Lester Brown

Lester Brown is the well-renowned author of the Plan B series and recent book World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.  His distinguished career, spanning agricultural policy, international development and environmental analysis, has seen him found two major environmental research institutes – the WorldWatch Institute in 1974 and the Earth Policy Institute in 2001 – and author or co-author 50 books. He is currently the President of the Earth Policy Institute based in Washington D.C.

He speaks to  Professor John Wiseman who is currently Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and Melbourne School of Population Health, on 31st July 2012.

JOHN WISEMAN: If you had just a few sentences to summarise the key messages you most wanted to get across in writing Plan B and World on the Edge, what would you say?

LESTER BROWN: The two biggest challenges, I think, that the world faces right now are the need to stabilise the climate and to stabilise population. Neither of these are easy but we’re well on our way to stabilising population. There are now 46 countries that have, essentially, zero population growth and a large part of Asia that is China, along with Korea, and Japan’s already stabilised its population. China’s going to be there in a matter of years so that’s a big chunk of the world. Then Europe,Western and Eastern Europe, have already stabilised their populations.

North America is moving in the right direction. Latin America is doing surprisingly well. Brazil’s population is projected to grow by 12% between now and 2050, only 12% which means they’re getting the brakes on pretty nicely, too. So the two big areas we have to concentrate on now are the Indian subcontinent, which has a total of 1.6 billion people. That’s India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and so forth, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Those are the two big population growth areas. They are also the two areas where most of the poverty is concentrated so we need to really concentrate on getting the brakes on population growth in those two regions of the world.

If we can do that, and it’s a combination of, of course, making sure reproductive healthcare and family planning services are available but it’s also education, making sure that children everywhere get at least an elementary school education, girls as well as boys. Then, we can begin to bring the birth rate down in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Then, we’ll be on the way home.

JOHN WISEMAN: And in relation to climate?

LESTER BROWN: Climate is a much more difficult issue. In contrast to population where 46 countries have already stabilised populations, there aren’t too many countries that have stabilised carbon emissions yet so that’s really a global challenge for us.

The good news is that in the United States, carbon emissions are starting to drop and I think are going to continue to drop very substantially during this decade.

The two big sources of carbon emissions in the US, as in most of the world, are coal and oil. We have, currently, 492 coal-fired power plants in the United States. Of those, 109 are scheduled to close within, if not this year, next year or very soon and there are more coming. We have a national campaign now that’s led by the Sierra Club called the Beyond Coal Campaign and the goal is to close every coal-fired power plant in the United States. Sierra’s working with many local groups, health groups, environmental groups, hundreds and hundreds of them across the country to close these plants. Mayor Bloomberg of New York in July of last year gave the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign $50 million. This is important, not just because it’s $50 million, although that, obviously, is important in and of itself, but it’s because Michael Bloomberg, one of the most successful businessmen of his generation, almost a household name, is the one who’s fuelling this effort. So I’m very optimistic on closing coal-fired power plants.

Now, with gasoline use, we have a number of trends coming together, some economic, some social, some political. One is that the US automobile fleet has started to shrink. In 2008, it was 248 million. 2009, it dropped to 246 million, 2010, to 242 million. That’s the last year for which we have complete data but I think it continued in 2011 and is going to continue in 2012. So in the United States, the growth of the automobile fleet’s been underway for a century now, is starting to decline.

Beyond that, the fuel efficiency of cars is increasing very fast in the US and this is partly because of the goals created by President Obama. When he was bailing out Detroit a couple of years ago, he got some commitments from them and one was to double the fuel efficiency of new cars sold by 2025 or, stated otherwise, new cars sold in this country in 2025 will use only half as much gasoline as those sold in 2010. So in 15 years, we’re cutting fuel use per car in half.

Beyond that, there’s now a cultural shift occurring in this country with young people. They are not part of the car culture in the way that my generation was and we, particularly growing up in a rural community, the car was how we socialised. When you’re 17 you’ve got a driver’s licence and you’ve got a car, or a pick-up truck, something you could drive, and that’s how you got around and got to see your friends in a rural community.

Today, we’re a largely urban society and so young people aren’t part of the car culture in the way that we were. There’s a real shift going on. They live in cities, most of them, and they use public transportation, they use bicycles. The Bike-Share Program, if you look at the people on these bikes, they’re between 20 and 40. They’re not between 60 and 80. No, it’s young people who are really taking to bikes and seeing them as their transport mode. So the combination of bikes and public transportation is where young people are today.

Two generations ago, the dream was to have a house in the suburbs and a car and so forth. That dream doesn’t exist anymore for young people. They’re not going to the suburbs. They don’t really want anything to do with the suburbs. They want to live in town.

JOHN WISEMAN: You’ve described some extremely optimistic indicators around energy efficiency and the shift from fossil fuel to renewable energy. If I was to ask you the biggest obstacles – the one or two biggest roadblocks in relation to solving the climate challenge, how would you describe them? 

LESTER BROWN: It would be the vested interests of big oil, and big coal and the influence they have, particularly in the Republican Party. They put a lot of money in political campaigns and now there are no limits on what they can put in so they’re just buying everything in sight.

Nonetheless, the trends are pretty clear and the gains in fuel efficiency, the cultural shift in young people regarding cars, is happening and it’s very difficult for them to alter that.

I saw an article about NASCAR recently…you know, automobile racing, car racing, and they’ve suddenly begun to panic because young people aren’t going to the races and so they’re seeing a shrinking audience. It’s an interesting question because I don’t think NASCAR’s going to last forever. Years, maybe, but not forever because the idea of having a powerful car with a lot of horsepower under the hood, it’s just not where young people are today. So these cultural shifts are more difficult to measure, usually, than economic shifts and they’re more difficult to anticipate as well but we’re clearly seeing a cultural shift and young people in this country are not, most of them, not part of the car culture.

JOHN WISEMAN: So do you feel, therefore, that the cultural shifts that you’ve talked about are sufficient to overcome the vested interest roadblocks that you’ve mentioned? 

LESTER BROWN: They are. The automobile industry, behind the scenes, do things… to prevent heavy investment in public transportation…they insist that we need to repair the roads and not build new transit facilities, so they’re behind the scenes and they’re doing things but the tide is pretty strong and it’s clear.

John Wiseman: Which leads me to a question about urgency. Many people will say that, yes, there are many good things happening in relation to energy efficiency and renewable energy, but we also know how quickly greenhouse gas emissions are rising and what the science tells us about the global temperature changes locked in and so on. When people say to you, “that’s all good …but it’s too late” what do you say to them? 

LESTER BROWN: When we use the term “Is it too late,” we have to say, “Is it too late for what?” Is it too late to prevent climate change from spiralling out of control? I don’t think anyone knows. We have to hope it’s not and then act accordingly with the urgency that that implies.

We’re seeing evidence now, almost every day, that the climate system is changing and this is obviously affecting the food prospects because agriculture, as it exists today, evolved over an 11,000 year period of rather remarkable climate stability. I mean, there were a few blips here and there and a mini ice age in the 13th century, but basically 11,000 years of pretty stable climate. So agriculture systems are designed to maximise production with that climate system but that climate system is now changing so with each passing year, the climate system and the agricultural system are more and more out of sync with each other and that is a very difficult thing to analyse and anticipate.

We know it’s happening. It’s inevitable and the question is can we get carbon emissions coming down soon enough to avert the worst consequences of climate change? We’re not going to avert all of them. We’re already experiencing them. I guess the question is, can we keep climate change from spiralling out of control? I don’t know the answer to that question but we certainly have to try.

JOHN WISEMAN: Returning to the point you’ve made about energy efficiency and the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, how much do you also think that the third element in that transition that needs to change is a reduction in the aggregate growth of the consumption of goods and services? How important is that in the mix? 

LESTER BROWN: Well, another interesting thing about the cultural shift is that the idea of acquiring property…starting with a small house and getting a bigger one and so forth, that acquisition of material things doesn’t exist with young people in the way it did with an earlier generation; the generations that were shaped by the Depression and World War Two, for example.

There was a period when growth was everything and more material possessions was everything but I think we’re beginning to leave that behind now. Values and attitudes are changing. The acquisition of material wealth is not something that looms very high in the minds of young people today. They don’t want to be bothered with it.

JOHN WISEMAN: How much of that is true, do you think, outside of the developed world – in China, Korea and India, where there is still considerable poverty and – many people would say – considerable need to expand material consumption?

LESTER BROWN: Well, the interesting question is what these countries are facing. I mean, their desire is to be like us and so they’re trying to adopt a 20th century economic model in the 21st century. Now, what if we sat back and said, “If you were designing an economy for the world today or some component like a transport system, if you were designing that for the 21st century, what would it look like and how would it be different from the one we’ve inherited from the 20th century?” The answer is it would be very different. If you were developing a new economy today, you’d have to take into account land scarcity, water scarcity, carbon emissions, a whole series of things that were not of particular importance in decades past but now they are.

So the question is how fast that rethinking will come.I remember doing a seminar for graduate students at Tsinghua University which is sometimes referred to as the MIT of China. It’s located in Beijing, and we were talking about cars and the future and I said, “Well, you know, you’re not going to be able to do what we did.” One student said, “But that’s our dream. That’s what we want, we want to do that,” and I said, “You know, in the United States, we have three cars for every four people. If you get three cars for every four people in China, you will have nine hundred million cars. If you get all the cars in the world today squeezed into one country, one third of one country because two thirds of China is uninhabitable,” I said, “that will not be a dream. That will be a nightmare.”

These are engineers, they should be thinking about how you design a transportation system for the 21st century, not how do you copy one that evolved during the 20th century. Forget the imitation. Be original. Be yourselves. Ask the relevant questions for today. Don’t ask how could we do what they did in the last century. That’s not where you want to be.

JOHN WISEMAN: I’m interested in your views about theories of change – how change happens. Can you talk a bit more about your view about the importance of cultural and social change as opposed to the importance of technological innovation? 

LESTER BROWN: Well, Malcolm Gladwell pioneered the concept of social tipping points, of political tipping points, and the interesting thing about tipping points is almost by definition, they’re difficult to anticipate, at least to anticipate accurately. Sometimes we don’t even see them coming. I mean, who saw the Berlin Wall coming down, you know, until it actually went down or I look at the Arab Spring of 2010 and it changed the government in almost every country in a large part of the Arab world and it happened in sort of several countries simultaneously.

These weren’t sort of random events. They’d reached a kind of tipping point suddenly. Things began to change. Partly it’s political, part of it is demographic; a lot of young people in the 15 to 30 age group. It’s technological; they have the internet now so they can organise, they can exchange information. It changes the whole ballgame. It’s not just a few adjustments here and there. It really fundamentally changes things.

We have an effort in Italy right now, led by a comedian, Beppe Grillo, to challenge the existing political structures, not of any particular party, just the traditional political structures, and they’ve begun running candidates for office just a week ago, two weeks ago. A 31-year old was elected Mayor of Palma, for example. They’re running candidates for all the local elections and everything. I mean, it’s amazing to see it happen and we’re going to see more of that.

We’re really on the edge of some fundamental changes that we can’t anticipate associated with the internet and information moving on the internet. It will override some of the traditional constraints of the systems but in ways that we cannot now easily imagine.

JOHN WISEMAN: So, given that, I’d like to ask you to put on your most optimistic hat and imagine we are sitting here in 2030 and we are discussing a world in which a really serious shift has begun towards the kind of changes which would have a real chance of preventing runaway climate change. Bearing in mind your point about how unpredictable the future can be, can you tell me how that change has occurred? 

LESTER BROWN: Most of us don’t like to change. I don’t like to change and I’ll go to great lengths to avoid changing sometimes but you reach these tipping points and then everything changes.

The United States before World War Two, if you’d conducted a poll on December 6th 1941, the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and said, you know, “Should we go to war?” probably 90% would have said, “No, we don’t want to get involved in another world war.” If you’d conducted that poll on Monday, December 8th, probably 90% would have said, “Yes, we’ve got to go,” and so it was just one event, that surprise attack. It was very successful from a military point of view on Pearl Harbour. I mean, the Japanese sunk half our Pacific fleet there in just one fell sweep but everything changed and we mobilised, we totally restructured the US industrial economy, not in decades, not in years but in a matter of months. Part of the key to that was banning the sale of automobiles.

President Roosevelt, early 1942, I think it was April 1st, and it wasn’t April Fool’s Day, I mean, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke, he said, “We ought to ban the sale of automobiles in the United States.” Then the car companies realised that they weren’t going to be making cars for a long time; they were going to be making tanks and planes. It created an extraordinary military machine and turned the tide in the process.

So it’s these tipping points that are difficult to anticipate but I think within the next five years, we’re going to be surprised at how fast things have changed and how fast we have changed, whether it’s in response to climate change and recognising the need to stabilise climate. I mean, up until now, climate change has mostly been someone else. You know, we see it on TV. It’s a flood or a heatwave in Moscow but suddenly this past summer was sort of like that.

In this country, we started with a drought and then the wildfires in Texas and then flooding in the Mississippi and then Hurricane Irene and so forth; the tornado in Tuscaloosa and then in Joplin. I mean, it largely destroyed two middle-sized towns. I realised that the news channels were becoming weather channels. set aside on a Saturday afternoon, 1.30 to 3.00, to watch the world track and field championships in Korea on NBC. This was on a Saturday. I turned on NBC channel at 1.30 and I didn’t get the track and field championships. I got Hurricane Irene. This is a major news network that had gone into around-the-clock coverage of the hurricane. It was a huge hurricane and it affected a lot of people on the East Coast. That, I think, is a sign of the times when news channels become weather channels and if you look at channels now and sort of think about it, they spend a lot more time on weather than they used to and people are interested in it. They’re concerned about that.

JOHN WISEMAN: Although the challenge then becomes how to join the dots between the weather and climate. Do you think people are starting to join those dots?

LESTER BROWN: They are. I liken it to recognising the link between smoking and health 20 years ago and the tobacco company CEOs are under oath saying, “There’s no proof of a link between smoking and health,” and get away with it. Then, within a year or two, everything had changed and they couldn’t say anything because no one would listen to them and no elected member of Congress would be seen in public with a tobacco company CEO. It just changed that fast. The Tobacco Institute used to be here in town, staffed by 300 people. Totally dismantled; forced to dismantle by NGOs and public opinion. I mean, it was amazing to see it happen. It happened very quickly…it had reached the tipping point and suddenly it was an entirely new ball game.

JOHN WISEMAN: Bearing in mind everything you’ve said about tipping points and given that at the end of the day tipping points are, by definition, to some extent, unpredictable, what’s your view about the highest priorities for action by people who would like to ensure, that when the tipping points occur, that responses can be as effective as possible? What are the most important things to be doing at the moment?

LESTER BROWN: The question I get most often as I travel around the world is, people ask me, “What can I do, what can I do?” and I think they expect me to say, “Recycle your newspapers, change your light bulbs,” and so on. Those lifestyle changes are important but we now have to change the system and that means becoming politically active, not for one party or another but to support the Beyond Coal campaign, for example. And be prepared to write letters to your Congressman to lobby, to demonstrate, you know, in front of a coal-fired power plant if necessary or in front of a utilities office. It can embarrass companies. There are banks in New York, investment banks, that if you threaten them with a demonstration, they’ll almost certainly think twice about going ahead on something because whether it’s Goldman Sachs or Bank of America or whoever, they don’t want their image smirched.

Having demonstrations and people with signs walking around creates that image that something is wrong and for people to start thinking something is wrong with a bank is not healthy for the bank. So we see environmental groups getting investment banks to agree not to invest in coal or any company that supports the development of coal. These things can become important and the coal-mining companies can’t raise capital as easily as they used to. No one wants to be associated with it. So those are the kinds of things that have happened and they happen quickly and they can have extraordinary consequences.

My bottom line feeling is things are going to change much faster than we realise and I think that change is probably more evident here in the United States right now where carbon emissions are dropping very fast as coal-fired power plants are closed and as gasoline use drops. Another interesting linkage between the two…42% of the diesel fuel used in the freight sector, rail freight sector, is used to move coal. If we’re not moving coal anymore, suddenly the demand for diesel is going to drop markedly.

JOHN WISEMAN: I’m very interested in what you’ve been saying about the United States because, certainly in the Australian media and to some extent in Europe, the story is sometimes told that, “Well, look, you’ve got a congress that’s controlled by very conservative forces, Tea Party Republicans and so on. There’s no sign of Cap and Trade coming back…the United States is not in a leadership position.” You’re telling, to some extent, a different story there, at least about the level of cultural change and, indeed, the harder indicators of shifts in energy usage and so on.

LESTER BROWN: Yeah, and the interesting thing is it’s happening because of a mix of things. If I were to pick the two most important things underway right now, one would be reducing gasoline use by cars, of new cars sold, by half, between 2010 and 2025. That’s the US government-designed policy.

The other is the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, closing coal-fired power plants. Now, there’s some overlap because EPA issues, restrictions on mercury emissions from coal plants, what-have-you, that makes it more difficult for them to stay in business. So we have two major initiatives, one primarily government, the other primarily in the NGO sector.

John Wiseman: If you had a minute or two with the world’s key decision-makers and you had two or three sentences in which you really wanted to convey very sharply, the most important priorities in relation to climate and ecological challenges, what would you say to them in two or three sentences?

LESTER BROWN: I’d say the biggest challenge we face is stabilising climate and that means closing coal-fired power plants, replacing the coal with wind and solar and geothermal energy.

The second big challenge we face is stabilising population and that’s a challenge that’s really concentrated in the Indian sub-continent and Sub-Saharan Africa and what we need to do there is to eradicate poverty, which we have the resources to do now, eradicate poverty and make sure that women everywhere have access to reproductive healthcare and family planning services.

John Wiseman: Thank you very much.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Professor John Wiseman is currently Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and Melbourne School of Population Health.

This interview originally appeared in Post Carbon Pathways, a website which aims to strengthen the understanding of the actions needed to create rapid, large-scale transitions to a just and sustainable post carbon future. 

Photo Courtesy: Lester Brown from Wikipedia/Creative Commons

FURTHER LINKS on EWTT YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN:

EWTT: Dr Tom Crompton: Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Values in Environmental Communication
EWTT: Joe Brewer: An interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex issues
EWTT: Aubrey Meyer: Contraction & Convergence: An urgent global imperative to tackle climate change
EWTT: Pen Hadow: Melting Arctic Ice and How it will affect Asia
EWTT: Whither Go Climate Refugees?
EWTT: Who cares If Bangalesh drowns?

Share/Save

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

– Chinese Proverb

By Bhavani Prakash

What is this life if full of care, we have no time to plant a single tree?

And what better way to express our gratitude to Mother Nature, compensate for our heavy footprint, and restore the land for generations to come, than to plant a tree? He who plants a tree, as Lucy Larcom the 19th century poet said, plants hope. He plants a joy, he plants peace, he plants youth, and he plants love.

Today, 5th June 2012 is World Environment Day and we take this opportunity to pledge our support to Project Green Hands, an inspiring grassroots initiative of the not-for-profit organisation, Isha Foundation. Its ambitious mission is to restore the green cover in Tamil Nadu, India to 33% by planting 114 million trees.

The programme was lauched in 2004 on World Environment Day, and has enabled the planting till date of more than 14 million saplings in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, with the help of more than 1.5 million volunteers.

In 2010, Project Green Hands (PGH) won a national award in India, the Indira Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar award in recognition of its efforts to create environmental awareness and reverse ecological degradation. PGH also has a Guinness World Record of planting most number of saplings in three days: 8,52,587.

Listen to Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, Founder of Isha Foundation, share his thoughts about Project Green Hands and the urgent need to reforest the earth.

Video link here

A single sapling costs only Indian Rupees 50 (less than 1 USD and just over 1 Singapore dollar). Every little counts by way of your contribution. 

By donating just Indian Rupees 50 per sapling through giveisha.org/pgh Project Green Hands (PGH) will plant trees on your behalf in Tamil Nadu, India.  The saplings will be provided to farmers for planting in their farmlands. PGH tracks the exact location of their trees and the details of the farmer who will plant and take care of it.

Project Green Hands hopes to plant 300,000 trees for World Environment Day 2012. The World Environment Day campaign will run for June and part of July 2012. PGH continues beyond that period to achieve its larger objective of planting 6 million saplings in 2012.

Your help to spread the word, and contribution, however small, really matters in achieving these goals to reforest Tamil Nadu. 

FAQs (as provided by Project Green Hands of Isha Foundation)

1. What is Give Isha?

GIVE ISHA is an online fundraising portal through which people can support for Isha Foundation’s social initiatives in Education – Isha Vidya, Health – Action for Rural Rejuvenation and Environment – Project GreenHands.

The featured project currently on Give Isha is:

World Environment Day campaign – Project GreenHands

2. Who plants the trees and where are they planted?

PGH is providing trees to farmers for planting in their farmlands. PGH has been working with farmers in Pudukottai, Erode, Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.

3. How can trees be tracked?

While taking saplings from PGH, the farmer has to register his name, contact details and location. This is stored in the PGH database. After the plantation is done, a survey will be carried out by PGH to confirm whether the saplings have been planted. So when an individual donates for a tree, he will be assigned a tree from the PGH database.

4. Will we get anything if we donate?

Once you make a donation, you will get an email with tree certificate indicating the total number of trees planted by you.

5. How can we donate?

You can donate online: log on to giveisha.org/pgh and offline: or send an Indian Rupee DD/ Cheque drawn in the favour of “ Isha Outreach” to Project GreenHands ,  Isha Yoga Center,  Velliangiri Foothills,  Semmedu post,  Coimbatore – 641114.

6. How much is the minimum donation?

One Sapling: Indian Rupees 50/- (about 1 Dollar)

 7. After I donate, what is the next step? How do I know what is happening and when the sapling planted?

Once you make a donation, you will get an email with tree certificate indicating the total number of trees planted by you. A tree tracking code will be specified on the certificate. Using this code you can track your tree starting Jan 1st 2013, on projectgreenhands.org/track

8. Why this time gap – why can’t I track the tree immediately?

The planting season begins in the month of September and trees can be planted till December. After the plantation is done, a survey will be carried out by PGH to confirm where the saplings have been planted. After which each donor will be assigned a tree from PGH’s database.

9. If I donate at separate occasions, will I get different certificates? Can I have it in the name of someone other than me?

Yes, you will get a different tree certificate each time you make a donation. If you want the certificate in someone else’s name, please fill in their particulars in the Donor details.

10. Are there any centers/stalls where something is set up for this campaign? If so, where?

No, the donation can be done only Online or a DD/ Cheque needs to be sent to PGH directly.

11. As someone who has donated and is interested in this campaign, how can I help? What can I do?

1. Many people may get inspired just by seeing your enthusiasm for the project. Spreading the word is the most important help you can do to us. You can take the message to all your friends and relatives by send them emails and videos, sharing on facebook, twitter and other social media.
2. Create your own campaign page on the Give Isha site and get all your colleagues and friends to join you.
3. You could also like the PGH Facebook page

About the Writer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com.  She is a sustainability speaker, trainer and writer can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

Share/Save

This has been a week of climate pessimism.  First, The Guardian on Wednesday, 9 Nov 2011 quoted the International Energy Association (IEA)’s warning that the world is headed for irreversible climate change in only 5 years. The article says:

“If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world’s existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that “carbon budget”, according to the IEA’s analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing.

If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available “carbon budget” will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA’s calculations.”

Prof Surya Sethi at ISEAS

The lecture at the Institute of South East Asian Studies (ISEAS) yesterday by Professor Surya Sethi compounded the gloom.  Prof. Sethi served on the Indian Prime Minister’s Energy Coordination Committee and wrote the Integrated Policy of India (2006) and also assisted in the development of India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008). He is currently Visiting Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYPP).

Prof. Sethi said that developments after the 2010 COP 16 Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico do not give much hope that a comprehensive and binding agreement will be reached at COP17 in Durban, South Africa later this month.  He also pointed to several ‘inconvenient truths’.

Inconvenient Truth #1

Markets do not have the solution to climate change or to the mindless exploitation of the world’s finite capital of water, land, minerals, other resources, or to the global commons itself.  If all externalities are included, such as the environmental cost of rearing cattle, impact on water, carbon emissions associated with transportation, the cost of a hamburger, for example, would be between US$20 to US$25.   However, it is sold for only 99 cents in the US and for US$3 in the rest of the world. Markets are therefore grossly underpricing natural capital which inevitably leads to resource exploitation.

Yet paradoxically, we look to the same markets which failed to keep the books straight on asset backed securities and mortgages that led to the financial crises of 2008 and the European Debt crisis this year, to deliver solutions to climate change.

The world is facing potentially disruptive and irreversible climate change triggered through rising temperatures, and non-linear positive feedback. Markets driven by greed and mathematical judgement cannot solve these irreversible effects or substitute value based decisions, which are required for equitable solutions.

If one looks at energy intensity of OECD countries, it varies from country to country a factor of 2.3 times. Even though there are no market barriers, the market is not equalising energy intensity. The financial bailout shows that politics plays a key role in deciding where funds flow.

Markets may allocate scarce resources, but they are not distributors of equity and justice. If we want to limit how much natural capital is to be used, we need to make ethical choices, which requires strong value based leadership. This was emphasised time and again by Prof Sethi.

Inconvenient Truth #2

Global carbon emissions are not coming down, and continue to rise.

• Most global projections show fossil fuel consumption as growing till 2030. There was a slight dip in 2008 due to slower economic growth because of the financial crisis, but it has picked up again in 2010.  The total estimated  30.6 gigatonnes carbon (GtC) emitted in 2010 is estimated to grow to 54 to 58 GtC in the coming years. The 2 degree pathway requires a  reduction to 44 GtC per annum globally by 2020. There will be an overshoot of 10-14 GtC on an annual basis.
•  The absolute level of consumption of fossil fuels is still rising in developed world. If you exclude the 2008 blip, consumption of fossil fuels during the 8 years from 1999 to 2007 of OECD countries grew 2.6 times than the rate of fossil fuel consumption growth in India. The OCED has a population of 0.9 billion, only slightly less than that of India, and hence comparable in size. In China fossil fuel consumption during the 8 year period grew 7.1 times than that of India.

What this underscores, according to Prof Sethi, is that all the talk about lowering energy and emissions intensity, and delivering the next more efficient car or light bulb (which is definitely important) only means growing GDP by a larger amount with marginally less energy intensity. So even if the same barrel of oil goes longer and energy security is increased;  as long as we are consuming more fossil fuels in absolute terms, we are not addressing climate change.

•  If one examines the claim that Annexe 1 (developed) countries have reduced emissions from GDP over 1990 levels, this is largely because as economies in transition, they have outsourced some of their pollution overseas.If you look at emissions from consumption by Annexe 1 countries,  the figures are even worse. Take the 15 EU countries – on a consumption bass, emissions have gone up by 40% over 1990 with 33% of emissions coming from imports. Gross emissions of the EU 15 countries amount to 10-12 tons per capita in addition to 3 tons per capita from imported embedded emissions, which by itself is more than the total per capita emissions of India at 1.9 tons.  The 4 tons carbon emissions per capita embedded in US imports alone is more than 2 times of India total per capita emissions. China is often blamed for becoming the biggest polluter, yet 26% of all China’s emissions are in embedded emissions from exports.  Yet, nobody is addressing these unsustainable patterns of consumption.

•  Pledges made in Cancun by Annexe 1 countries are actually lower than pledges by non-Annexe 1 countries.  So far, all pledges of Annexe 1 countries add up to 5% to 17% below 1990 levels, which compares poorly to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects, i.e., at least between 25 to 40% emissions reductions below 1990 levels are required to keep within 2 degree C temperature rise.

The non-binding pledges in Cancun puts the world on an auto-pilot mode of 3.5 to 5 degree C temperature increase.

Inconvenient Truth #3

The lack of equity in talking about climate emissions reductions is the third issue.

• If the world has to remain bound to a 2 degree temperature rise, then going forward the Annexe 1 countries between 2010 to 2050 must have a negative carbon emissions of 1.5 GtC.  For the 350 GtC total carbon budget to be equitably distributed, richer nations have a climate debt owed to the developing world of  US$ 10 to 13 trillion, depending on the price of carbon.  The developed world does not accept historical responsibility of carbon emitted over the last century to fuel its economic growth. However the common and differentiated responsibility principle which underpins the UNFCCC negotiations is built upon the bedrock of historical responsibility.
• We live in a world with extreme inequality. The top 20% of the world, and some live in India and China too, are today responsible for 85% of private global consumption while the bottom 20% live on less than 1 dollar ppp(purchasing power parity) per day. 40% of the population is below the poverty line in India earning below the threshold of 70 nominal Singapore cents in cities and 55 Singapore cents in villages. This kind of inequality which will lead to greater instability in the world in terms of social and political unrest.

The huge transfer of international funds required to pay for climate debt is as much a question of equity for the bottom 20%.

Inconvenient Truth #4

The final inconvenient truth is that there is very little climate finance being made available to developing countries for mitigation and adaptation.

The scale of funding required is to the tune of more than a trillion dollars, but Cancun’s Green Climate Fund is only for $100 billion.*  The reality is that the developing world is spending a higher and higher portion of its GDP on adaptation and lowering energy intensity e.g., India is spending 2.3 to 2.4% of its GDP on adaptation, though it is doing it for gaining energy security than for climate change.

* At the COP15 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December 2009, the proposal was to mobilise US$10 billion per year between 2010 and 2012, and up to US$100 billion by 2020 annually – which represents only 0.8% to 8% of developed countries’ national defence budgets”

Climate finance requires massive resource transfers from the developed to the developing world. The existing multilateral agencies like the World Bank do not have the instruments or capacities for these. According to Prof. Sethi, the World Bank’s net disbursements between 2002 and 2008 were between minus 0.8 billion to minus 4.8 billion without IDA (International Development Association).  With IDA the disbursments were between to minus 2.9 bn to +5.4 bn US dollars. These agencies are at best equipped to do project lending, and not to deliver the scale of funds transfer required for climate finance.

According to Prof. Sethi, unless there is some disruptive technology in the coming decade, the climate change challenge cannot be tackled in time.

What will wake up the world to the climate reality? Prof Michael Quah, Deputy Director, Energy Office at the National University of Singapore who chaired the ISEAS event, quoted the former International Energy Agency director, Nobuo Tanaka who spoke in the CNBC energy opportunities brainstorming session held in Singapore recently. Tanaka had said, half jestingly, that perhaps we need another tsunami, another Katrina, and other similar disasters to rouse the world to action.  Stark as this may sound, it looks as if the world is headed that way, unless collection and drastic action is taken steered by strong global leadership.

The theoretical model and practical framework exists to create solutions with equity and justice, as Prof Sethi acknowledged after the event when I raised the Contraction & Convergence model  by the Global Commons Institute. It is a science based model to allocate emissions reductions to different countries, and also allow for compensation to nations which emit less than their allocations. As far back as 2003, Janos Pasztor (who is now with the Climate Change Task Force), had mentioned as a member of the UNFCCC Secretariat that “Stabilisation inevitably requires ‘Contraction and Convergence” .

The challenge as Prof Sethi pointed out is the lack of political will to agree to the scale of emissions reduction envisaged and large scale transfer of funds to the developing world to deal with mitigation and adaptation.

To conclude, a world that has US levels of consumption can only house 1.4 billion people and not 9 billion people as we are projecting by 2050. Prof Sethi came back to the profound wisdom of Gandhi for what we need for a truly sustainable world:

Gandhi's wisdom

****************************************************************************************************

About the Writer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com. Despite the climate pessimism in this article, she believes individuals and communities can play an active role in changing behaviour, and also in influencing policy decisions as well as industry action required to tackle climate and biodiversity issues. She writes and conducts talks and workshops on sustainability and can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook,Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

******************************************************************************************************

Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT: Contraction & Convergence: An Urgent Global Imperative to tackle Climate Change

EWTT: Whither Go Climate Refugees?

EWTT:  Pen Hadow: Melting Arctic Sea Ice and How It Will Affect Asia

EWTT:  Wikileaks: Carving Up the Arctic Sea

EWTT:  Everything you need to know about Climate Change from a Top Hedge Fund Manager

EWTT:  Who cares If Bangalesh drowns?

EWTT:  Climate Challenge: The Voices from Pakistan

EWTT:  Global Corruption Report: Climate Change

EWTT:  Climate Change in Southeast Asia And Why We Can’t Afford Not to Act

Share/Save

Millions of people face the risk of being dislocated from their homes due to the effects of climate change. However there is no global framework to handle the humanitarian and political crisis when it explodes. Should UNHCR, UN’s refugee agency expand its definition to include “climate refugees” or do we need an entirely new convention?
Should nations start building up funds towards disaster when it strikes, where richer nations pay up their ‘ecological debt?’ Whatever the approach, this is an issue that demands urgent global attention and policy responses.

The slow pace at which world leaders and nations are crawling towards even a rudimentary climate deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would make it appear as if climate change were a remote eventuality.

For millions of people in the world, climate change is here and now. It’s a stark truth staring at the homes of 50 million people as they escape flooded towns and villages, eroding shorelines or barren and thirsty lands.  It is estimated that 200 million people, mainly in Asia and Africa will be dislocated by 2050.  If the less than optimistic climate change scenario pans out, a 4 degree rise in global temperature in the next 50 years could well move out a billion people.

Map showing areas at risk from climate change
Courtesy: Emmanuelle Bournay from UNEP (See link for larger map)

The Human Face of Climate Change

Abstract and aggregated numbers convey little of the hardship that people facing the brunt of climate change have to endure.

Sandstorms relentlessly expand the desert in China by 2,500 square kilometres every year. 90,000 tonnes of sand blow through the village of Longbaoshan, Heibei province from the Gobi desert, making its way to Beijing and onwards to Japan and Korea.

For many of those who move on, it is often a catch-22 situation. Jian Bing Li works long hours in Beijing at a restaurant kitchen after having left behind her life as a peasant, and her only son with her father in the village. She vents out her frustration as quoted in Collectif Argos’s book called “Climate Refugees,”

“I hate this city. There’s too much pollution, too many cars, too much noise.  But I hate Longbaoshan just as much. There’s too much sand there now. Rain no longer falls from the sky. It’s become impossible to make anything grow.”

Peter Caton’s photoessay entitled  “Sinking Sundarbans” shows how poor Bangladeshis living on the low-lying Sundarban delta are suffering from the consequences of rising sea levels as well as Cyclone Aila which hit with brutal force in May 2009. They talk poignantly about losing their land, their lack of drinking water which is either too salty or contaminated, and the ordeal of having to wade through neck high water.

Entire island nations face the risk of being submerged. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS)’s Vice Chairman Antonio Lima says in The Telegraph,“We are going to be the first human species endangered in the 21st century. We are going to be in danger of going extinct.”

This fear is voiced by ordinary people and ministers alike. Easter Molu is a school teacher in Tuvalu, a small south-west Pacific island nation with 9 atolls only one metre above sea level. She is quoted in the aforementioned book as asking her students rhetorically, “Just imagine that the sea level begins to rise – are you scared?  I’m VERY scared. Over the past few years, during the spring tide, water has been seeping out of the ground and into my house. That’s never happened before.”

Last year at the COP15 climate change summit in Copenhagen, Tuvalu’s Environment Minister made a tearful plea for world governments to take action on climate change urgently, as the fate of his people depended on it. A grown man breaking down in front of an international audience shows the weight of anxiety and fear facing his nation.

When people are forced to move, they have to leave behind their cultures and traditions, their communities and bonds, their language and way of life, like the migrants from Shishmaref, Alaska. A traditional hunting community, the residents have been forced to give up centuries old lifestyles due to coastal erosions and adopt completely new occupations.  Integrating with mainstream Americans is a process that has meant a loss of their very identity.

International Law and Climate Justice

Photo by DK Fonne: Statues of Sudanese "Wandering Refugees" at Copenhagen COP15

With millions of people facing the risk of dislocation, the issue of climate refugees is a humanitarian time-bomb waiting to explode. There is no legal or institutional framework for this, neither is it on nations’ list of priorities to address this at a global level.

UNHCR, UN’s refugee agency does not include climate refugees in its mandate, which considers “refugees” as people who have escaped their country due to fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.

Climate refugees are, according to The Global Governance Project “people who have to leave their habitats, immediately or in the near future, because of sudden or gradual alterations in their natural environment related to at least one of three impacts of climate change: sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and drought and water scarcity.”

Climate Change is not strictly speaking a form of persecution or torture perpetuated by the state. Neither do the people displaced form a unique social group. Most of the refugees are, initially at least, migrants within their own borders, which also refutes the legal notion that they should be outside their country.

If a nation such as the small island of Tuvalu in the Pacific atoll disappears, the citizens are not intentionally being denied their nationality. The loss of the state itself is not recognised by international law.

The UNHCR’s current position is that it can’t handle the burden of climate refugees, due to inadequate funding and concerns about diluting its responsibility to the refugees under the conventional definition.  The agency feels here (Page 13) that environmental migrants or refugees should come within the ambit of national governments whose protection they continue to enjoy.

Andrew Simms of the New Economic Foundation who has championed extensively the cause of Climate Refugees says in the Guardian article, “Creating new legal obligations to accept environmental refugees would help ensure that industrialised countries accept the consequences of their choices. In certain circumstances, the suggestion that the solution must lie at the national level could be absurd – the national level may be under water.”

Besides, developing nations are least equipped politically, socially, financially or technologically to handle a major wave of environmental migrants.

Dr. Janos Bogardi of United Nations University feels that a new convention or category of refugee, best addresses this to avoid UNHCR diluting its current commitment.

At the heart of the debate is the issue of Climate Justice. The poor and vulnerable of developing nations who are most at risk from climate change had very little to do with it. It is the moral responsibility of developed nations who have been large emitters to repay their ‘ecological debt.’

A strong advocate of this approach is Dr Atiq Rhaman of Bangladesh Centre for Studies (BCAS) and a member of the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) who has been campaigning for a global approach for the last two decades. He suggests, “Each country must take responsibility for- in other words, transport and accommodate – a quota of climate refugees proportional to its past and present greenhouse gas emissions.”

Small island nations are clamouring for a global “climate change insurance fund” which would provide funding to relocate and rehabilitate climate refugees in the event the entire state goes under water.

At the COP15 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, it was proposed that developed nations mobilise US$10 billion per year between 2010 and 2012, and up to US$100 billion by 2020 annually. This represents only 0.8% to 8% of richer countries’ national defence budgets. In contrast, about US$2 trillion was spent on the financial bailout, and over US$1 trillion for the Iraq war.  Does the world have its priorities right?

What is the way forward?

Some nations are beginning to take action themselves. In 2008, the Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed declared he was setting aside state funds to buy a new home for his entire island nation of 300,000 in India, Sri Lanka or Australia. Maldives is the lowest lying nation in the world with an average ground level of 1.5m above sea level, and faces a high possibility of being submerged with rising sea levels.

President Nasheed however admits that this is not as easy as it sounds. Neighbouring countries like India are themselves grappling with explosion in migrant populations. The country is also erecting a 2,500 mile barbed fence to prevent illegal immigrants entering from the borders with Bangladesh.  Other nations like Australia and in the west have stiff immigration laws.

Climate Refugee Demonstation at Dhaka

Activists and NGOs feel massive awareness needs to be raised about the urgency of the climate refugee issue. Shamsul Momen Palash from the Green Bangla Coalition, a grassroots organisation cutting across political affiliations at Dhaka University has organised a “Mobile Climate Refugees Camp” from 29 November to 11 December 2010 during the two week long COP16 Cancun climate summit. It aims to register its concerns about climate refugees to the COP16 conference authority through 194 national focal points and organizations, activists, journalists and students attending the sessions.

He told us, “The climate refugee crisis is definitely going to become the biggest ever political crisis sooner than later, unless we think of a comprehensive global relocation or rehabilitation plan in advance. So it needs the urgent attention of global leaders.”

The root of the problem is the rate at which greenhouse gases continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, for which richer nations have been historically responsible, with increasing contributions from the likes of China and India as their economies grow rapidly.

Business as usual either with respect to climate change or the issue of climate refugee is simply not an option.  If there is any hope for the millions, it lies in decisive, unambiguous, global action.  And the time for that is right now.

*********************************************************************************************************

About the writer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk.com She was inspired to research and write about the subject of Climate Refugees after receiving a Letter for UNHCR from a Grade 5 student , Atulya Venkataraman.  As emphasised in the above article, it is an issue that needs urgent international attention by world governments, policy makers and refugee agencies like the UNHCR to avoid it from becoming a large humanitarian, political and social crisis.

She can be contacted at bhavani [at] ecowalkthetalk.com

*********************************************************************************************************

Photo courtesy By DKFonne Claus Fonnesbech  His description of the image:

“Climate refugees. Notice the power plant in the background. The symbolism kills me. These three sculptures are standing at 10 meters tall and is inspired by the Sudanese female refugees walking through the desert. Here, as part of an installation for the COP 15 climate change summit in Copenhagen, they are there to symbolize the 200 million of climate refugees that UN’s panel of climate change experts expect will be present in the following 40 years. These “wandering refugees” are part of sevenmeters.net – a global warming activity for the COP15.”

Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT: Letter for UNHCR from a Grade 5 student
EWTT: Climate Refugees
EWTT: Climate Change in Asia? Who Cares If Bangladesh Drowns?
EWTT: Stories of 4 women: Climate Change in Bangladesh (Videos)

Treehugger: Global Warming hits world’s women hardest- especially when they don’t have equal rights

Share/Save

Image source: BBC News

With the worst of the financial crisis behind us, the engines of economic growth have begun to hum again. From a carbon emissions point of view, we have much cause for concern as there is a direct correlation between GDP and GHG emissions. (See diagram on the right).

We have not yet made that shift to where economic growth comes with low carbon emissions. On the contrary, we are causing climate change at a faster rate than we are mitigating it. How can we manage future emissions in a way that economies, human societies and ecosystems are not blown apart due to the growth paradigm [1] to which we as an economy driven world are addicted – of infinite growth in a planet of finite resources?

CO2 concentrations from CO2now.org Click here for larger image

The world is facing a serious climate crisis [2a], with ever increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere. Measured in parts per million (ppm), the current concentrations of CO2 as of April 2010 are 392 ppm. (See diagram on left based on figures released every month by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii).

We’re already past the safe limit of 350ppm[2b] – a level beyond which gives us an increasing probability of exceeding the overall 2 degree temperature rise [3]  as compared to global temperatures at the start of the industrial revolution when CO2 concentrations were about 280 ppm. The 2 degree temperature rise is the upper limit world leaders have committed to observing.

Just as we have a budget at home that we cannot exceed without negative consequences, we also now have a limited carbon budget [4], if overshot, will have catastrophic consequences – rising global temperatures, biodiversity and species loss impacting sustainability of ecosystems, melting polar glaciers and rising sea levels that may engender mass displacement of millions of people.[5]

We, as members of the public, have a moral responsibility to understand and engage in the climate change debate.  It is our responsibility to have a say, to demand a say,  in our children’s future – not only for the future of their education, finances and health, but critically for their ecological future on which everything else rests.

Important as they may be, we cannot leave the issue to politicians, businesses, NGOs and climate scientists alone, especially considering that various governments haven’t gone very far with the reduction of CO2 emissions since the Kyoto Protocol [6] that was signed in 1997.

Various climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change  [7] (UNFCCC) including the recent one at Copenhagen in December 2009, the COP15 [8], have failed to arrive at a “fair, ambitious and binding” climate deal that defines a clear future path for reduction of emissions.

Although it was recognised during the negotiations that tackling climate change is important, there was less clarity on how to share the “burden.” Certainly, many developing countries felt there was injustice in why they were being asked to share the burden of the problem of solving climate change, when they had little to do with its creation. 

What is the most equitable model to combat climate change?

Credit: EarthTrendsDelivered.org (Click for larger image)

Every human being should have equal rights on this planet and that extends to the amount of carbon emissions he or she is allowed. Our current global average use per person is about 1.3 Metric Tonnes Carbon [MTC]   (Carbon emissions refer to carbon atoms which weigh less than the CO2 molecule, so divide the per capita CO2 emissions shown in the diagram on the right by a factor of 3.667 if you want to get to per capita MTC)

The use of the global atmosphere is very unequal, with richer countries taking the lion’s share. About 33% of the global population have carbon emissions greater than the world average of 1.3MTC, with 67% below it.

According to Global Carbon Project.org  “From a historical perspective, developing countries with 80% of the world’s population still account for about 20% of the cumulative emissions since 1751; the poorest countries in the world, with 800 million people, have contributed less than 1% of these cumulative emissions.” 

For any climate deal to be successful, unequal future use of the air as a dump for carbon will never get majority support.  We have a better chance of avoiding disastrous climate change, if we reduce this world average to 0.9MTC by the next 20 years or so. All nations basically “converge” to this global average by around 2030.

Developed countries make steeper and swifter cuts or “contractions” to come down to the lower per capita average, while poorer nations which are below the average can increase their per capita emissions till all countries have converged to the same level.  After that, everyone transitions to null emissions.

This is the simple essence of the “Contraction & Convergence” (C&C) model put forth by the Global Commons Institute (GCI), a UK non-profit organisation set up in 1990 by Aubrey Meyer. C & C was proposed to the UNFCC in 1996, and though explicit mention of this model is not made often in the negotiations, it has been the underlying philosophy behind them since that time, the devil being in the details.

C & C is a simple, elegant and equitable carbon rationing framework for an international agreement on CO2 emissions.  To borrow from the GCI website:

‘Contraction’, refers to the ‘full-term event’ in which the future global total of greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions from human sources is shrunk over time in a measured way to near zero-emissions within a specified time-frame.   Each country starts with a certain entitlement level of CO2 emissions in line with present emission level.  Then the contraction is scheduled for each year until we get to compliance with the ‘objective’ of the UNFCCC – a safe and stable GHG concentration in the global atmopshere.

Having defined a global budget, the second step, ‘Convergence‘ refers to the full international sharing of the emissions contraction-event, where the ‘emissions-entitlements’ for all countries result from them converging on the declining global per capita average of emissions arising under the contraction rate chosen.  Each country is assigned annual allowances which starts for example from actuals in 2000 and converges to a common level of per-capita emissions in an agreed target year. While developed countries are receiving drastically reduced emissions entitlements, the emission entitlements of developing nations increase every year till we reach the date when they are all equal per capita. If they don’t use all their the entitlements, they can sell these to the rest of the world, and use it to fund their energy efficiency, green technology or adaptation investments.

This video clip from the climate change movie directed by Franny Armstrong, ”The Age of Stupid“ portrays the C & C concept in a simple manner:

C& C as a model provides clarity in terms of goals to achieve – the targets, the timeframe and the mechanism. It provides us the “shared language” to work together towards a workable solution to climate change.

It is an equitable model as in Aubrey Meyer’s words from the UNEP’s Climate Change Action Magazine 2008 (Pg 27)  [9]:

- Equity as collateral is the 100% entirety of the emissions contraction even necessary for concentration stability

- The social equity as the equal per person on the same 100%  throughout that event but softened by convergence

- The commercial equity is the shares pre-distributed this way sum to the same 100% and are tradable so as to accelerate the positive sum game for the emissions-free economy that must emerge if we are to prosper in the future. 

Integrated and implemented this way, we have a chance of accelerating the positive sum game for the emissions-free economy that must emerge if we are to prosper globally in the future. 

Climate Justice without Vengeance

C & C is a non-prescriptive model. It can calculate any rate of global emissions contraction required to meet UNFCCC goal for safe and stable concentrations of GHG in the atmosphere and any rate of convergence to equal per capita emissions entitlements within any rate of contraction, to satisfy the UNFCCC equity rationale.

C & C doesn’t impose on any nation or groups of nations what the rate of convergence should be;  it is a model that can be used as an underlying basis for nations to sit together and negotiate this rate.  By modelling various scenarios it shows what timeframe is acceptable, and what is dangerous if we delay convergence.

Unfortunately, this did not happen at the COP15 meeting at Copenhagen last year.

The “leaked” Danish texts at the summit were the cause of much furore, because developed nations were “prescribing” the convergence rate rather than using the C & C model as a basis of negotiation. The reductions in the text proposed : to achieve equal per capita emissions globally by 2050 within which developed countries must contract by 80%  with a global convergence of per capita emissions by that date, which might give a 50:50 odds of remaining within a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius.  [ GCI had expressed concerns about the odds and the rates applied and the prescriptive nature of the proposal as you can see in this animation here]

It then became a political blame game that Aubrey Meyer and Terry O’Connell explain in this Business Green article.

The Danish texts were met with angry protests from the G-77 nations and China on two fronts:

1. It froze per capita emissions 2:1 in favour of developed nations (i.e., developed nations needed to cut down to 2.67 tonnes of carbon, whereas developing nations could not emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon)

2. The lion’s share of what was left going to developed countries.

While the first point was not true (the convergence would have been towards equal per capita shares), there was validity in the second point. As shown in this CGI animation in the section on “Compare Rates of Convergence for Pre-Distribution of Tradeable Equity,”  earlier the rate of convergence, the more advantageous it is for developing nations.

For example, if the date of convergence is 2020 instead of 2050,  developing nations would get an extra 40GTC of carbon entitlements, that would come out of developed countries accounts. At £100/tonne, equity of  £4 Trillion can accrue to developing nations, which is in effect the “rent” paid for unused entitlements to use the atmosphere. 

It would then be fair to the developing countries to be compensated for what they are underutilising. They would be able to use these funds for many purposes:  green technology, adaptations, external debt and so on. This is Climate Justice.

Instead of acrimonious debate brought about by pulling out numbers from a hat, the idea is to have an organised and harmonious international negotiation with a framework like the C & C that brings all nations together under the required contraction event, for the rightful sharing of entitlements based on a mutally agreed convergence date. This is Climate Justice without Vengeance.

Why are Copenhagen targets simply not enough?

A recent report by the Potsdam Institute of Climate Change Research (PIK) and published in Nature[10]  has warned that Copenhagen targets will not slow down global warming [11].

* As part of the Copenhagen Accord, 76 countries (which between them are responsible for about 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions) submitted pledges to limit their emissions by 2020.

* The US submitted a target  for a reduction of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. This equates to only 3% below 1990 levels, even though it is estimated that 25%-40% reductions are necessary in developed countries. China’s goals are basically a business-as-usual scenario, while the European Union’s targets are more towards a 20%-30% emissions cut. The only two countries that made pledges in line with the 2°C target are Japan and Norway.

* Global emissions in 2020 could actually end up being 20% higher than today. Many countries will raise annual emissions of greenhouse gases 10%-20% above the current levels, reaching a high of 47.9 to 53.6 Gt CO2 (gigatonnes of carbon dioxide) by 2020.

* Current pledges mean a greater than 50% chance that warming will exceed 3°C by 2100.  This would put the odds of global warming levels exceeding the 2°C limit by the end of this century at 50%.  However, if nations agree to halve emissions by 2050, there is still a 50% chance that warming will exceed 2°C and will almost certainly exceed 1.5°C

The sum and substance is that climate negotiations are nowhere near the kind of carbon emission reductions that will contain global temperature rise to within the safe 2°C target.

Another worrying factor as pointed out by GCI and incorporated in the C & C framework is the sink efficiency of oceans and forests –  or the ability of these ecosystems to go on absorbing extra human generated generated CO2.

So far the evidence as reported by the IPCC for the last 15 years, is that the Constant Airborne Fraction (CAF) [12] (or the fraction of anthropogenic carbon emissions that accumulates in the atmosphere) has been constant at around 50%, but now this is gradually increasing as sink efficiency decreases with rising temperature.

Carbon Bathtub: Click image for larger picture

Think of the atmosphere loosely as a bath tub – a tub with a tap running and a drain open. If we put in carbon at a faster rate than natural ecosystems can drain it out (roughly 50% of human induced CO2 emissions), then we get rising concentrations and a warmer world.  Cumulatively, oceans are increasingly saturated with old GHG absorptions causing increased acidification which causes carbon-consuming life-forms in the oceans to die-off. With this and with temperatures rising, oceans are not able to absorb as efficiently as before. So we need to rework our model to factor in the new and declining sink efficiency,  to make sure the tub doesn’t overflow.  

[The carbon tub analogy is illustrated in the diagram on the left as it appeared in the National Geographic magazine. It assumes a lower Constant Airborne Fraction of 44% which means 56% can be absorbed by our natural sinks. The IPCC studies [13](Pg 14-17) over 15 years show a CAF of 50% which means sinks can absorb only 50% and even that ability is declining]

As mentioned before, the level of CO2 in the tub is 392 parts per million (ppm) and rising by 2 or 3 ppm each year. To stop it at 450 ppm, a level many scientists consider dangerously high, John Sterman [14] MIT Sloan School of Management’s Director of Systems Dynamics Group, said  the world would have to cut emissions by around 80 percent by 2050.  A partner in ClimateInteractive.org, he helped create the C-ROADS climate policy simulation model and Climate Scoreboard  [15] that measure the long-term effects of various proposals for emissions reductions.

The C & C model proposes [16] similar targets, mentioning the maximum convergence date that is acceptable to stay within safe limits:

“to keep within 2 degrees (with a greater than 50:50 chance), a global contraction budget no more than 350- 400 GTC, with a minimum 80% cut all emissions globally by 2050 and negotiating a convergence to equal per capita shares (of 0.9 MTC) of this globally within one third of the timeline for contraction, i.e., no later than 2030.” 

Here is one example of the C & C model showing the scenario of per capita emissions converging to 0.9 MTC per person by 2030 and contraction of total emissions by 50% by 2050 and 90%  by 2100:
 

Contraction & Convergence Model: Global Commons Institute

For a better understanding of the model, please view the various scenarios in the GCI animation” Climate Justice without Vengeance” here.  [17]

Separate Development is not Sustainable Development

Aubrey Meyer [18] is a British born musician turned climate campaigner. He co-founded the Global Commons Institute [19], a non-profit organisation for the protection of global commons [20]in 1990. The elegant C & C framework that he created was first proposed to the UNFCC in 1996. Having schooled in South Africa during the Apartheid era, he understood the injustices of the system.  As a climate change activist, he was quick to recognise the “global apartheid” of carbon emissions which favours the rich over poorer nations. In his model, are embedded notions of justice and equity, in a well defined, scientific and stuctured framework for charting the path of carbon emissions reduction – a structure that he likens to that of music.  He was nominated in 2008 by the UK All Parliamentary Group on Climate Change for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Guardian UK in 2008 named Aubrey Meyer among “the top 50 people who could save the planet“[21]   and earlier in 2005, New Statesman called him one of “10 people most likely to change the world.” [22]

Here’s a 11 minute video where Aubrey Meyer talks about C & C with contributions from Tim Smit (CEO, Eden Project, UK), Bill McGuire (Director, UCL Hazard Research Centre) and Dr. Rajendra Pachuari (IPCC chairman) and Lord Adair Turner (Lord Adair Turner (Chair, UK  Climate Change Committee)

What is the call to action? 

Here is a message from Aubrey Meyer: 

May 30th 2010

Please will you support and co-sign this letter from Colin Challen to Chris Huhne?   

Below is the text of a letter that is being sent soon to the Rt Hon Chris Huhne MP, the UK’s new Liberal Democrat Minister of Energy and Climate Change.

The letter will be sent by Colin Challen, the former Chair of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change.

“It appreciates the pro-Contraction-and-Convergence [C&C] record of Chris and his party and requests him to convene a public meeting to address the way ahead in terms of this “UNFCCC-compliant Global Climate Change Framework”.

Before sending it, Colin is circulating the letter widely with an open invitation to anyone in agreement with its message to become a co-signatory to it.

If you would like to be, please will you email your agreement along with your name, title and position to me asap at: -

aubrey[dot]meyer[at]btinternet[dot]com

With thanks

Aubrey Meyer

 

Here is the chance to lend your weight behind the C & C framework, by supporting this signature campaign to call the UK Government for a public meeting. Please send your email as above to Aubrey Meyer. If you have any comments or questions about the model or any related climate change issues, please do leave your note here at the end of this blog for him to answer or send him an email at aubrey[dot]meyer[at]btinternet[dot]com

Why should we in Asia or anywhere outside the UK support an initiative in the UK?

This is not an initiative for the UK. C & C is a just and workable solution meant for solving the climate change issue for the entire planet. Climate change is not a national, or regional issue, but a collective issue for all of humanity.  By supporting this letter right now, we are as world citizens telling the new UK government, that this is a solution that matters to all of us.  If the UK and other developed nations adopt this as a standard for negotiations, those in the developing world are likely to benefit most, as this is an equitable model to reduce carbon emissions. We are all looking for a win-win solution, and C & C is it. However to avoid dangerous climate change, we have to act now, act quickly and act together.

 As Dr. Rajendra Pachauri( IPCC Chairman) says in the video :

“ When one looks at the kinds of reductions that would be required globally, the only means for doing so is to ensure that there’s contraction and convergence, and I think there’s growing acceptance of this reality.

I don’t see how else we might be able to fit within the overall budget for emissions for the world as a whole by 2050. We need to start putting this principle into practice as early as possible, so that by the time we reach 2050, we’re not caught by surprise, we’re well on a track for every country in the world that would get us there.

On the matter of ‘historic responsibility’, there is no doubt that accelerating the rate of convergence relative to the rate of contraction is a way of answering that we really need to get agreement from Developed and Developing Countries to subscribe to this principle.”

Who supports C & C?

The GCI document called An International Conceptual Framework for Preventing Dangerous Climate Change  [9] quotes several international personalities in support of the C & C model. These include Heads of State from Europe, Asia (Dr. Manmohan Singh and 7 other leaders of the Indian subcontinent), environmentalists like Sir David Attenborough and Sir Johnathon Porrit, climate scientist James Lovelock, economists Partha Dasgupta and Paul Erlich among other people.

A Report [23]of a Joint Inquiry by Bangladesh Parliament’s All Party Group on Climate Change and Environment and the UK All Party Parliament Climate Change Group shows how C & C can bring the developed and developing world closer.   To quote from the report:

” We believe that this lack of clarity and shared purpose is the greatest barrier to success in the UNFCCC negotiations.  We wish to demonstrate in our joint approach that parliamentarians from our two countries can help resolve the burden sharing riddle. 

Bangladesh is a country which is most often quoted as being one of the first that will suffer badly from the impacts of climate change; the UK is a country which since the industrial revolution has contributed most to the problem – and which now professes political leadership on the subject. 

We believe that if we as Parliamentarians from these two countries can bridge the differences, and develop a shared understanding of our respective burdens and challenges, we could propose a model for both the developed and developing worlds.”

What can I do to help with the Climate Change issue?

We can’t create change without taking action. Share the seriousness of the climate change issue and the importance of the C& C model with your family, friends and colleagues, offline and online through social media. Write and talk to your ministers, and members of  parliament. Write to various magazines and forums.  We can make ourselves heard by voicing our opinions and concerns about our shared future and those of the coming generations. 

As Sterman says, “In the end, it comes down to public support. We have to change the way we use energy and support policies that will enable those changes to occur. Science is no longer the bottleneck to action. We need to focus on social and political change.” 

Thank you! 

Many thanks to Aubrey Meyer for his answers to my queries regarding the C & C model.

The links that have been used in this article: 

[1] EWTT: The Impossible Hamster: Limits to Economic Growth
[2a] Huffington Post: The Perfect Storm: Six Trends Converging on Collapse
[2b] James Hansen in the Huffington Post : Twenty Years Later : Tipping Points Near on Global Warming
[3] Real Climate: Hit the Brake hard  (Why 2 degrees as a threshold is important)
       Related : National Geographic Video: 2 Degrees Warmer  Also watch 3 Degrees Warmer,  4 Degrees Warmer, 5 Degrees Warmer and 6 Degrees Warmer
       Related:  EWTT: Impact of a Global Temperature rise of 4 Deg Celsius 
[4] New Scientist: Humanity’s Carbon Budget set at One Trillion Tonnes 
[5] EWTT: Climate Refugees
[6] Wikipedia : Kyoto Protocol
[7] Wikipedia: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
[8] Wikipedia: Copenhagen Accord
[9] Global Commons Institute GCI: An International Conceptual Framework for Preventing Dangerous Climate Change
[10] Nature: Copenhagen Accord pledges are paltry
[11] Cordis Europa : Copenhagen targets will not slow down global warming
[12] Skeptical Science:  Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic Co2 emissions increasing 
[13] Global Commons Institute : IPCC Studies showing Constant Airborne Fraction at 50%
[14] John Sterman   MIT Sloan Professor finds Copenhagen Climate Summit agreement inadequate to reach global goal for greenhouse gas emissions 
[15] EWTT: Climate Scoreboard
[16] Global Commons Institute C & C proposal : Second Memo from GCI to the UK House of Commons “Environmental Audit Committee”  
[17] Global Commons Institute C & C animation : C & C is Climate Justice without Vengeance  
[18] Global Commons Institute : CV_Aubrey Meyer
[19]Global Commons Institute Home Page
[20] Wikipedia: Global Commons
[21] Guardian UK : The top 50 people who could change the planet
[22] New Statesman: Ten people who could change the world
[23] Report of a Joint Inquiry by Bangladesh Parliament’s All Party Group on Climate Change and Environment and the UK All Party Parliament Climate Change Group

Share/Save

The Climate Scoreboard can be embedded in blogs, websites, Facebook pages, newletters and so on. Please share with the world asap, so that many people, both leaders and the public can become aware of the goals during the Copenhagen talks, and that it may influence action.

Watch the video explaining the Climate Scoreboard here:

Visit the Climate Scoreboard website here for further science and information. You can also follow the site on Twitter.

There’s also an interesting Powerpoint explaining the scoreboad on the Climate Interactive website the highlight of which is this path of emissions growth and the results.

Thanks to ECO Singapore for the sharing the site. A Youth delegation from ECO Singapore is taking part in various consultations and activities at Copenhagen. You may follow their updates here.

You may also be interested in:

Interview with the “Youth against Climate Change” – a youth delegation from ECO Singapore visiting Copenhagen during COP15

The Impact of a Global rise in temperature of 4 deg Celsius

How to talk to a climate sceptic : A comprehensive resource

A 350 ppm emergency pathway by the Stockholm Environment Institute

350 vs 450: The heart of the matter by Grist.org

The different meanings of CO2e explained

Share/Save

 
These were several of the stimulating questions answered by Pavan Sukhdev on December 1, 2009 in a seminar organised by the Singapore Environment Institute (SEI).  Andrew Tan, from Centre for Liveable Cities, Singapore which co-hosted the event, made the introduction.

Pavan, combines his expertise in the financial sector as Chairman of Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets Centre Mumbai, as well as his deep understanding of environmental issues.  He leads the UNEP’s “Green Economy Initiative”, the G8+5 commissioned report on “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” (TEEB) and the Green Indian States Trust (GIST)

 
The TEEB highlights the economic impact of biodiversity loss. It parallels what the Stern report does to highlight the economic impact of climate change.

 What is a green economy?

According to Pavan, it is easier to define a green economy by what it is not. A green economy does not consume natural capital or risk human survival.

World Footprint www.footprintnetwork.org

The ecological footprint of human activities as measured by the demand on the resources of Earth’s ecosystems, already exceeds the planet’s regenerative capacity by 40%.  Humanity is now demanding 1.4 Earths. In fact, we have been in “ecological debt” for the last 20 years, using up natural “capital” instead of living off the “interest”  it generates.

 With Global Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at 42 GTCO2e (Gigatons) at 5 times higher than the Earth can absorb, the planet faces climate risk at a pace that can’t be sustained.

Watch Pavan Sukhdev talk about the consequences of the erosion of natural capital

Economies can adopt a more sustainable path, if they increase their investment in “green” sectors and the share of the GDP devoted to renewable energies, clean transportation, clean technologies, green buildings, waste management, water services, sustainable agriculture and forestries. Such investment will bring about an increase in quality and quantity of green jobs.

Concurrently, it is important to reduce the energy use per unit of production, as well as carbon emissions per unit of GDP, while minimizing wasteful consumption in various sectors of the economy.

Having said that, there is inertia in moving away from an unsustainable growth path, and this is because “we can’t manage what we can’t measure.”  An economy’s Gross Domestic Product or GDP is a linear measure of growth, capturing only value of goods and services produced within its boundaries for a given year. It is not reflective of human or societal wellbeing or the state of ecosystems.

If there is a tsunami or earthquake for example, the economy may continue to register a growth in GDP due to the related manufacturing and repair expenses. It does not indicate the human misery or suffering of the people.  We need a measure that captures the three-dimensional aspects of Human and Social Capital, Natural Capital as well as Financial and Physical Capital.

The environment provides the foundation upon which society can become healthy and wealthy. A severely deforested state of Haiti shows how losing natural capital has led to poverty, lack of economic development, increased child mortality and deterioration of maternal health.  All these are interdependent. A green economy is as much about society, human well-being, and the natural environment.

A study by Green Accounting for Indian States Project (GIST) shows that the connection between loss of ecosystem services and poverty can be stark.  In India, ecosystem services account for 7.3% of the GDP (based on 2002-2003 data). However, if you isolate the GDP of the poor, ecosystem services can constitute as much as 57% of the livelihoods they earn in small farming, small scale forestry, fisheries and animal husbandry. So degradation of the environment directly exacerbates poverty.

Which sectors should be given priority in a green economy?

The accumulation of risks resulting from the depletion of natural capital, can lead to various pressures such as a hike in food and oil prices. This directly affects the poor. A 1% loss in GDP could well translate into 20 million people going below the poverty line of US $1 a day.

A rule of thumb would be to allocate resources in sectors that create jobs. In the US, there are 2.3 million employed in the renewable energy sector, compared to 2 million in the oil refining sector.  If projected investments in the renewable energy sector of US $630 million pan out by 2030 globally,  there is potential for 20 million jobs to be created.

If the share of renewable energy in the total energy mix in the US were to increase from 5% as it is currently, to 25%, it would create a huge multiplier effect on employment without the contingent liabilities associated with carbon emissions.

In South Korea, the government has taken a leadership role in steering the economy towards green growth.   The investment of US $1.5 billion in the Four Rivers Project, to clean up the rivers has created 350 thousand jobs. Such a project builds the ecological infrastructure, and the nation’s productive natural capital which is vital for the future.

 There are big opportunities in increasing energy efficiency of buildings as the technology exists. It is estimated that in the US, an investment of US$100 billion over 4 years could generate 4 million new jobs. India could create 900,000 jobs by 2025 in biomass gasification.

There is considerable scope for bringing about efficiency in the agriculture sector as well.  According to a study by the UNEP,   when one accounts for various kinds of wastage in the food supply chain, from planting and harvesting in the fields, from the field to the table in the manufacturing process, discards in fisheries, and also the leakage that arises from using 1/3^rd of the world’s cereal grains to feed livestock instead of people directly, food wastage could be as high as 50%.  

How can we feed the rising population as well as preserve the biodiversity of the planet?  The answer lies not in “more agriculture” but efficient agriculture through reduced wastage, organic farming and proper land allocation.

Why don’t we have a Green Economy yet?

 A green economy is often easier said than done, because we can’t solve the problems with the same thinking that created them.  Often it’s a question of inertia amongst policy makers, businesses and the public, who have to be convinced about the ROI and benefits of green economic growth.

Pavan highlighted that there are two broad enabling conditions that need to be addressed. The first is the International Policy Architecture which includes development of global markets for carbon as well as ecosystem services. Policies are needed for development and transfer of technologies, and for international trade, aid, and co-ordination.

The second enabling condition is in the area of Domestic Policies. These include dismantling lopsided subsidies to fossil fuels, taxes and policies that promote renewable energies, environmental legislation, integrated management of fresh water, policies for proper land use for urban and agricultural areas, monitoring and accounting of ecosystem services.

According to the Global Green New Deal report by the UNEP  more than $300 billion are being spent on energy subsidies across developed and developing economies, the bulk of it on fossil fuels. Removing these subsidies would actually add 0.1% to global GDP and reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 6%.

Mitigating the effects of climate change: The different colours of carbon

Often enough, there is a lot of focus on “brown carbon” or emissions from energy use and industry.  Other types of carbon should be given weightage in mitigation efforts.  ”Blue carbon”  is the carbon stored in the oceans. In fact, they bind an estimated 55% of all carbon in living organisms. “Green carbon” refers to what is stored in the biomass of forests, agricultural lands and pastures. According to the IPCC 2007, by “halting the loss of ‘green’ and ‘blue’carbon, the world could mitigate as much as 25% of total GHG emissions, with co-benefits for biodiversity, food security and livelihoods”

“Black carbon“ is the soot generated by burning coal, biomass and biofuels, and can be reduced by adopting clean technologies.

 Adaptation

According to a TEEB study on the Estimates of Costs and Benefits of Restoration Projects in Different Biomes , economies should recognize the crucial role that ecosystems can play in climate change adaptation. Restoring ecosystem services will help deal with freshwater scarcity, natural hazards like cyclones and improve agriculture and fisheries productivity.

Mangrove planting increases productivity by 80% in the ecosystem, and brings benefits of risk management against natural disasters and resilience for farming communities. 

The study shows the incredible IRR range from 7% to 79%  on projects that rebuild Ecological Infrastructure. The associated Cost Benefit ratios that have been calculated by the GEI team are 3-75 times in different ecosystems from coral reefs to rainforests to grasslands, which is significantly more than any conventional industrial project.

 Global Green New Deal

 The Global Green New Deal is a report by the Green Economy Initiative, launched by the UNEP in 2008. It outlines a global plan for governments and businesses to build green economies using 3 main pillars.

Firstly, valuing and mainstreaming nature’s services into national and international accounts. Secondly, employment generation through green jobs and the laying out the policies and thirdly, encouraging instruments and market signals able to accelerate a transition to a Green Economy.

According to the Deal,  “one third of the around $2.5 trillion-worth of planned stimulus packages should be invested on ‘greening’ the world economy. The estimated $750 billion of green investment, equal to about one per cent of current global GDP, could trigger significant, multiple and potentially transformational returns.”

 Unfortunately as the September 2009 update to the report notes, ” The effectiveness of the green stimulus risks being compromised by delays in allocation of funds.  At the end of the first half of 2009, around only 3% of committed green funds had been disbursed.  Moreover, many G20 members have not included sufficient green investments in their overall stimulus packages.”

As the world emerges out of recession, we have a historical opportunity to transform economies into engines of green growth. Technologies exist. Solutions exist. As Pavan pointed out in the Q&A, what is needed is the behaviourial change to bring about the transition. Change has to come from policy-makers , businesses and enlightened citizens who all need to push actively for this transition based on the new paradigm and mindset. 

You may be interested in these:

“HIGH STAKES: a movie on the Economics of Climate Change in SE Asia”

Climate talks timeline: From 350 to Kyoto to Copenhagen and beyond

Share/Save

We’re beyond the safe limit of CO2 in the atmosphere of 350ppm, thanks to an efficient and extensive fossil fuel based industrial and agricultural machinery that relentlessly spews out green house gases into the atmosphere. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few. According to the UNU-WIDER report, “the richest 10 percent of adults in the world own 85 percent of global household wealth. Of these individuals, almost half live in the US and Japan.”

On the other extreme, half of the 6 billion people of our planet live on less than two dollars a day. 2.5 billion people have little access to basic sanitation.

Capitalism is based on private ownership of the means of production, for the purpose of manufacturing and distributing commodities. The primary objective of course, is to maximise profit. The very nature of the system therefore, demands more and more consumption – something that entails using extensive exploitation of raw materials with increasingly cheap labour. Globalisation of markets for raw material, labour and consumers means that no corner of the planet is spared in the relentless pursuit of profit. Much of this has led to tremendous pollution and damage to ecosytems ranging from rivers, oceans, forests and soils beyond their capacity to regenerate themselves.

Why has capitalism or the markets failed?

1. Tragedy of the commons (a term coined by Garrett Hardin in 1968) means that a common, open access resource such as the oceans or forestry or rivers or air is bound to be over-exploited by individuals. Take fisheries, for example. Each trawler will act in its own self interest and harvest as much from the oceans as possible, because it’s  trying to maximise its own profit. The degradation caused by one trawler may be small, but the collective unbridled harvesting will lead to overfishing, and the eventual collapse of the ecosystem.

2. Environmental and social costs are externalised. Someone or something else, outside of the person or company who earns the profit,  bears the true impact and costs of production and consumption, and these costs are not properly priced in the market.  The bananas that appear on supermarket shelves are cheap, because the true costs of pesticide use are borne by workers in the plantations, by the soil which gets degraded which in turn affects future productivity for local populations,  by rivers which get contaminated by pesticide run-off, which again impacts fish-protein supply.

Can we solve these problems outside of capitalism?

Is socialism the alternative? With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European bloc we’ve already seen that the socialist economic model is not a viable one. A centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production and has to make trillions of economic decisions on behalf of consumers is bound to be inefficient. Take just one example, how many shoes of what size should be made available for which town?  As a vehicle for resource allocation, socialism is cumbersome.  However the intent of creating an equitable society is what we can take away.

Can we and should we improve the Capitalist system?

Many, including environmentalists like Jonathon Porritt as in “Capitalism as if Earth Matters” admit, even if grudgingly, that capitalism is here to stay. If we have to live with it, we might as well make it better, and here are the main thoughts put forward by free market thinkers and environmentalists alike.

1. Regulation  is one way of making sure capitalist forces do not destroy natural resouces and ecosytems in a reckless manner. We’ve seen since the 1970s, a slew of environmental acts and regulations, which have no doubt been useful in checking the excess, but have by no means been adequate.

2. Tragedy of the commons- perhaps not a tragedy? Not many noticed that Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics this year, and her theory is of significant importance to environmentalists. Elinor Ostrom says that common resources don’t have to necessarily face a ‘tragic” downward spiral of destruction, if we have some kind of community participation and ownership of land.  So it’s not always necessary for governments to intervene, provided the community rules of governance are clearly laid out.  In a sense, Elinor rules against either extremes- complete privatisation of natural resources, or at the other end total state control.

3. Green capitalism is seen as a way to achieve “sustainable development” or economic growth which does not destroy the regenerative capacities of different ecosystems.  This involves changing the way we create change, by creating a vision of a sustainable world, by laying emphasis on human “well-being” rather than narrow definitions of GDP of a nation.  Green capitalism involves renewable technologies, closing the loop in waste management, carbon credits and so on. However, there is still a danger that “going green” may only address some aspects of environmental destruction, while broader problems remain e.g., an electric car may be a greener option, but it does not address the fundamental issues of development such as loss of habitat, urban sprawl, increased water and energy use in power plants, or resource use in the car production. It does not ensure issues such as wealth disparity or social inequalities are addressed.

4. Market pricing for ecological and social costs. Markets need to be developed for ecosystem services so that these externalities are accounted for. This will bring about fundamental, systemic change, but is easier said in theory than in practice. Distortions such as subsidies on fossil fuel or large scale industrial agriculture or livestock farming need to be removed. If this is done, organic food for instance, will actually cost less than conventional food when the latter includes the carbon emission impact, cost of unsubsidised fossil fuel inputs for fertiliser and pesticides, fair wages for workers, and costs for effluent treatment before it reaches rivers.

Can society think out of the box?

If we were living in a feudal society, we’d probably be asking, “How can we make feudalism better?” It’s always easier to say in hindsight, “Replace it something better like parliamentary democracy.” 

We as a society are now asking, “How can we make capitalism better?”  Whether we like it or not, that’s where we are. To think out of the box is not easy, but sure enough one day, a new paradigm, a new model will emerge that is more just and sustainable.

Even if we were to live with the existing model, we should be cheering that all the solutions are there. We only have to go as far as Lester Brown’s “Plan B 4.0 Mobilising to Save Civilisation“  or Al Gore’s new book “Choices” where they outline the various pragmatic possibilities within existing frameworks. Solutions also lie within communities, whether they are in rural India or in the Amazon rainforest to solve local issues and manage local livelihoods sustainably.

Where there is a will, there’s a way

The more important question for society at this crucial juncture is “How do we get the political will to implement these solutions, and achieve social and environmental justice?”

As Bill McKibben said, what we are probably seeing for the very first time is a grassroots movement arising to actually push forth the political will needed, as we saw on October 24th, 2009 - the International Day of Climate Action.  Paul Hawken too in his book, “Blessed Unrest” sees a worldwide grassroots movement building up to bring about change in a benign, non-violent manner.

Economic systems have come and gone and there is no reason to believe that capitalism will not be replaced by a model which is sustainable and equitable. Whether that transition comes as a result of a sudden shock to the existing system, or a result of intelligent choices that society makes is the moot question.

You may also be interested in these:

George Monbiot in the Guardian: After this 60-year feeding frenzy, Earth itself has become disposable

Elinor Ostrom featured in the Guardian : Elinor Ostrom breaks the Nobel mould

Measuring Human Well Being: Happy Planet Index

Share/Save

With only about 2 weeks left for Copenhagen at the time of writing, let’s take a pause and look at how we got here:

If I had to choose one historic day on this timeline, it could well be the one that Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org calls “the day the climate movement was fully born.”

You may be interested in this:

The Impact of a Global Temperature Rise of 4 deg Celsius

International Day of Climate Action: 24th October 2009

Blog posts supporting the 10:10 campaign initiated by “The Age of Stupid” movie team to reduce carbon emissions by 10% in 2010

Share/Save

Today’s Guest writer is Chris Tobias, Celsias  Editor-at-Large and Lead Strategist at Forward.  He has been creating a positive future for our planet in the sustainable development/CSR space for five years.

The upcoming climate negotiations in Copenhagen have highlighted an interesting dilemma.  Nations worldwide are trying to shirk their responsibilities around emissions and their economies.

So called “developed” nations like the U.S., U.K., and Australia are having a difficult political time getting industries to swallow the fact that big changes need to happen.  Industry needs to clean up its act.  Of course, then the political dance begins:

• “But what about xyz country?  Are they going to do it too?”  Yes, yes, always point the finger somewhere else.  Someone else should be the leader, start things off, too risky for us.
• “Developing countries should do their bit!”  Undoubtedly the case, but perhaps those who have been polluting in droves since the start of the industrial revolution should take the first step.
• “But it will RUIN industry!  It will be a calamity!  Jobs destroyed!  Lives ruined!  We simply cannot afford to change!”  Unfortunately, the same logic was used at one point to justify slavery, and many other sad practices.  It is a classic technique used to frighten and scare people away from the real issue at hand.  In this case, the cost of climate change will pale all other costs by comparison.  Can we really take that risk? 

Of course for “developing” nations like India and China, the “Hey, it’s OUR turn guys!” excuse gets some pretty significant tread.  And it is pretty hard to object to trying to raise the living standard of people, especially those living in abject poverty.  However, by what means they are raised from poverty… that deserves some scrutiny.

What developing nations have in their favor is the presence of technologies, techniques, and abilities that simply did not exist at the beginning of the industrial revolution.  There are many ways to leapfrog past the dirty, polluting industries we need to avoid, and still give people a chance at a better life.  Development this time need not follow the same dirty learning curve.  With some investment and ingenuity, it shouldn’t have to.

A case in point: rather than laying scores of telephone lines, countries including India have improved communication by having people go directly to mobile phones.  In essence, that’s the logic we’re after. 

So how do you move both developing and developed countries forward and end this stalemate?

Perhaps give them something to aspire to.  Rather than a two tier, there vs. here approach, why not a third choice?  Why not an “evolved” nation status, a better way?

Criteria could be set around all manner of what it means to be an advanced society: economic, environmental, social, and cultural traits would be looked at holistically.  These criteria might include points for:

• Investment in renewable energy infrastructure (a country like Scotland would win points)
• Advanced public healthcare and preventative care (Sweden would do well)
• Low political corruption (Singapore has done a great job)
• Progress with organic, low-impact agriculture (Cuba is a fantastic case study)
• Attention to general public well-being and progress (Such as in the case of Bhutan’s “Gross National Happiness”)
• Strong banking and financial regulation (New Zealand would do well)

… and the list could go on and on.  The point is that each country would inherently have some points in their favor, and with a chart set on advancement, could have a solid direction to move in.  An “evolved” nation would have reached a minimum threshold of criteria, and a timeline for implementing the rest.  It would be an aspiration to genuine progress and a departure from old mindsets.

The catch of course would be to make sure that these are robust, and that nations stay on track.  It would likely take some external review and oversight by a third party to determine genuine progress. 

But of course, if you could say on a worldwide stage that your nation had “evolved” past the many historic problems facing other countries, there would be some strong political interest in supporting these initiatives.  Humans simply like being competitive.

So rather than frame the climate negotiations in the developing/developed nations stalemate, perhaps the time has arrived for a third, more enlightened option—one that actually offers the opportunity for progress, and something for people to aspire to.

Share/Save