena), and when thousands stand for long hours to receive basic care they could not hope to afford, the problem is nonetheless clear.  This last April, when the good folks at RAM pulled up stakes and left Oakland for their next stop, it was Haiti.  The America they were leaving was not the “exceptional” America of the official dream.

  Obviously, there’s lots to say about this.  And much from which to avert our eyes.  But what else is new?  The apologists say that the poor will be with us always, so how is poverty in Oakland California in any way “news?”  Or poverty more generally, given the now routine brutalities of the new economy?  Or insecurity and suffering more generally still, given the precarious state of the whole global system?  And what, finally, has any of this got to do with climate?  The answer, simply put, is “everything.”  Which is to say that while most economic-justice activists don’t spend much time thinking about the climate crisis, it’s become ridiculously easy to argue that the deficit / budget / tax battle that’s now raging across the wealthy lands of America and Europe is going to have outsized impacts on climate politics both domestic and international.  That in fact it already has.

  View Full Text »

• April 27th, 2011


• Kissing cousins?

• 

• April 5th, 2011


• Cancun Success? Compared to What?

• Cancun was not a surprise.   Nor was it a failure.  This much is easy to say.

  But was it a success?  This is a more difficult question.  I used to have an irritating friend.  Every time you made a strong, implausibly simple claim – something like “Cancun was a success” – he would reply “Compared to what?”  It was a pedantic device, but it worked well enough.  It made you think, which, I suppose, is why it was irritating.

  Compared to what the science demands, Cancun was obviously a failure.  The Climate Tracker crew made that clear in an evaluation filed before most people even got home – if the pledges in the Cancun Agreements are delivered upon, but only just barely, the result would be at least 3.2C of warming, and possibly far more – the CO₂ concentration of the atmosphere would be about 650 ppm in 2100.

  Why then wasn’t Cancun a failure?  Because, just maybe, it will put us onto a better road.  Because it was so closely managed that, even in the face of immense discord and multi-polarity, it managed to produce a weak – though substantive – agreement.  Because, though doubt is everywhere,  it could be the breakthrough that its partisans claim it is.  Because, in any case, we’ve lived to fight another day, and the UN-based multilateral climate negotiations have been relegitimized, at least for the moment.  Which is why most of the assembled NGOs, citing a pre-Cancun study by UK think tank E3G, decided that the Cancun outcome met the qualifications for the “Lifeline scenario”:

  “Skillful diplomacy led by the Mexican Presidency provides just enough substance to move the process forward; and does not compromise environmental integrity of reaching a global deal in the future… This scenario provides sufficient movement on key issues and rolls the negotiation process forwards another year, but must contain a high degree of trust and confidence to prevent moving back into Zombie.”

  The Zombie scenario, suffice it to say, would have been worse.

  View Full Text »

• December 14th, 2010


• The Cancun Setup: One year after Copenhagen, and counting

• The first thing to say about the climate negotiations – meeting soon in sunny Mexico – is that they’re teetering at the edge of what, back in the day, we used to call a “legitimation crisis.”  On every side, folks are eager to suggest that the negotiations have become a waste of time.  It’s gotten to the point that people are apologizing for going to Cancun, as if it were bad for their image to be seen at the climate talks.

  Which, actually, is an odd turn of events.  Because if ever a moment was critical, it’s this one, midway through the cycle of negotiations (Copenhagen 2009, Cancun 2010, South Africa 2011) that will determine the shape and direction of the post-Kyoto climate regime.  What happens now matters, particularly because, all else being equal, the eventual end of the economic crisis will be accompanied by another rapid rise in global emissions.  The only way to avoid that rise, and many others, is to escape the logic of the business-as-usual world.  Despite the coming low-carbon energy revolution, we can’t expect to make that escape without systems of global cooperation, burden sharing and accountability to help us along, systems that can only be rooted in a fair multilateral accord.  Which is to say that the climate talks may not be fun, and may not even be the main event, but there’s no real hope without them.

  Copenhagen, unfortunately, was a grave disappointment, and was quickly followed by a cascade of others: the “Climategate” fiasco, the failure of the beltway realists to deliver a US climate bill, an explosion of denialist populism on the American right, and, of course, the midterm American elections.  Even worse, from the point of view of the climate talks – the success of which depends, in the last instance, on international cost sharing – is the emergence, in Europe as well as the US, of an Austerity Panic Party that pretends, amidst unprecedented inequality and unprecedented wealth, that the North is bankrupt.  The point of the pretense?  To project a story of the future in which declining “foreign aid” is as inevitable as the decimation of domestic social services.

  The discouraging pace of the international talks, in other words, is anything but unique.  Right now, nothing is working particularly well.  The US, in particular, is a model of dysfunction, and an eager player in the international “blame game,” which is now in full swing.  Nor is this a simple “climate problem.”  The truth is that the climate challenge is bound tightly to a larger political crisis, and that neither is likely to be resolved without the other.  So, to be clear – there is no “deadlock” in the global negotiations.  Nor is there a “North / South impasse.”  What we’re seeing, rather, is a political and governance disaster of the first order, and despite its many critical international dimensions, it’s a disaster that is centered in the wealthy world.

  View Full Text »

• November 17th, 2010


• You want Loopholes with that?

• The bad news is that the climate/energy push just crashed and burned in the Senate.  The good news is that, in the wake of that crash,  the US climate community is having a robust Big Think.  The last time we had such an exchange was back after what, for lack of a better term, I will call the Great Copenhagen Disappointment.  Which raises an interesting question – do we only debate, openly and seriously, after we lose?

  If so, and judging by the situation in Bonn, where an inconclusive post-Copenhagen “intersessional” just shambled a bit closer to December’s rematch in Cancun, we’re up for another round of disputation soon.  Not, of course, that disappointment in Cancun is certain.  It’s still possible that the wealthy countries are going to actually come up with the “fast start finance” that they promised back in Copenhagen.  Maybe they’ll even go beyond fast-start finance, and actually start acting like they want to make a meaningful international deal.  Because, frankly, it’s their move.

  View Full Text »

• August 11th, 2010


• The National Academies study, from a global point of view

• A few days ago, I got mail from a colleague at Climate Action Network International, a communications guy, asking for a comment on the US National Academy of Sciences recent climate reports, or rather on the US emissions budget that is recommended / affirmed in these reports. It turned out to be quite an interesting request.

  First up, though, these reports only strengthen the scientific case. For example, the IPCCs 2007 Forth Assessment Report says that sea levels could rise by between 0.6 and 1.9 feet by 2100, but recent studies have suggested that this is far too optimistic. The NAS reports incorporate this newer research and concludes that sea levels could rise by as much as 6.5 feet in during this century.

  Second, I was a bit surprised by the way the NAS approached the problem of calculating the US emissions budget. The standard methodology in the climate world is to estimate a remaining global budget (which is hard) and then to work out the share of this budget that properly belongs to each country (which is harder). And you have to admit this approach makes sense; after all, when the US or any country takes a budget, less is left for everyone else; which is why climate, fundamentally, is a sharing problem. Anyway, I expected to find some version of this approach in the NAS reports. How else could they calculate a recommended US budget?

  View Full Text »

• May 24th, 2010


• After Copenhagen: On being sadder but wiser, China, and justice as the way forward

• (Revised, Feb 19, 2010)

  (For a snappier version of this analysis — without the charts! — see the Earth Island Journal)

  First up, this is not another enumeration of confident judgments. I do not presume that Copenhagen was an unmitigated failure, or that this failure was Obama’s fault, or, as is the fashion, that China was the ugliest of them all. Nor do I suggest that the South’s negotiators made impossible demands. Or argue, with disingenuous resignation, that the UN process is obsolete. Or believe that, finally, only a US breakthrough really matters.

  To be sure, Copenhagen was absolutely a failure, in the precise sense that it failed to catapult us into the fair and ambitious global mobilization that’s needed to prevent climate catastrophe. But this was never going to happen. What did happen, as the veteran Bangladeshi policy activist Saleem Huq put it, was a shaking of the traditional pieces of the global geo-political puzzle and their landing in a new and unfamiliar configuration. In this sense, the question of success and failure is moot. The real question is whether this new configuration offers us new ways forward, and if any of them lead beyond the “North / South impasse (a misleading formulation that implies an equal division of blame) to enable a meaningful global mobilization.

  This question cannot be answered by the hard, uncompromising pragmatics of campaign logic. This is a time for reflection, not for pushing forward, one more meeting, one more demo, one more demand at a time. This time we need strategy as well as tactics, and we need it fast. 2010, which will culminate with another showdown in December in Mexico, is going to be another big year. As, for that matter, will 2011, and 2012, and all the other years in the brief period just ahead, the post-Copenhagen period in which we must, finally, begin to move.

  View Full Text »

• January 31st, 2010


• Getting China Wrong

• It’s been a long time since Copenhagen.

  A few weeks after it ended, chatting to a friend about some stupid comments I’d overhead during that long last night, he said that “everyone gets a pass for anything they said during the first week.” The first week after Copenhagen is what he meant — a time of exhaustion and near despair in international climate circles.

  I bring this up because some of the stupid things that were said during that first week are still with us. There were plenty of them, of course, but this post doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive. It’s just about China.

  Copenhagen, of course, was not a success. But it did change the game, in particular by establishing a framework in which both northern and southern countries can step forward to “pledge” to mitigation actions of various kinds. As they do, scientists and institutes around the world are tabulating the pledges, normalizing them, calculating their implied aggregate impact on global temperature, and — inevitably — drawing conclusions about which countries are doing their “fair share” and which are free riding on the efforts of others. View Full Text »

• January 30th, 2010


• A 350 PPM emergency pathway

• The Greenhouse Development Rights project, of which we are core members, has just released a brief report (only 12 pages) entitled A 350 ppm Emergency Pathway. In it, for the first time, a very precise and up-to-date representative 350 ppm pathway is developed. Like so:

  The first phase of the 350 campaign has been a wild success. 350 is now an international symbol of emergency climate stabilization. More importantly, the 350 target reflects a scientifically-grounded assessment of what global climate protection really means. But what would it actually take to bring the atmospheric carbon-dioxide (CO₂) concentration back to 350 parts per million?  This memo provides a quick, up-to-date overview of the issues here, which are significant to any plausible emergency emissions-reduction effort. It focuses on the extremely limited size of the global CO₂ budget that would remain to us in a 350 ppm future, and on the shape of the emissions pathway that’s needed if were to keep within that budget. In particular, it specifies a representative emissions pathway consistent with a 350 ppm concentration target. By way of context, it then compares this 350 pathway to an emission pathway consistent with a 2C temperature target, and to other, supposedly 2C-compliant pathways that have significantly lower odds of actually satisfying their target. Finally, it offers a brief glimpse of the challenges that all true emergency climate-reduction targets raise in this North / South divided world.

  View Full Text »

• December 23rd, 2009


• Rough initial thoughts on the Copenhagen Accord

• Copenhagen was obviously a failure — at least if you judge it by the numbers, the formal emission targets and financial commitments that are needed to support a fair and effective emergency global climate mobilization. If you judge it, that is, by what is necessary.

  The more pressing question, though, is whether Copenhagen was a failure when judged against, not what is necessary, but rather what was possible. This is a much more difficult question, and it has far more to do with judgment than with calculation. And, here, very little is obvious.

  View Full Text »

• December 22nd, 2009


• Europe’s Share of the Climate Challenge

• A major new report, just released today by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Friends of the Earth Europe, shows that — despite an increasingly widespread sense that climate catastrophe can no longer be averted — radical action, on the necessary scale, is still a very real possibility.

  The report — Europe’s Share of the Climate Challenge: Domestic Actions and International Obligations to Protect the Planet – takes a close look at Europe, showing exactly how it can show leadership in keeping global climate change within the necessary planetary limits. The analysis is in terms of Europe’s”two fold obligation,” and shows how it can act, on the one hand, by undertaking domestic actions to rapidly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and, on the other, by fulfilling its international obligations to help other countries address the twin crises of climate change and development. View Full Text »

• December 1st, 2009


• Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

• A lot of dreck comes across my desktop. I’m even on a list called ennui mail, and some of it is utterly irredeemable. But still I took notice when Chuck Norris: Copenhagen Talks To Forge One World Order blew in.

  I especially like this bit:

  In this conference, they’re going to try to take our money and send it to third-world countries because of, since we spend so much oil and these other countries have suffered, then were going to give our money to these third-world countries.

  But then there’s this:

  Neil, we have people here starving in our own country, Norris said. You know, my foundation, I have families, who are making $9,000 a year, the kids I’m teaching. Why aren’t we trying to help the poverty in our own country

  … which demands to be taken a bit more seriously. View Full Text »

• December 1st, 2009


• One billion high emitters

• An important scientific paper (by Chakravarty et al.), called Sharing global CO2 emission reductions among one billion high emitters was just published in the Proceedings of the [US] National Academy of Sciences. And because, as Greenwire notes, it “loosely builds on the idea of ‘greenhouse development rights,’” we’ve decided to write, and prominently feature, this a friendly rejoinder to it. View Full Text »

• July 10th, 2009


• A Blame Game? Get ready for Prime Time!

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

• June 18th, 2009


• To fix the climate, get serious about solving poverty

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

• June 2nd, 2009


• Principal-based Annex 1 Differentiation in the Copenhagen Accord

• Earlier this year, in preparation for a pre-Copenhagen NGO policy summit, we prepared a framing and background paper called Principal-based Annex 1 Differentiation in the Copenhagen Accord. It’s quite interesting, we think, as a guide to thought and debate, but do note that it was written with an expert audience in mind.

• May 21st, 2009


• Public Secrets

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

• March 1st, 2009


• Second edition of the Greenhouse Development Rights book

• The second edition of the Greenhouse Development Rights book is now available for download. Download the entire second edition here. Download a nicely composed brief executive summary (6 pages) here. Download the longer version of the executive summary (10 pages) here.

  You can also read a detailed list of the changes that have been made since the first edition was released (December 2007) in Bali.

• February 17th, 2009


• A Call for Leadership: A GDRs analysis of the EU?s proposed 2020 targets

• When published, this was the most ambitious of our country reports. It contains a detailedanalysis of the EUs climate policy, as well as concrete proposals for moving forward into a principle-based climate regime that might actually work.

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

• October 19th, 2008


• EcoEquity’s View, in Eight Minutes

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

• September 10th, 2008


• A Peak on the Horizon

• There are essentially two paths forward from here, both of them passing through Copenhagen and then heading on to a global peak and, subsequently, a rapid decline in greenhouse-gas emissions. The first, an extremely dangerous business-as-usual path, is one in which we fail to act, decisively and in time, and thus commit ourselves to disruptive, frightening, and extremely expensive near-future adjustments. View Full Text »

• August 4th, 2008


• A Brief, Adequacy and Equity-Based Evaluation of Some Prominent Climate Policy Frameworks and Proposals

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

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

• February 18th, 2008


• A Critical Appraisal of the Vattenfall Proposal for a Fair Climate Regime

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

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

• February 13th, 2008


• Toward a Defensible Climate Realism

• There is change coming to Washington. The question is if it will bechange 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]. View Full Text »

• February 6th, 2008


• The Worth of an Ice Sheet

• The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change received a lot of attention. But Stern dismissed stringent stabilization targets, or any sort of peak and decline trajectory that would have a high probability of keeping temperature increase below 2C.

  In this analysis, EcoEquity’s Paul Baer takes a close look at Sterns treatment of potential catastrophic risks (like the l of the Greenland ice sheet) and demonstrates that Sterns treatment of these risks is clearly inadequate. And he draws the obvious conclusion: Those who claim that Stern has shown that emissions pathways consistent with the 2C target are not economically justified are simply wrong.

  Download as pdf

• January 18th, 2007


• The Inconvenient Truth: Part II

• Weve seen the movie, so we know the first part were in trouble deep. And its time, past time, for at least some of us to go beyond warning to planning, to start talking seriously about a global crash program to stabilize the climate…

  Which is exactly what this essay (we hesitate to call it a manifesto) sets out to do…

  Download as pdf

• January 18th, 2007


• High Stakes: Designing emissions pathways to reduce the risk of dangerous climate change

• High Stakes is a contribution to the intensifying debate over precaution and long-term objectives. This is because it shows, by way of fairly robust but quite transparent risk calculations, that even if we could orchestrate an extremely steep and nearly immediate decline in global emissions, we would still face a risk on the order of 10-20% or more of exceeding the 2C threshold, the most broadly endorsed “precautionary” target.

  The report was published by the Institute of Public Policy Research

  Download the report as pdf

• November 19th, 2006


• 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.

• May 1st, 2006


• EcoEquity Blogs the Montreal Conference

• We, for our part, took the occasion of COPMOP1 to experiment with a blog. It was fun, intermittently illuminating, and occasionally thereapeutic. Our big success was that, in it, we finally succeeded in a long-time effort to engage the anti emissions trading folks in a public debate. To pick up that debate from the beginning, see Cloud Cukcoo Land. To drop in at a more orderly restart, see Cutting Through the Smoke on Trading. And, hey, feel free to contribute. This is definately a work in progress.

• December 7th, 2005


• Honesty About Dangerous Climate Change

• Just in case you’re in a good mood, we offer you this exploration of a most difficult subject — What is the science actually telling us, and how should we pass it on It doesn’t directly address “the equity issue,” but it helps, we think, to lay the foundation upon which real climate equity will have to be built… View Full Text »

• November 22nd, 2005


• Where We Stand: Honesty about Dangerous Climate Change, and about Preventing it

• Excuse the didactic tone we’re taking here…

  We stand, first, with the emerging scientific consensus, which tells us we have very little time to act if we honestly expect to avoid a global (as opposed to a “merely local”) climate catastrophe. Further, we insist, contrary to the pretended realism of those who seek to be “reasonable,” on a rather direct approach. We do not, for example, imagine that carbon concentrations that would quite probably yield 3C or 4C of warming can reasonably be considered “safe.” (See this 2004 essay for technical details). Instead, we prefer to stay in the reality-based world of those (the E.U., the Climate Action Network) who draw the line at 2C maximum (which is itself not by any means safe) and who admit that avoiding a global climate catastrophe is going to be difficult indeed. View Full Text »

• November 22nd, 2005


• Finally, A Good Interview with EcoEquity

• Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have done what environmental activists couldn’t — they’ve put global warming on the mainstream agenda. Now the question is what can be done about it Dr. Kevin Trenberth (National Center for Atmospheric Research) lays out the problem, while EcoEquity’s Tom Athanasiou links climate change to global justice. And it’s a podcast folks — you can listen instead of read!

• September 27th, 2005


• A Glass Half Full? The Kyoto Protocol, and Beyond

• The first thing to say about Kyoto’s entry into force is that it is a significant victory, won particularly by the Europeans, over social and economic complacency, cash-amplified, flat-earth pseudo-science, the carbon cartel, and, of course, the Bush Administration. The second is that, if it’s not soon followed by other victories, deeper and even more challenging ones, the Earth’s climate will soon – think 2050 or even sooner – be transformed into one that is far more inhospitable, and even hostile, than even most environmentalists imagine. View Full Text »

• May 20th, 2005


• The Writing on the Wall

• It’s been a while since the last climate conference, COP8, long enough for the remorse to fade and long enough, even, for a bit of revisionist history. It’s certainly been long enough for lessons to be counted, and conclusions drawn. And, alas, they have been, with a vengeance.

  If you’ve been following the climate talks, you’ll know what we mean. For while the new science demands new urgency, the negotiators can step only haltingly, if at all. With the U.S. withdrawn into its strange neo-conservative agonies, the global economy gone manic-depressive, and Kyoto’s progress stalled by Russian temporizing and, no doubt, sleazy back-room deals, no nation North or South seems much disposed to visionary leadership. The long term seems long away, and it is given to the scientists to tell us that, in fact, it is breathing down our necks. In the corridors and plenary halls, another logic rules. Realism, the usual realism of short-term, national self-interest, is the watchword. View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2004


• First, the Bad News

• Optimism, they all tell us, is a precondition of effective political action. And they are no doubt quite correct. Despair, after all, hardly motivates sustained political engagement. Drinking, more like it.

  Optimism, unfortunately, is a problem, for enviros in particular but in fact for anyone determined to look, hard and critically, at the truth of our predicament. Few of us are able to consistently follow Antonio Gramsci’s advice, to combine “pessimism of the intellect” with “optimism of the will.” Most of the time, it seems more like a choice between one and the other. Or, even worse, a choice between paralyzing pessimism and idiot, right-wing confidence.

  We, for our part, still believe that realism (the real thing, not the ersatz neo-con variety) is the best ground for an honest optimism, and in that spirit we’d like to start off this issue of Climate Equity Observer with an effort to look reality in the eye. View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2004


• A Northern Call for Southern Leadership

• The events of the last few years – 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq come immediately to mind – should prod us all to admit that our situation is deadly grim. And nothing on the climate front offers evidence to the contrary. Forget the state of the Kyoto protocol. The emerging recognition that the Earth’s climate sensitivity is likely to be quite high will generate a special breath of dread, at least in those few of us who follow such matters.

  Much can be said about this. For example: it’s simply not going to be possible for the developing countries to indefinitely avoid greenhouse gas emission limitations. It’s certainly not going to be possible for them to do so while, at the same time, honestly speaking for either the good of their own peoples or the good of humanity. Yes, the US is pursuing a duplicitous and sometimes evil strategy. Yes, the Europeans are conflicted, often hypocritical, and, as they demonstrated at COP8, prone to clumsiness. But narrow conceptions of “national interests,” as they are called in the realist tradition, are also a problem in the developing world. Thus, its statesmen and ministers have thus far satisfied themselves with refusal (even of a long-overdue analysis of “the adequacy of commitments”) and with merely abstract appeals to equity. View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2004


• PetroPolitics Global Warming Backgrounder

• It would be good to be past todays well-financed skepticism about global warming, good if we all already understood that, in a world rife with potentially catastrophic threatsfrom nuclear war to genetic erosionglobal warming is one of the most serious. Alas we are not. Alarmingly the skeptics (better called denialists) continue to derail the all-important political discussion of global warming by pretending that its still an unproven theory.

  This backgrounder, however, will ignore them.

  It will also avoid any real introduction of the science of global warming. Such introductions take time, and they are already readily available. See for example the excellent graphic overview of global warming (but not its politics) which the UN Environment Program maintains at www.grida.no/climate/vital/. View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2004


• Book Review: Richard Heinberg’s “The Party’s Over, Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies”

• by Richard Heinberg. (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2003.)

  The beer keg has run dry, only a few dispirited hors d’ouevres languish on the tray…The Party’s Over. In this important new book, Richard Heinberg argues that the end of the biggest party of all, the fossil fuel gala, is in sight. Basing his argument on the work of geophysicist M. King Hubbert, who accurately predicted that U.S. crude-oil production would peak between 1966 and 1972 (the actual peak year was 1970), Heinberg draws on a contemporary “roster of Cassandras” in petroleum research to suggest that global fossil-fuel liquid extraction rates could peak as early as 2006, depending on how quickly the world economy grows. In the process he effectively debunks the rosy visions of well paid cornucopians like Bjrn Lomborg, whose 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist was greeted enthusiastically by the business community and journals like The Economist. He also argues, and quite convincingly, that Iraq War II was, finally, about oil: the Bush administration, according to Heinberg, knew about the predicted peak through its access to oil-insider information like that provided by Petroconsultants, and acted to secure one of the largest oil reserves on the planet so that no one else would get there first. View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2003


• A CEO Interview: Michael Grubb

• Michael Grubb is one of our best known international climate policy analysts. Currently at the Royal Institute for International Affairs and at University College, London, Grubb has written on all aspects of the climate problem, focusing especially on issues of equity, emissions trading, and European leadership.

  This interview was conducted on December 30 2002 (we were still in the shadow of COP8) by Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou of EcoEquity. It’s been a while, we know, but we’ve been busy, and there was that war… And, actually, Michael’s comments are only more interesting for the delay. View Full Text »

• December 30th, 2002


• The Science of Drawing the Line

• (For a much longer version of this analysis, and all the accompanying political and strategic discussion, see our recent book, Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming. See Dead Heat post, or browse to the Seven Stories Press Dead Heat page, where you can actually buy a copy.)

  Our goal here is hardly comprehensive. We suffer no illusion that we can summarize climate science as a whole. But we do think that can distill out the part of the science that bears most immediately on the core problem of drawing the line.

  Should the climate negotiations try to cap CO2 pollution in the atmosphere at 550 parts per million (ppm), 450 ppm, or some other (hopefully lower) figure Or should we take an entirely different approach and try to cap temperature change itself, rather than CO2 pollution And what must we know about the kinds of impacts and instabilities that can be expected at any given level View Full Text »

• October 15th, 2002


• Calling All Realists

• The abortive “Earth Summit” in Johannesburg is already fading from our overtaxed memories. Indeed, as we write this, the conference of the week is COP8, the Eighth Conference of Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. And it may be a whole lot more important than Jo’burg, if only as a marker, a way to date another death of innocence. For COP8 comes only days after Al Qaeda, in its latest blast of apocalyptic warfare, destroyed a pair of Balinese discos, and with them hundreds of lives. We should not forget, those of us who follow the game of global environmental policy, that Johannesburg’s final preparatory conference was also in Bali, and only a few short miles away.

  COP8 comes on a calendar no activist would have chosen. It’s not so much that the climate talks are in limbo, but that their progress-just now we’re waiting for Kyoto to enter into force, and looking forward to debating the globalization of the climate regime-seems abstract and even unreal against the background of an ever more gruesome world. The brutal post-boom economy, Al Qaeda’s mad utopianism, an imminent US invasion of Iraq: together they announce a new and bloody chapter in the history of our strange civilization, and set a geopolitical context in which semi-rational negotiations like those at the COPs can only seem odd, brave, acts of faith.

  As if the climate talks could someday really matter. View Full Text »

• October 15th, 2002


• A Tale of Two Cities

• Authors Note:

  This analysis of the linked destinies of the climate equity and global justice movements was written in August and then put aside to settle. After September 11, we decided to defer its publication, and since then our assessment has inevitably been overtaken by events. This, however, is true of most everything thats been written about Bonn. And as these movements strike us as more important than ever, weve decided to go ahead and publish this, our analysis of the Bonn Compromise. Some rewriting was done, but not much. In the next issue of Climate Equity Observer, well give our views on how September 11 has changed the terrain of global environmental politics. Meanwhile, we hope you find this analysis to be both interesting and provocative. View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2002


• A War of Coalitions

• As we write this, four months has passed since September 11, and since the pundits began chanting that “everything has changed.” It’s not a long time, but then again, history is moving quickly these days, and its long enough for us to say that there’s little evidence for this nearly universal claim.

  We are not, to be sure, impartial observers. Nor are we blind. A great deal has changed, a great deal is different. But much of the difference, it seems to us, lies on an axis of disillusionment: much that was unacknowledged is now too obvious to ignore. Further, it’s clear that, from the perspective of justice and sustainability, we’re in much the same hole as we were before.

  So perhaps everything has changed. The question now, as Gregory Bateson used to say, is if the difference makes a difference. And the answer to that question is simply that it’s too early to know. Still, we think a close look at how recent events have changed global coalitional politics can shed useful light on the challenges of the future. So here goes. View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2002


• Blowback

• Drag up Kyoto these days and you risk the charge of being anti-American. It’s as if we have entered a new, Orwellian world where our personal reliability as comrades in the struggle is measured by the degree to which we invoke the past to explain the present. Suggesting there is a historical context for the recent atrocities is by implication to make excuses for them. Anyone who is with us doesn’t do that. Anyone who does, is against us.

  John le Carr, A War We Cannot Win

  The line between understanding and excusal is thin, and easy to transgress. This is a problem for us all, but a special problem for those of us who have managed to claim, in any way at all, the honors of activism. We must speak, and from time to time we must speak clearly of the big picture. And even in America, people, many of them anyway, are prepared to listen. This is, as they say, a “teachable moment.” View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2002


• After Marrakech

• In the previous edition of CEO (written after Bonn but published after September 11), we argued that despite all the weakening that the Kyoto Protocol had suffered, the Bonn Compromise had made it ratifiable, and had to be counted as a major victory. We argued that with Kyoto’s ratification carbon would actually be priced, that new principles for the protection of the global commons would be established, and that the structures necessary to eventually strengthen the climate regime would be put into place. And we added a few elements of hope: that as the reality of climate change becomes more sensible and the climate protection coalition stronger, it would become possible to step past Kyoto to the global, equity-based treaty that might actually work.

  At COP7 in Marrakech, the Kyoto Protocol was weakened even further – it is, now, the Marrakech Dilution of the Bonn Compromise to the Kyoto Protocol. Nevertheless, and despite the often-dispiriting nature of Kyoto’s loopholes, we believe that the essential situation remains unchanged. Particularly in today’s grim international context, the ratification of even this weakened first-generation climate treaty must be counted as a major victory for democratic, multilateral environmental governance. And this remains true despite September 11, despite the arrival of the US-led “anti-terror coalition,” and despite the newly uncertain fate of the Bonn coalition. View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2002


• The End of the End of History

• The world, they say, has changed. Well, yes and no. We are, to be sure, at war. It’s a strange war, but it looks to be an important one, a major turning point. Best to assume that it will be, for war is always dangerous to underestimate.

  Shifts that looked to be forever out of reach are already old news. The US, for one thing, has paid its UN dues, and President Bush, in his speech to the United Nations, actually referred to Kofi Anon as “our president,” just as he spoke the word “Palestine.”

  That, to be sure, was something new. View Full Text »

• January 15th, 2002


• Book Review: Peter Barnes’ “Who Owns the Sky?”

• Capitalism 2.0

  Who Owns the Sky: Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism, by Peter Barnes (Washington: Island Press, 2001).

  Who Owns the Sky is an important book at a bitter moment. Its important because it tries to make a realistic proposal for a fair way of managing the USs transition away from carbon-based fuels, and because, in many ways, it seems to actually succeed. It certainly highlights some of the crucial questions, and it just may do a whole lot more. In normal times, it might automatically command a bit of attention View Full Text »

• July 9th, 2001


• The Pew Climate Equity Conference

• First of all, full disclosure: when we arrived at Equity and Global Climate Change , we did not do so with entirely open minds. We were skeptical, frankly, that the fairness issue would get a fair treatment at Pews hands.

  Why Well, largely from our reading of Pew’s 1998 report The Complex Elements of Global Fairness , an odd bit of work in which the problem of the rich worlds overwhelming per capita emissions is brought up, held briefly against the light, and then swaddledgently, but rather too tightlyin a strange and suffocating complexity.

  As it happens, our skepticism was disappointed, though not entirely misplaced. First, though, place yourself at the Mayflower Hotel, a vaguely Rococo affair on Washingtons Connecticut Avenue. It was a fine spring day, there were plenty of carbos and coffee, and when Eileen Claussen, the president of the Pew Climate Center (and a former climate negotiator in the Clinton Administration), rose to introduce the proceedings, her words seemed quite unexceptionable. She told us, for example, that an effective international response to climate change must not only be environmentally sound and cost-effective, but equitable as well: fair to all nations, rich and poor. She quoted Michael Zammit Cutajar, executive secretary of the climate change secretariat, to the effect that the 1992 Rio convention defined the project of controlling climate change as a burden to be shared, and that this sharing would have to be one in which, under the rubric of common but differentiated responsibilities, the rich countries take the lead. Familiar words, these, and we didnt have to come to Washington to hear them. Still, in the time of G.W. Bush, they were a relief. View Full Text »

• July 9th, 2001


• Raise a Glass to Kyoto

• The climate showdown, as everyone knows, is coming soon. The Europeans are doing their best to ratify Kyoto, but the Japanese-essential to any ratification coalition that lacks the US-are waffling, and the US (contrary to the promises it made last month in Sweden) is maneuvering to get its way. If it does, the setback will be strategically serious and politically demoralizing, so much so that few climate activists, today, are willing to even admit the possibility of failure. Doing so, after all, could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  At some point, however, we have to take stock. That point would have come after last November’s COP6 in The Hague, but then COP6 deadlocked, and we learned that it would be continued in Bonn this summer. The Supreme Court soon thereafter appointed G.W. Bush as the US president, and ever since then the ball has been relentlessly in play. Now, of course, all eyes are turning to Bonn, where the second shoe is about to drop, and already the futurists among us are looking forward to COP7 in Morocco, and to Rio+10 in Johannesburg. After all, the great thing about the Kyoto Protocol, like the UNFCCC before it, is that it’s a moving target. If we lose the next round, there’ll be another, and another. Failure, as they say, is not an option. View Full Text »

• July 9th, 2001


• Europe at the Crossroads

• It’s hard for Americans, even progressive Americans, to imagine a future in which the U.S. is no longer the “indispensable country.” This is as true when it comes to climate politics as it is in any other area, and for much the same reason-the U.S. looms so large that it simply cannot be ignored. We emit, in particular, such a high share of world’s carbon that, in the end, any climate regime to which we do not immediately subscribe is doomed to failure.

  Or so, at least, it seems. And it’s because it does that the history of the climate talks is a history of attempts to placate the U.S. Which is, again, a big part of the reason why the Kyoto negotiations-and the Kyoto Protocol itself-are in such a sorry state. The fact of the matter is that, barring sudden deliverance by a new energy revolution on a computer-boom scale, the U.S. as we know it today will refuse and resist any climate treaty even remotely appropriate to the threat. The fossil-fuel lobby is just too powerful here to expect anything else. Which is why, perversely and quite inadvertently, the Bush administration may have just done the world a colossal favor. View Full Text »

• June 9th, 2001


• Lies and Economic Models

• Amory Lovins and other green techno-optimists have long argued that there are numerous technologies and policies that could reduce energy use and emissions at a net profitthe so-called no regrets policies that would save more money than they cost to implement. Conservative economists, many of them employed or supported by the Department of Energy, have argued that this simply cant be true, since energy marketslike all marketsare optimal. (This is the famous twenty dollar bill argument; i.e., there cant be twenty-dollar bills lying on the ground, because people would have already picked them up).

  Many economists, of course, see the bills everywhere. 2500 economists including eight Nobel laureates signed the Economists Statement on Climate Change in 1997, which declares Economic studies have found that there are many potential policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions for which the total benefits outweigh the total costs. View Full Text »

• June 9th, 2001


• The EcoEquity Interview: Wolfgang Sachs

• Wolfgang Sachs is a senior research fellow at the Wuppertal Institute of Climate, Environment and Energy. He has long been active in the German and Italian green movements and is currently Chair of the Board of Greenpeace in Germany. He is the author of For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires, the editor of the immensely influential Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, and the co-author of Greening the North: A Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity, which goes beyond critique to envisage concrete alternatives and feasible processes for social transition. More recently still, he is the author of Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development and, in the role that occasioned this interview, a co-author of the lead chapter of the Third Assessment Reports Working Group 3 report. Working Group 3, of course, focuses on mitigation, and its first chapter contains the TARs most explicit discussion of equity.

  >This is a long interview, but it barely scratches the surface of the issues. View Full Text »

• May 18th, 2001


• The CEO Interview: Anil Argawal

• February 23, 2001

  CEO: We were surprised by depth of the equity discussion at COP6, and it seemed to us that it had come some distance from 1990, when you and Sunita published Global Warming in an Unequal World. Do you agree, and if so, how would you characterize the changes View Full Text »

• February 23rd, 2001


• 4P or not 4P

• When the administration of Bush II decided that it wasn’t going to regulate CO2 emissions in the electric utility sector, it also postponed an important debate over the form those regulations will ultimately take, a debate with key implications for climate equity. The “4P” (four pollutant) legislation that Bush preemptively vetoed would have required rules to allocate a fixed carbon emission cap among utilities. A significant controversy had already emerged among environmental organizations over how this might be done, and this debate should not be forgotten. View Full Text »

• January 9th, 2001


• HELLO WORLD! Climate Equity Observer: Issue number 1

• This is the first issue of Climate Equity Observer.

  Its purpose, since you asked, is to put a single idea onto the agenda. To wit: if we hope to make a soft landing in a tolerable future climate, we’re going to have to shift from the initial Kyoto framework to a new “equity framework” based on equal per capita rights to the atmosphere. This idea is already on the table in most of the rest of the world. We want to put it on the agenda in the United States. View Full Text »

• January 1st, 2001


• Adequacy and Equity: Three Focal Questions

• By Stephen Bernow and Sivan Kartha

  Note: Steve Bernow, a former EcoEquity Board Member, was the head of the Tellus Institute’s Energy Department. This is one of his last essays, written with Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute shortly before his unexpected death on July 5th, 2003. He is missed.

  This paper asks three questions that are focal to devising an effective climate protection regime. The first two questions – What is “adequacy” and What is “equity” – arise from the observation that both adequacy and equity are necessary features of an effective and politically acceptable international climate regime: View Full Text »

• July 1st, 2000