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Ten Years After Paris

Not failure, not yet, but we can see it from here

2015’s Paris Agreement could have been a turning point. It posited a world in which all countries – the wealthy and the rest – would do their proper parts, as they saw them, to stabilize the climate system. Paris wasn’t ideal — there was no agreed way of understanding national fair shares in the common effort of global transition, and no real climate finance strategy, and of course there was no enforcement. But there was still a real chance at another pathway, another storyline.

Ten years later, such guarded hope is even more difficult to sustain. Despite a superbloom of technological solutions, the international climate regime is failing catastrophically. Paris promised a new kind of cooperation, but instead the talks have been stalled by systemic pathologies rooted in long historical injustices, by grotesque levels of inequality both between and within countries, and by the entrenched power of the fossil-fuel complex. Current policies are steering the world far beyond the 1.5°C warming limit, with devastating consequences already being borne disproportionately by the poor, especially in the Global South.

The abject inadequacy of the NDCs (the national pledges) is a consequence and not a cause. The central fact of the Paris regime is that the NDCs are weak because there has been no meaningful finance breakthrough. Nor can there be, not while the wealthy – people and nations – utterly fail to do their fair shares. This is one of the key points of  this year’s Equity Review, Inequity, Inequality, Inaction, a report that stresses that Global North countries have uniformly failed to do their fair shares; and that while Global South countries — with important exceptions — have done far better, they too have not done enough; and that, absent the finance support they need to leapfrog to a post-carbon world, they cannot reasonably be expected to.

As one of the authors of Inequity, Inequality, Inaction,  I fear it will be overlooked in the informational avalanche of the COP. So let me add, as an enticement to your attention, that we have allowed ourselves to stray from the  stiff, overdrawn Global North vs Global South positions that often define international climate politics. The whole truth is more complex, and we have, in this report, tried to face it. We have in particular concluded that, at a certain point, the finger of blame must turn from the Global North and point directly at the world’s rich elites, who have repeatedly used their vast wealth to amass disproportionate political power, and then used that power to service their often fatally short-sighted conceits and self-interests.

This isn’t exactly news, but neither have the dots here been clearly and repeatedly connected. The fact is that the world’s rich could easily afford to finance a just global climate transition, and would barely even notice, say, an expenditure of $1.3 trillion, the amount needed to deliver on the Baku to Belem roadmap. Such a figure fades to insignificance compared to the additional $33.9 trillion the global one percent have accumulated since Paris. The rich could pay the entire cost of the roadmap, say by way of progressive global climate taxes, and hardly feel it.

Not that I expect them to embrace such taxes anytime soon. In fact, this is a moment of retrenchment and “greenlash,” and incrementalism, we are endlessly told, is the order of the day. But let us not bend too quickly to agree. The truth is rather that the climate reckoning demands a more challenging kind of realism, a “climate realism” that takes the imperatives of both science and justice into proper account, and admits (sorry if I sound like a “doomer”) that our civilizational survival is contingent on a transition to a fairer world.

It’s too late to avoid a 1.5°C overshoot, but it’s not yet too late to keep that overshoot reasonably brief and shallow, and to do absolutely everything in our power to avoid even a transient warming of 2°C, which we can now now begin to see, dimly but unmistakably, on the near horizon. Unfortunately, given the power of the fossil-fuel complex – from Houston to Riyadh to Moscow – this is shaping up to be a tall order indeed. It’s not too much to say that everything depends, as per Dubai’s final agreement, on “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” We can only hope that the Brazilians play their hand well in Belém, and that COP30 somehow manages, in the words of environment minister Marina Silva, to land an outcome that “sends a message” on a “just, planned, gradual and long-term decommissioning of fossil fuels”.

Silva is being “realistic” of course. You can tell by her reference to “gradual and long-term” decommissioning. In truth, the fossil-fuel phaseout had best happen as quickly as humanly possible, and even in the best case, wherein we achieve the “highest possible ambition” called for by the Court of International Justice, we’re going to be flirting with catastrophe.

See INEQUITY, INEQUALITY, INACTION — A civil society equity review of the post-Paris climate regime and the new NDCs, with a focus on mitigation, the role of climate finance, and equity and fair shares across and within countries.

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Guest Essay: A New Idea as COP30 Approaches

Robin Hahnel, U.S. left libertarian economist and stalwart of participatory economics, has long been a friend of EcoEquity, and of the Climate Equity Framework that defines much of its work. In this guest essay, he argues that a fair shares climate transition can most effectively be financed by a global emissions trading system. Such an idea will of course be anathema to many of today’s activists, but note well that Hahnel speaks for a system in which “trades” only count towards a nation’s fair share if they are aggregated and accounted at the national level — like so:

“(1) If they wish any country government should be allowed to certify emission reduction credits for emitters within its national territory who apply for credits to sell.

(2) When calculating whether a country has complied with its national pledge to reduce emissions, any emission reduction credits purchased by anyone within the country will be added to the country’s national emission allowance, and any emission reduction credits sold by anyone within the country will be subtracted from the country’s national emission allowance.”

By Robin Hahnel.  Robin can be reached at robinhahnel1946@gmail.com

 

Ideally an international climate agreement would be:

  1. Effective: Reduce global emissions sufficiently to reduce the danger of cataclysmic climate change to an acceptable risk before it becomes too late.
  2. Equitable: Countries’ responsibilities for emission reductions should depend on (a) how much they contributed to creating the problem and (b) how capable they are of contributing to its solution.
  3. Efficient: The overall cost of reducing global emissions should be minimized.

Readers should always ask whether, and to what extent, any proposal under discussion achieves these three goals – what we might call the three “E’s” for an international climate agreement.

In Climate Change Not All Countries are Created Equal!

Before presenting a proposal for an agreement that would be effective, equitable, and efficient I want to explain where the distinction between “economically more developed countries” and “economically less developed countries” came from, and the important role it has played in international climate negotiations. The terminology “more developed countries,” or MDCs, and “less developed countries,” or LDCs, is taken from the development economics literature. More economically developed countries traditionally include countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the countries which comprise the European Union. Most other countries, whose citizens have yet to enjoy the benefits of economic development, are traditionally designated as less developed countries.

Under the Kyoto protocol, which was negotiated in Kyoto Japan in 1997 and entered into force in 2005 after it was ratified by 192 countries, but not the United States, only countries designated as more developed were expected to commit to mandatory emission reductions, while less developed countries were excluded from mandatory emission reductions, presumably until they reach some higher level of economic development. However, this binary distinction between more and less developed countries fails to take account of important differences within each category. For example, China and the Republic of the Congo were both classified as less developed countries under the Kyoto protocol. But China bears much more responsibility for causing climate change and has much more capability to contribute toward its solution than the Republic of Congo; even though China bears far less responsibility and capability than the United States, which of course is classified as a more developed country.

While international negotiations continue to be dominated by disputes between less developed and more developed “blocs,” in truth the binary distinction between more developed and less developed countries is quite imprecise. For years nobody had developed procedures to overcome this problem. However, fortunately, that is no longer the case. We can now measure different levels of responsibility and capability on a continuum. Continue reading “Guest Essay: A New Idea as COP30 Approaches”

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The Planet Will Warm Past 1.5°C. What Now?

The only way of ensuring that the overshoot is temporary is to decisively defeat the fossil fuel cartel.

This essay was originally published by The Nation, here

The 1.5°C temperature target is difficult to honestly and openly discuss. Within the climate movement, it has become a locus of anguish, confusion, and even despair. Long a symbol of mobilization and hope, 1.5°C has become central to both activist campaigns and scientific analysis. Yet it’s now clear that the planet will almost certainly warm more than 1.5°C.

This is a rough prospect. It will likely condemn countless communities, many of them largely innocent of responsibility for the climate crisis, to suffering and destruction on a vast scale. It will trigger major ecological crises, extinctions first among them—the coral reefs, to pick just one example, could almost entirely vanish as the warming breaches the 1.5°C line.

These are not encouraging words, but they should not be taken as invitations to despair, or to a strange denialism in which, fearing hopelessness, we soft-pedal the severity of our circumstances. Because the truth is that the planet is not doomed, and neither are the world’s most climate vulnerable people.

The message here is that it’s time to act. Fortunately, significant action seems finally to be possible. At the last climate summit, after a grand push from the Global South coalition (the G77 + China) and the climate movement, the long-deadlocked battle to establish a “loss and damage” fund was finally won. That fund could finance disaster prevention and disaster mitigation in regions that have been pushed beyond their adaptive capacities. There will, of course, be limits to such interventions, but this could be the beginning of real climate internationalism. And it would not be alone. To cite just one other justification for cautious optimism, the renewable technology revolution has finally arrived.

Still, implacably, year by year, the “emissions budgets” are being drawn down, and the IPCC’s new “Synthesis Report” has made this undeniable. We’re going to hit 1.5°C. Thus, if 1.5°C is still achievable, it is only by way of an “overshoot and decline” pathway in which the temperature, in time, drops back below 1.5°C. As Peter Thorne, a physical geographer at Maynooth University in Ireland, noted at the report’s launch, “Almost irrespective of our emissions choices in the near term, we will probably reach 1.5 degrees early in the next decade.… The real question is whether we reach 1.5 degrees and then maybe go a little bit over and come back down or whether we go blasting through one and a half degrees and two degrees and keep on going.”

The challenge now is to limit the depth and duration of the 1.5°C overshoot and thus the destruction that occurs during and after it. This means, among much else, rapidly phasing out fossil fuels, a tremendously challenging prospect that will disrupt economies and political alliances around the world. Such a phaseout can succeed only if it unfolds in a manner that is widely accepted as fair.

Continue reading “The Planet Will Warm Past 1.5°C. What Now?”

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Why you should read The Deluge

The first thing I want to say about The Deluge, Stephen Markley’s doorstop of a novel on the climate emergency, is that the prestige reviews it has thus far garnered, at least in the US – I’m thinking in particular of the Times, the Post, and the LA Times – are all a bit irritated by it, and all of them in irritating ways. Especially the LA Times, which actually complains that The Deluge “drowns us in catastrophes”. Don’t get me wrong – there are good criticisms to make here — but somehow these reviews avoid, or miss, or downplay, the point that should be highlighted, which is that you should absolutely read The Deluge. In fact, should put it at the top of your stack. This book is an event like few others, and you don’t want to miss it.

I’ll not go into the details. This isn’t my job and in any case I don’t want to drop any spoilers. Which seems to be a part of the problem that seriously reviewing The Deluge poses. How, for example, do you talk about the ending? Unlike Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, which was always going to conclude with an uptick – Stan’s point is to show that we are not doomed, that we could absolutely make a different future – The Deluge is more an extrapolation of the current storyline, the one we’re trapped in, and let’s just say that this extrapolation ends on a razor’s edge.

Many things here are just absolutely fucking great. One of them, a big one, is its take on the climate movement. We talk, some of us, about “the movement ecosystem” – how the frontline activists work in implicit if sometimes hostile coalition with the legislative activists, how the technologists are essential, but prone to exaggerate their own importance, how the climate movement, as it become the climate justice movement, is passing through some challenging cultural water, how eco-desperation can decay into eco-terrorism – but rarely, if ever, has there been a fiction that more intelligently centers these cross currents, even as it shows the resulting mélange being tossed about in rising waves of seemingly unstoppable fossil-fueled fascism.

Also, the writing can be sublime.

What criticisms would I highlight? Well, the description of Kate Morris, the charismatic activist at the center of the tale, can in extreme moments collapse, or almost collapse, into caricature. On the other hand, I have to add that I would really like to have been on her staff, back before everything went to shit. Also, if you’re sick unto death by the suggestion that the US will have to lead the world out of these dark precincts, you’re probably not going to love the pathway forward, which includes an embattled US Administration managing, despite all, to nonetheless lead negotiations that actually achieve a viable international climate accord. Which, given the strength of the winds blowing against it, isn’t really all that bad.

Here’s a quick summary, as that deal emerges out of some very delicate talks in the tumultuous year 2037:

“The framework was not a new idea. Each country would bring its per capita carbon emissions into alignment so the carbon budget of developing countries could rise minimally while developed nations would have to drastically reduce theirs. The CSDF [ Climate Stabilization and Development Fund] would pay for zero-carbon infrastructure in the Global South, while debt forgiveness would be tied to each participant’s decarbonization and biodiversity preservation. Free riders would be dealt with, first with limited sanctions and then with economic boycotts. If the major economies could stick to this, it would flush the carbon out of the world’s economy to limit warming to 2.5 degrees.”

Do note that terrifying number. Because, by the time we get to this point (page 814) in the tale, the Paris temperature goal is fading history. And note too that even holding this desperate line — 2.5C is not where we would choose to turn the tide — involves winning an endlessly deepening and dispiriting battle against insane new forms of sociopathic Christian authoritarianism. It also involves a culture dominated by virtual reality, an AI-assisted surveillance state, identity politics, heroic but cantankerous scientists, very clever bombs, cap and dividend, a democratic revolution in China, the methane emergency, solar radiation management, and the widespread acceptance, won at very high cost at the very last moment, that there is no way forward save the realization that we really are in this together.

The Deluge is long. But it’s written by a real novelist – this is not climate fiction as usual. And it is imbued with a realist sensibility, tinged with hope, that I for one found to be quite congenial. It deserves way more attention than it has thus far received.

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Al Gore’s Rant at Davos

Al Gore has had his moments before. It’s always good to recall that — back in 2007, when the Kyoto Protocol was still a thing, and the realists of the day were telling us the equity challenge would have to wait — he used his access to the pages of the The New York Times to remind us that

“Countries will be asked to meet different requirements based upon their historical share or contribution to the problem and their relative ability to carry the burden of change. This precedent is well established in international law, and there is no other way to do it.”

His latest moment came at a panel at this year’s Davos jamboree. It was called Leading the Charge Through Earth’s New Normal and it began with Johan Rockström and Joyeeta Gupta introducing critical new research on “Safe and Just Planetary Boundaries”. Watch their presentation, noting that the planetary boundaries work now contains a much greater emphasis on justice than it used to — Joyeeta says “redistribution” twice! For more info on this work, see here, and here, and here. But first skip forward to 37:00 (or 39:00 if you have absolutely no attention span) to hear Gore’s rather brilliant rant. And I mean this in the best possible way.

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Threading the Needle at COP27

Almost nothing – but something real – changed at this year’s climate conference

There is something in the modern radical mind that wants the climate negotiations to fail. Such a failure, after all, would seem to prove that this wretched system cannot be reformed, that only a revolutionary break can re-open the human future.

COP27, the climate conference in Sharm El Sheik in Egypt, was not, however, a failure. I say this despite the fact that my inbox contains, among much else, an alert from an international organization I generally support (and will not name) that tells me that “For the 27th time in its history, COP, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, has failed. The rapid degradation of our planet by our industrial economy will not be held in check.”

Alas, this email’s date stamp, November 18, places it two days before COP27 ended. During those two days, the rich countries that had blocked the establishment of the Loss and Damage fund folded under immense political pressure, thus allowing COP27 to finally create the fund.

The United States, the greatest of the miscreants, was the last to stand down. By some reports, it only did so after a last-minute threat by European negotiators to abandon the talks. But despite this win, the endless U.S. stalling did immense damage. In particular, it allowed the Egyptian presidency, no friend of humanity and nature, to play out an end-game gambit in which, finally, the core mitigation text—which is far too weak—couldn’t be challenged without putting the new fund at risk.

This was a failure, no doubt about it. But it was not a systemic failure. It wasn’t the fault of “the COP”—as in “COP27 is a COP out,” one of the least inspired of the recent headlines—unless this accusation extends to the UN system itself, which condemns the climate talks to consensus decision-making. This might be fair enough, save for one thing – blaming the UN lets the governments themselves off the hook, and this will not do, because the governments could yet change the rules.

Still, the Loss and Damage fund is a very big deal, or will be if we manage to provision it – to fund it adequately. As Mohamed Adow, the executive director of Power Shift Africa, put it, “What we have is an empty bucket. Now we need to fill it so that support can flow to the most impacted people who are suffering right now at the hands of the climate crisis.”

This is exactly right, and not just because a great deal of loss and damage finance is needed. So too is a great deal of mitigation finance. And adaptation finance. And just transition finance. But after COP27’s loss and damage finance battle, something very large has shifted. Back in the old days, when it was still possible to honestly imagine that mitigation alone would be sufficient, it was also possible to argue that the redirection of private capital flows would more or less suffice. But those days are over. Today, no one honestly believes that a meaningful flow of loss and damage finance will come through private channels, and this realization spills over to the transition portfolio as a whole.

The decision to create the loss and damage fund has thus queued up the real financing battle, in which international public finance takes center stage. Further, it did this even while it pushed the linked battle to phase out fossil fuels to a qualitatively new level. That battle was lost at COP27, but this was just an initial skirmish. Indeed, at COP27, the government of India, which will soon hold the G20 Presidency, came out, again and unambiguously, for the “phase down” (not “out”) of all fossil fuels, not just coal. The politics here are complex and fraught, and they promise to remain so, but this was unambiguously good news. The old days in which all major G77 politicians could be expected to reflexively argue that fossil energy is essential to development are, it seems, over.

Continue reading “Threading the Needle at COP27”

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Fair Shares – Lessons from Practice, Thoughts on Strategy

The climate fair shares idea is no longer novel. But as the planetary crisis deepens, its profile is changing. Humanity is facing a civilizational emergency – a polycrisis with both climate and injustice at its core – and we need big ideas that can help guide us out of it.

This discussion paper, which was prepared by the Climate Equity Reference Project for the Climate Action Network International, is focused on one such idea: climate fair shares. Its purpose is to support analysis and campaigns for equitable climate action, including – quite explicitly – greatly increased international climate finance flows.

Note here a political premise — the equity challenge cannot be set aside while we concentrate on “implementation.” To be absolutely clear — we are in trouble, but a rapid global climate transition can still be achieved. We have (all) the money and (most of) the technology we need. But it is hard to see how any sufficiently rapid transition will be possible unless the benefits and promises and also the unavoidable pain and disruption are shared amongst the people of this world in a way that is widely accepted as being fair, or at least fair enough. We can not follow, yet again, the all too often repeated pattern in which most of the benefits are captured by those who are already wealthy and powerful, while most of the pain and suffering is born by those already marginalized and oppressed. 

Some highlights:

  • Lessons and Thoughts contains a careful executive summary, which is good, because the paper as a whole is pretty long.  By today’s standards. 
  • It contains a tidy chapter on planetary inequality – which is what you get when you have a world of nations, some of them wealthy and some of them not, and all of them internally stratified between rich and poor.
  • It contains a brief history of the equity debate within the international Climate Action Network, which is at this point a global network of more than 1,800 civil society organizations in over 130 countries.
  • It reviews the various fair shares projects that have been done over the past few years — in Norway, Canada, the US, the UK, Quebec, New Zealand, France and South Africa.  The lessons are both varied and interesting.
  • It contains a brief — if somewhat technical — explanation of why, when thinking about national fair shares in an emergency climate mobilization, it might help to lean into the Climate Equity Reference framework.  As opposed to some of the alternatives.
  • It lays out some preliminary — but not entirely preliminary — thoughts about “climate realism”, which is considerably different from the traditional variety.  Given the future we’re looking at, as we shoot far beyond the boundaries of a safe climate system, this conversation needs real attention.
  • It offers some advice on framing the financial costs of stabilizing the climate system, and why these costs – though certainly denominated in trillions – might be far more tractable than they appear.  Particularly given how much money we waste today, on the militaries and, of course, on the rich.
  • Finally, it asks a group of big strategic questions, and invites reflections on difficult equity challenges that go beyond even climate fair shares.

Tom Athanasiou, for the Climate Equity Reference Project.

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Adam Tooze: “There Is a Fix for Climate Change. But Can We Afford It?”

In this interview from Global Reboot, the Foreign Policy podcast, its editor in chief Ravi Agrawal asks the economic historian & critic & polymath & general know-it-all Adam Tooze some key questions and then lets him run, which is basically all you can do with Tooze.

The key topics here are:

1) the financing demands of the global climate transition, which for the purposes of this discussion limited to mitigation. Hint: 2 to 4 trillion dollars a years in additional investment, about half of which is “inefficient”, which is to say that it is insufficiently profitable or risky or otherwise unwise to count on, at least in a business-as-usual world.

2) the political conditions under which this mitigation finance might be mobilized, and why, in Tooze’s view there are only two ways it might actually happen. The first is something like a global green new deal; the second is a massive public / private “derisking” enterprise of the kind that Blackrock’s Larry Fink dreams about.

The first, of course, is ruled out by the realism of the day, while the second would stink to high heaven.

In any case, this is short and focused — an interesting piece of the puzzle.