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The VECA (Vision for Equitable Climate Action)

Dave Roberts has just penned a must-read piece called At last, a climate policy platform that can unite the left.  Among its many virtues, it prominently notes the Vision for Equitable Climate Action, aka “the VECA”, which was recently released (after two years of work) by the US Climate Action network, and then opines that it is “surprisingly substantial”.  As one of the VECA’s many authors (there were about 175 people, all told, involved) I have to agree.

It goes without saying that the VECA lays out a justice-first vision.   What does need to be said is that this vision is an international one. You wouldn’t know this from Roberts’ piece, which like most all American climate commentary, is very strongly national in its focus.

Roberts refers to international matters in only two ways.  First, by way of the science, which is global by definition).  Second, by noting that the US climate left’s emerging consensus is not yet a comprehensive one.  In particular, he notes that it does not yet include “regenerative agriculture, adaptation and resilience, international climate justice, decarbonization for heavy industry, and much more.”

But the VECA, unlike the movement as a whole, lays does down substantial points on international climate justice, which is an important point because, for all the severity of the American emergency, international climate justice will not wait. 

Here’s the VECA’s entire Global Issues and Responsibilities section:

  • “The United States must immediately rescind its threat to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, and, if necessary, take the appropriate steps to rejoin that Agreement. It must also immediately make a new contribution to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to replace the U.S. Obama‐period disbursement that the Trump Administration rescinded; end public financing and subsidies of fossil energy and deforestation; and begin a long‐term process designed to increase its future actions to align more closely with its fair share of the shared global effort to stabilize the climate system.
    • The U.S.’s immediate new GCF contribution must be justifiable both ethically and terms of the scale of the necessary global mobilization. For example, as the global Green New Deal discussion has evolved, authoritative voices have proposed that the U.S. contribute $200 billion to the GCF, an amount that, when taken together with a 70% reduction in U.S. domestic emissions by 2030, would represent a good faith effort to meet the demands of both science and global equity.

    • The U.S. must also immediately end all public financing and subsidy of fossil energy and deforestation, both within its borders and throughout the world. This termination must include but is not limited to oil, gas, and coal project financing, as well as loans and guarantees via multilateral development banks, export credit agencies, and other taxpayer‐backed government agencies.

    • At the same time as these immediate actions are taken, the American people must begin a profound new conversation about global climate justice and about the U.S.’s fair share in the shared global effort of stabilizing the climate system. Doing our fair share unavoidably involves radically scaling up both U.S. domestic actions and international cooperation. This new conversation must consider all relevant finance channels (e.g., Global Environmental Facility funds and bilateral initiatives, as well as contributions to the GCF), and must include both U.S. obligations within the Paris regime and the obligations of fossil energy companies, as per the internationally recognized “polluter pays” principle.

    • The scope of international cooperation must also go beyond mitigation finance to include significant assistance in the form of technology transfer and other measures to ensure that environmentally sound and socially just technologies are affordable and easily accessible to poorer countries. And, critically, it must include adaptation and disaster recovery assistance as well as technological leapfrogging.

  • U.S. trade policies must be reviewed, rewritten, and implemented in a manner consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Such policies must not allow companies to offset or export their emissions overseas; they must not encourage fossil fuel production; and they must not be weaponized—such as through investor‐state dispute settlement mechanisms— to prevent other countries from implementing policies to combat climate change.

  • The U.S. must recognize its role in contributing to current and future climate‐induced forced migration. As part of this responsibility, the U.S. must provide support, commensurate with a fair‐shares analysis, for persons permanently displaced by climate change, allow for significant inflows of climate‐displaced persons into our country, and ensure full protection of the rights of those who relocate here. The U.S. must also play a constructive role in ongoing and future processes to develop international agreements regarding the rights of climate‐displaced persons.

  • U.S.‐based fossil‐fuel companies must cease domestic oil and gas exploration and development, and U.S.‐based banks, insurance companies, and asset management companies must cease the financing of such activities. If not curtailed, U.S. oil and gas expansion will impede the world’s ability to manage a climate‐safe, equitable decline of oil and gas production. This policy demands a correspondingly ambitious just transition program, which must be well planned and funded at scale.

  • It is in the national security interests of the U.S. to rapidly and fairly transition its own economy away from fossil fuels and to assist other countries in doing the same. To that end, it is also in the national security interests of the U.S. to rapidly wind down our extraction and exports of fossil fuels while ensuring a just transition for extraction‐dependent workers and communities.

  • Consistent with these principles, it is against the national security interests of the U.S. to provide any form of assistance to corporations and foreign governments, if that assistance will be used to explore and develop fossil fuel resources, or to build infrastructure such as pipelines or export and import terminals that lock in fossil fuel extraction and use.

  • It follows that under no circumstances should the U.S. military intervene or provide technical or logistical assistance to secure fossil fuel infrastructure—whether owned by U.S. corporations or not—against social movements opposed to extraction, or foreign governments planning or implementing a fossil fuel phase‐out. Such actions would be inconsistent with U.S. national security.“

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Why “Planet of the Humans” is crap

Mostly, Planet of the Humans is just so fucking bad. So bad that its good points are useless. It does have some good points – there seem to be a lot of rock festivals in Vermont that claim, incorrectly, to be running on solar. They totally deserve ridicule. But you would never recommend this film to anyone. You’d be carrying water for the fossils if you did. So it’s a failure on its own terms, since it wants, or pretends to want, to bring the truth about renewables to the green movement.  And it may even, judging from the ending, where both Bill McKibben and the Sierra Club are said to clarify their positions, make us a bit more careful about our tactical alliances. But boy oh boy does this guy—Jeff Gibbs is his name—know less than he thinks.

It’s too bad, because his central complaint, that the environmental movement is looking to green tech to save us, and believing quite a bit of nonsense in the process, is pretty legit, though it’s less legit every year, and you wouldn’t know it from this film.  Anyway, this kind of techno-optimism is and has always been a huge mistake, and it throws us to the mercies of the snake-oil salesman and, in general, to the corruptions of capitalist realism.  This is an excellent point, and it could have been made well.  Gibbs could have built a good bit of teaching around it.  But instead he threw so many cheap shots and so much old news into the bucket that it ruined, and I mean *ruined*, the mix.  The truth is that he doesn’t have the slightest idea about how to make his critique in a helpful way. 

Once you get beyond the pro-solar rock-concert bullshit, Gibbs’ rap against renewables is embarrassingly wrong.  Not all of it, but most of it.  Moreover, it is fantastically dated.  He seems to not even know that the net-energy analysis of renewable energy systems is a thing.  Which is odd, because Richard Heinberg is an expert in this field, and Gibbs embeds him at the center of his narrative. Heinberg, alas, has long been pessimistic about the potential for renewables to produce net energy on the scale we’ll need, and here he says that “we’re getting, in some cases, no energy from these potential options,” which is just what Gibbs wanted. *

Then, unsurprisingly, talk turns to population.  Heinberg’s provides the framing — “There are too many human beings, using too much, too fast” — and then Gibbs takes us off to the Malthusian races, wherein we’re told, by Stephen Churchill (an anthropologist who’s called out as “a scientist”) that “I don’t think we’re going to find a way out of this one.”  The mix goes on, and in it we get exactly one sentence—“our consumption has also exploded, on average ten times per person, and many times more in the western world” — that might in any way be taken as a reference to class, or to class footprints.  As if you could just multiply the number of people by their average impact and, by so doing, get to the fundamental truth of our predicament. 

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We’re not going back to normal

There was a great article in MIT Technology Review a few days ago that everyone should read, on how social distancing will remain a big part of our lives until “until either enough people have had Covid-19 to leave most immune (assuming immunity lasts for years, which we don’t know) or there’s a vaccine.”

We will adapt, of course. But like everything else in this caste society of ours, this adaptation will, all else being equal, concentrate the pain on the poor and the vulnerable. Here’s how the author, one Gideon Lichfield, put it:

“As usual, however, the true cost will be borne by the poorest and weakest. People with less access to health care, or who live in more disease-prone areas, will now also be more frequently shut out of places and opportunities open to everyone else. Gig workers—from drivers to plumbers to freelance yoga instructors—will see their jobs become even more precarious. Immigrants, refugees, the undocumented, and ex-convicts will face yet another obstacle to gaining a foothold in society.

Moreover, unless there are strict rules on how someone’s risk for disease is assessed, governments or companies could choose any criteria—you’re high-risk if you earn less than $50,000 a year, are in a family of more than six people, and live in certain parts of the country, for example. That creates scope for algorithmic bias and hidden discrimination, as happened last year with an algorithm used by US health insurers that turned out to inadvertently favor white people.

The world has changed many times, and it is changing again. All of us will have to adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.”

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The Coronavirus Economic Crash

I don’t often recommend articles from Jacobin, but this is spot on as far as I can tell. 

The ending . . .

“Governments are out of monetary fire power. If they respond at all, it must be with fiscal policy. Co-ordinated stimulus programs from the world’s major economies might be enough to prevent a significant downturn — and borrowing is now cheaper than ever. Given that the virus will have a greater impact on poorer countries and more vulnerable individuals, the response must be targeted at protecting the least well-off. And given that the climate crisis represents a far greater long-term threat to humanity than coronavirus, it should also promote decarbonization.

In other words, now is the perfect time for the Green New Deal. It remains to be seen whether governments led by Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel will seize the opportunity.”

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Climate Emergency Summit – David Spratt’s Science Update

David Spratt has been on the case for some time now, and he knows the science cold. So it’s well worth your time to read this brief “state of the science” summary he wrote for the amazing Australian Climate Emergency Summit that just took placein Melbourne. Do note one of the key takeaways, emphasized in the graphic here — we will hit 1.5C around 2030.

While we’re on the subject, here’s the conference declaration. It’s very much in the “emergency mobilization demands bipartisan action” camp, which doesn’t strike me as particularly realistic these days, but what do I know? I haven’t been to Australia since the fires. No way I can make meaningful short-term political judgements.

So I’m definitely not going to argue with comms expert Peter Lewis, who recently offered this in the Guardian:

“The idea of pushing for centrist, reasonable and sensible policies may chafe when the world is on the brink. It does not dispel the need to campaign hard at the margins – climate rebellions and school strikes are essential to shifting the window to make other policy change possible. But the risk is to confuse the movement with the moment. If political change is the answer and Australia can’t wait until 2022, then locating the Overton window and finding a way through it now seems the only viable way forward.”

The Overton climate window sure is open now! New polling indicates that 64% of Australians support “Setting a zero-carbon pollution target for 2030”.

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Equity in the Global Stocktake

Actually, the title of this report is Equity in the Global Stocktake and Independent Global Stocktake, the iGST being a loose but interesting collaborative of climate research institutes. We at the Climate Equity Reference Project are active in iGST equity debates, and wrote its initial scoping paper on the equity challenge.

Here’s the “blurb,” such as it is:

“In this paper, we’re looking at the scope of assessments in stocktaking as an issue of equity; some “quality” criteria for equity benchmarks and equity information in stocktaking; how the whole issue of climate finance and support could be dealt with from an equity point of view, what could be said about intranational equity; and what minimal (and other) standards of procedural equity should be guaranteed. “

This paper is fairly technical, but very much of interest, for the simple reason that equity is essential to any future climate regime in which anything like an “Ambition Mechanism” is actually functioning. Which is to say that the Paris Agreement’s much discussed ambition mechanism is still a dream.