by David Steven | Nov 21, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Yesterday, while railing against UNAIDS for its failure to provide accurate estimates of the number of people with HIV/AIDS, I was casting around for the first person to make the wrong-about-HIV=wrong-about-climate-change link.
I couldn’t find anything then, but our friend Claudi Rosett has now made the link:
Could there possibly be a certain parallel here between past UN alarmism over a wildfire global AIDS pandemic, and Ban Ki-moon’s latest pronouncement that to stop the imminent, irreversible, dire, apocalyptic, overwhelming, total, unquestionable and abruptly looming climate catastrophe (he went and saw a melting glacier for himself — who are we to question what that means?), there must now be a titanic planet-wide wealth transfer, with the UN as fee-collecting broker and middleman?
At the imminent UN climate conference next month by the warm beaches of Bali, where UN staffers will collect their per diems while UN eminences plan ways to chill our economy, will anyone dare to bring that up?
by David Steven | Nov 21, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific
My response to Alex’s post is – why wouldn’t Kevin Rudd take Australia back into Kyoto? The country is already tracking its Kyoto target and is quite capable of meeting it:
The Tracking to the Kyoto Target report projects the levels of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2008-2012. It forecasts Australia’s emissions to be 109 per cent of 1990 levels by 2008-2012.
Australia is committed to achieving an emissions target of 108 percent of 1990 levels by 2008-2012 and the report shows we are within 1 percent of meeting that target.
Rudd, it seems, will bear little political cost if he triumphantly returns his country to the fold. New Zealand, however, is in a a more difficult position. It’s in Kyoto, but will miss it will miss its target by 12% on current projections. According to the New Zealand Institute, a leading think tank:
With the benefit of hindsight, a previous commitment on climate change, in the form of New Zealand’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, was negotiated and ratified without a full understanding of the New Zealand position. The official view at the time of New Zealand’s ratification in December 2002 was that New Zealand would receive a significant national benefit.
As it has turned out, however, New Zealand has incurred a financial liability currently estimated to be in excess of $500 million.
The Institute concludes that New Zealand should still aim to meet its Kyoto targets – but by 2020, not 2012.
by Alex Evans | Nov 21, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific
What a coup it would be for the UN – and Ban Ki-Moon in particular – if one of Kyoto’s prodigal sons returned to the fold ahead of the Bali climate summit (running from 3-14 December).
That’s exactly what could happen if Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd (profile here) wins Saturday’s general election there. He’s already said that if elected, he will personally lead the Aussie delegation to the summit – and that a Labor government would “immediately” reverse John Howard’s refusal to accept binding targets for Australia.
The FT yesterday cited polling data putting Labor 10 points ahead.
by David Steven | Nov 20, 2007 | Economics and development
In 2002, UNAIDS reported that:
There are 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS world-wide. 38.6 million of these are adults, 19.2 million are women and 3.2 million are children under the age of 15. Five million new infections with HIV occured in 2002 of which 4.2 million were adults and 2 million of them were women.
It also argued that:
Best current projections suggest that an additional 45 million people will become infected with HIV in 126 low- and middle-income countries (currently with concentrated or generalized epidemics) between 2002 and 2010—unless the world succeeds in mounting a drastically expanded, global prevention effort.
The agency was especially pessimistic about India, suggesting that “there remains considerable potential for growth in India… where almost 4 million people are living with HIV.”
In subsequent years, UNAIDS has reported 12.6m deaths from the disease. So some quick maths suggests that – absent “a drastically expanded, global prevention effort” – UNAIDS would have been expecting 55-60m people to be living with HIV by now.
So what are the most recent figures? 33.2m people are now believed to be living with the virus. A miracle, no?
Well no, it’s not. Just last year, 39.5m people were reported to be infected.The sudden fall is not due to anything other than better data. 2.5m Indians, for example, are now thought to be infected. The figure reported last year was 5.7m. Quite a drop.
On top of that, far from spiralling out of control in 2002, UNAIDS now believes the epidemic peaked as far back as 1998 (see slide 4). That year (using corrected data), there were 3m new infections. Last year, there were around 2.5m
UNAIDS defence? According to its director of monitoring and evaluation, accurate data are too expensive to collect regularly, with a household survey costing $2-3m per country.
What a lame excuse! The world is now spending $10bn a year fighting the epidemic. In comparison, a few tens of million on research is chump change.
by Alex Evans | Nov 20, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks, UK
Last week it was Gordon Brown’s first speech as PM on foreign policy; yesterday, his first on climate change and the environment. I went along to listen. An hour and a bit later, I emerged, having been duly told that “this is a challenge to which the human spirit, and our powers of ingenuity and enterprise, will rise”. Stirring stuff; Gordon was clearly taking detailed notes as he read from Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth (“…when we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge…”)
Looking at the papers this morning, it’s intriguing to see how the speech has polarised opinion. In the blue corner, here’s Polly Toynbee in the Guardian: “Yesterday’s speech heralded a seismic change in attitude. If Britain hits these targets for renewable energy and CO2 emissions, it will be a near miracle.” In the red corner, Charles Clover in the Telegraph: “it was extremely hard to see that what Mr Brown was proposing bore any relationship to Churchill’s ‘action this day’. It was more like ‘action by 2020’.” Peter Riddell in the Times agrees: ” Gordon Brown’s first big green speech was long on analysis and aspiration, but shorter on action.”
So what was there, really? By my tally, the list of genuinely new announcements goes like this:
– Confirmation of UK commitment to the EU target of 20 per cent of power from renewables by 2020, though admittedly with no detail on what the UK’s share would be (NGOs very waggy about this, as leaked documents last month suggested the Government might not support the target);
– European emissions trading scheme to be extended to service sector companies;
– An expansion of energy efficiency obligations on power supply companies;
– Smart meters offered to every household within a decade;
– A new one-stop public advice service on energy efficiency and micro-generation;
– Proposals for EU car emissions to be limited to 100g Co2 / km by 2020.
In fairness to Gordon Brown, this is a pretty good roster of ‘announceables’, as they go. Tradition dictates that a Prime Ministerial climate change speech should have one announceable in it, and that (say) fifty million quid for energy efficiency grants (or renewables R&D or whatever) will generally suffice. This went a lot further than that. On the other hand, the green crowd have rated Brown’s tenure so far a disappointment, and Brown will have known that he needed to do better than average in order to avoid losing ground to the Tories on what may yet become a key battleground issue for the next election. He achieved that yesterday: Greenpeace director John Sauven commented, “this time he really gets it.”
Well, maybe, maybe not. For my own part, my overriding impression was that this is still all about business energy use. There was precious little here about what real people need to do, and it left the listener with the sense that the Government still lacks a robust theory of influence on climate change.
As David and I discuss in a paper we’re publishing next month on the state of the climate change debate, there’s lots of evidence that individual people feel a strong sense of dissonance between the “we’re all doomed” messages they hear about the problem of climate change and the “all you need to do is turn out lights and not leave your TV on standby” messages thay hear about solutions.
Brown’s speech yesterday fell straight into that trap. Despite all the rhetoric about how “the character and course of the coming century will be set by how we measure up to this challenge”, the reality was that very little was actually being asked of the public. No need to drive less; no need to fly less; no need even to answer the (entirely logical and legitimate, if still politically leftfield) question about whether meat consumption should be capped in view of the fact that (a) livestock are responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions and (b) consumption of meat and dairy products is forecast to rise 50% by 2030.
Of course, you may argue that we’re witnessing the first steps on what will be a long journey, and that business energy use is the right place to start. Well, maybe. On the other hand, you can also argue that by maintaining the dissonance between messages on the scale of the problem and messages on what needs to be done to solve it, you’re actually inviting the public to conclude one of two things: either (a) the problem isn’t actually as big as politicians say, or (b) it’s too late to solve it. The evidence on what actions people are taking on climate change, or are prepared to take, unfortunately seems to confirm the more pessimistic view.
None of this is to deride the substantive nature of what was on offer yesterday. But it’s hard to see how the UK is really going to manage a 60 to 80 per cent emissions reduction by 2050 without that elusive theory of influence.
