Friday, November 30, 2012
The State of Climate Change at COP-18
Every year at this time I post on the
state of the world's response to climate change. This began in 2009
with Copenhagen, which was a watershed moment for international
cooperation on getting a grip. That was COP-15, the fifteenth
Conference of Parties. Now we are at COP-18. How many times does it
take for the climate bullies of the world to get a grip, to cop to
the woolly mammoth in the room?
Watershed moment indeed. It has
passed, the geopolitical energy peaked. At Copenhagen, the
truth-sayers were not allowed inside the party (with a couple of
eloquent exceptions – a fifteen year old Canadian girl looking the
bureaucrats in the eye and speaking simple, plaintive truth; a
weeping elder chief from drought-ridden Africa, testifying to the end
of his culture). This has been the case ever since, with the UNFCC
becoming an annual occasion for diplomatic doublespeak while global
NGO's mass outside the official hall proclaiming the shame of it all.
As Clive Hamilton put it in Requiem for a Species, Copenhagen was the moment when we may have lost our “last
hope for humanity to pull back from the abyss.”
The reports from
climate scientists are bleak, getting worse all the time. CO2
emissions are growing, not abating. Mitigation targets from Kyoto
were mostly missed, and Canada has recently accelerated its dreadful
backward slide by publicly withdrawing its commitment to the
protocol. Even as the tar sands await their route to the sea, the
boreal forest is dying from drought and the infestation of mutating
beetles, imperiling one of the planet's major carbon sinks. Worse,
what I feared years ago, because it was so obvious a threat, but had
never been included in official calculations on the rate of warming,
has begun in earnest the last two or three years, namely the thawing of the Arctic tundra. The permafrost contains amounts of methane
with CO2 equivalents that dwarf the amount of increased emissions we
are currently experiencing. Already, 44 million tons a year (out of
400 billion tons) are leaking into the atmosphere, equivalent to the
emissions of 29 million cars.
Climate
Denial. Though the effort by the infamous Koch brothers to debunk
the global consensus of climate scientists by funding a study led by
Berkeley physicist and McArthur fellow Richard Muller ended up
backfiring (he found data even worse than the published results of
the IPCC), convincing a hireling denier to change his position, the
denial industry still holds the upper hand. They made it politically
inexpedient to mention climate change during the Presidential
campaign, and recently vigorously debunked findings by Iowa's 130
climate scientists that the protracted, crippling Midwest drought is
fueled by climate weirding.
With COP 18
negotiations underway in Doha Qatar, the chair, Christine Figuera,
has bravely pointed to slow, steady progress, while acknowledging
that we have much more to do. Frankly, other than a few isolated
countries (and states like California, Hawaii, Vermont, and Iowa),
there is very little progress indeed. Though I fervently backed an
international agreement in 2009, and renewed that call in subsequent
years, I no longer see meaningful progress towards this kind of
solution. As I wrote last month, a series of “clubs” -
bilateral, small groups of nations, etc, modeled on trade agreements
between sovereigns - might be able to achieve piecemeal what we have
not been able to do wholesale through an international agreement.
And if some of the big players, especially the US and China, would
enter into agreements to reduce emissions, then significant progress
could be possible.
The argument runs that carbon emissions partners need to have similar goals and
strategies. On the face of it, the US and China are in competition
more than partnership. Why not turn that competition into something
the whole planet can benefit from?
But if we pull
back from a binding international agreement (the stated goal is to
have a successor to Kyoto signed by 2015), it is critically important
that any shift towards a new strategy be carefully signaled to
provide a continuum of hope. Any hope attached to the present charade
is dishonest, false hope. There are no signs that anything serious is
afoot at Doha. It is time to shift strategies, putting Plan B into
place. I don't know what the US strategy is for the current round of
meetings, but something needs to be in place by the time the next
UNFCC meeting is scheduled to occur a year from now. In the interim,
instead of trying to get all UN states to agree, negotiations could
go on among trading blocks and trading pairs, with the space for
international activity next Advent filled instead by final
negotiations of these treaties. First World peoples could issue
manifestos, and rich nations could work more honestly on aid to
countries at most immediate risk from climate destabilization.
In other words,
all the things that we have come to expect from these gatherings
would continue, but most of the energy towards negotiating economic
changes to reduce carbon by the big players could be constructively
spent in bilateral talks. If a few significant ones were signed,
then we would have cause for some honest hope for a change. At that
point the UNFCC wonks could crunch the numbers resulting from climate
club treaties, and the ever-receding goal of holding temperature rise
to 2 degrees C could be replaced by something more realistic.
Are bilateral
climate treaties possible, even thinkable, in the current political
atmosphere? There is progress outside the conference hall in Doha,
mainly in China and Australia. Autralia has initiated a carbon tax,
and China is giving it serious thought, as both James Hansen and Al Gore report. As Gore points out,
things go on under the radar and may be ready to break out. Like
many of us, he argues for a revenue-neutral carbon tax. If the new
leadership in China moves boldly, then they might join Australia in
instituting one. France under Hollande may achieve what it could not
along these lines under Sarkozy. And the suicidal reign of
ultra-conservatives in the US Congress might, just might, give way to
climate realism. Let us continue to work for this improbable goal,
and pray that this Advent covers the seeds of a climate change
awakening in our recalcitrant nation.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
