I went to the Climate Camp yesterday, on Blackheath, next to Greenwich Park, a brick’s throw from the Royal Observatory. The camp is maybe a 150m-diamater circle, with a metal fence around it, filled with tents. You have to enter through a steel gate, over which hangs a sign saying ‘Capitalism is crisis’, and under which crusties sit on straw bales, perusing the new entrants like monkeys outside a Hindu temple. (more…)
Presentation by Alex Evans to a seminar organised for the UN Department of Political Affairs by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (August 2009)
I spent yesterday morning presenting on scarcity issues – water, food, energy, land and climate security – to staff from the UN Department of Political Affairs, as part of a three day session on non-traditional security threats organised by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
Here’s a copy of my presentation on the kinds of institutional change we need in order to manage scarcity, which focuses particularly on reducing the vulnerability of poor people and fragile states. This draws heavily on a new report on Multilateralism and Scarcity that I’ll be publishing through the Brookings Institution later in the year.
Also presenting were Geoff Dabelko from the Woodrow Wilson Center (if you don’t subscribe to The New Security Beat, the Center’s superb blog on scarcity-security links, then you should); and Mike Hutton from the US Department of Energy’s Office for Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence (as previously documented here, one of a handful of hotspots of radical forward thinking in the US government – you can get involved, too).
He didn’t get it at Kyoto – and he doesn’t get it now.
John Prescott – former British Deputy PM, and its lead negotiator at the 1997 Kyoto climate summit – is making headlines this morning with his call for “equalising greenhouse gas emissions per head in each country”. But what he’s getting wrong (again – sigh) is the point that what we need to equalise for a fair global deal isn’t emissions per capita – it’s emission entitlements per capita.
This is not hair-splitting. Equalising emissions per capita is just what obviously and inevitably happens if we’re solving climate change: given that total global emissions will have to fall by at least 80% by 2050, and almost certainly by close to 100% at some stage, then obviously it follows that we’ll all be equalising our emissions – at roundabout zero.
The real question is what happens between now and that point – and in particular, how global emissions permits get shared out. We always think of emissions targets as burdens, but they’re also tradable assets, of course. They’re worth quite a lot: global emissions trading markets were worth $64bn in 2008. That’s already more than half the size of total global aid flows ($120bn in 2008).
So the $64bn question – literally – is what share of these assets low income countries get. If they get an equal per capita entitlement within a global emissions budget, then the fact that their per capita emissions are so low means they get to sell their surplus permits via emissions trading markets – and a major new finance for development flow is created, at the same time as the climate is being stabilised.
If, on the other hand, all they get is John Prescott’s implied assurance that we’ll all end up at zero emissions in a hundred years or so, then that’s not really the same thing at all, is it?
From Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, a sad tale:
“They needed a room with proper ventilation so that the security guards could make bacon sandwiches without the whole place smelling of bacon. I was in the only one they had, so I had to move.”
My friend, not long appointed a special adviser to one of John Major’s Cabinet ministers, looked sheepish. He was explaining to me why his office next door to the Secretary of State had become one that was up two flights of stairs and along a corridor. As he told me the tale, he slowly realised that he’d been had. The Civil Service had found his “special advice” inconvenient. In future, they decided, there would be no more bumping into the minister. My friend would have to call up and arrange a meeting.
I felt sympathetic. But really all I could do was laugh. The inventiveness of the Civil Service, as they dreamt up ways to hobble special advisers, was always so impressive. The lightness of touch was what I enjoyed most. These people knew how to beat someone up without leaving a mark on their body that they could show to Amnesty International.
Ah yes, they certainly do. When I became a special adviser at DFID in 2003 and was first shown my office, I realised that it was a looong corridor length away from the Secretary of State’s private office.
A year later, I returned from leave to discover that my office had halved in size: the wall had been moved six feet. To create a new meeting room for the Permanent Secretary on the other side.
As Finkelstein rightly observes, all you could do was laugh…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxi5mokoOP8[/youtube]