Year: 2008

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. Continue reading “The Greening of the South”

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.” Continue reading “The Debt of Nations”

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.

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.

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.” Continue reading “Stop Climate Chaos Manifesto”