It frustrates me so much that UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres was rubbishing the idea of a carbon budget two years ago, even as the IPCC was being more trenchant than ever before about the need for one …and now here she is two years later saying there’s no way Paris will agree a 2 degree deal.
*Obviously* Paris isn’t going to do a 2 degree deal, in this lame incremental paradigm where everyone just talks about what they think they can manage, as opposed to what’s actually necessary. But that’s because no one is leading by putting the question of how we share a safe global emissions budget out between 195 countries squarely on the table.
Surely Christiana Figueres’s job as UNFCCC Executive Secretary is to tell the world what it will take to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at a safe level? Am I missing something here?
Few things infuriate me more than when people tell me that there’s no way we’ll ever agree on how to share out a global carbon budget because it would inevitably lead to a zero sum game in which everyone ends up fighting – without their having taken the trouble to sit down and actually run the numbers.
Owen Barder, Alice Lepissier and I just spent the last three years building a quant model to answer the question of what it would look like if the world agreed a 2 degree carbon budget, shared it out on the basis of equal per capita shares of the sky, and allowed emissions trading. (Our report is out in a month’s time at the SDG summit, but here’s a 3 page preview if you’re interested.)
You know what we found? That not only is it way cheaper than you’d think for high emitters, but even more strikingly, that low and lower middle income countries receive $419 billion a year from emissions trading by 2025. Which is more than three times as much as total current aid flows. So we stabilise the climate – and in the process we sort out the finance for development gap that last month’s Addis FFD summit so manifestly failed to do anything about.
Climate change and poverty eradication are just so _solvable_. And yet here we are still running round and round and round in circles telling ourselves it can’t be done – with the effect that emissions are now up 52% since the UN Climate Convention was signed in 1992. We can do a lot better than this.
