A propos my post below – Brown has said that the NSF core group will be made up of 12 men and women. But who could they be? Join in the fun and send us your thoughts.
Some help: Brown suggested that the 12 publicly appointed members would reflect the broad range of the subject areas in the national security strategy. Taking into account the fact that Brown will nominate a Chair that leaves 11 places.
My national security top trumps below:
Chair: (Most likely to be a retired or serving senior civil servant – possibly in the resilience space?)
Although plenty of people see the Guardian’s George Monbiot as an irritating gadfly (see also Gideon Rachman’s amusing account of what it’s like to work with him), I’ve long taken him seriously on climate and scarcity issues; his book The Age of Consent, in particular, contains a really excellent attempt to think through what will happen to world trade in conditions of resource scarcity.
So it was with interest that I saw on his blog that he’s officially Changed His Mind on post-Kyoto climate policy. Like me, George has for a long time been an advocate of C&C – under which countries agree a global ceiling on greenhouse gas concentrations (e.g. 350 parts per million of CO2), figure out the level of global emissions each year that will keep us below it, and then share out the tradable permits to that ’emissions budget’ on the basis of convergence to equal per capita rights by an agreed date, like 2050. But no longer. Here he is in the Guardian on 1 July:
After reading the proofs of a book by the independent thinker Oliver Tickell, to be published this month, I have changed my view. In Kyoto2: how to manage the global greenhouse, Tickell slaughters my favourite ideas(8). He shows that there is no logical basis for dividing up the right to pollute among nation states. It gives them too much power over this commodity, and there is no guarantee that they would pass the pollution rights on to their citizens, or use the money they raised to green the economy…
Instead Tickell proposes setting a global limit for carbon pollution then selling permits to pollute to companies extracting or refining fossil fuels. This has the advantage of regulating a few thousand corporations – running oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser works for example – rather than a few billion citizens. These firms would buy their permits in a global auction, run by a coalition of the world’s central banks. There’s a reserve price, to ensure that the cost of carbon doesn’t fall too low, and a ceiling price, at which the banks promise to sell permits, to ensure that the cost doesn’t cripple the global economy. In this case companies would be borrowing permits from the future. But because the money raised would be invested in renewables, the demand for fossil fuels would fall, so fewer permits would need to be issued in later years.
Tickell calculates that if the cap were set low enough to ensure that the world became carbon neutral by 2050, the total cost of permits would be about $1 trillion a year, or roughly 1.5% of the global economy. The money would be spent on helping the poor to adapt to climate change, paying countries to protect forests and other ecosystems, developing low-carbon farming, promoting energy efficiency and building renewable power plants.
In some ways, I can see the attraction too. For one thing, Oliver Tickell’s proposed approach (which you can read more about here) retains C&C’s most important attribute: it starts from where we’re trying to get to, through a quantified, binding ceiling on GHG concentrations. None of the usual crap about “aspirational long-term goals” here, then.
I suspect it’s also true that it would be methodologically far easier to cap the emissions of a few thousand refineries, cement works, coal mines or power stations – the ‘upstream’ end of the production life cycle, in other words – than it would be to cap national emissions, given that totalling an entire country’s emissions involves tracking hundreds of millions of different activities (e.g. the gas I’ve just used to cook my lunch).
But while the methodological / policy end of things does look easier under Oliver’s Kyoto 2 proposal, the politics look very much more difficult. For one thing, think of the developing country equity dimensions, which China and India showed so clearly at the G8. Oliver’s proposal effectively tells Chinese steel companies that they’ll have to compete against Japanese steel companies for emission permits in an open auction – a process that in effect takes no account of their developing status, and hence does away with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Good luck with securing agreement to that.
Secondly, allocating emission rights to states may indeed entail no guarantees that these states will then pass emission rights on to their citizens, it’s true. But the fact of the matter is that it’s those states that must negotiate any global deal – and those states that must enforce domestic level compliance with the global deal, even if the deal is done as Oliver wants it to be.
All in all, Oliver’s is a smart idea – especially its focus on a relatively small number of sites – but it’s hard to see it as feasible…
Lots of people converging on the need for an integrated approach to food, climate and energy this week (funny how the same ideas often seem to sprout in different places at the same time). Just as I was about to publish my paper on multilateralism and scarcity on Monday, I saw Indian PM Manmohan Singh quoted as saying that,
Climate change, energy security and food security are interlinked, and require an integrated approach.
Then yesterday Mark Malloch Brown and I spoke at a meeting in Parliament organised by the All Party Groups on Africa and Conflict, which was on (guess what?) the conflict risk posed in Africa by the convergence of peak oil, climate change and soaring food prices – here’s the speech I gave.
But the prize for joined-up thinking of the week goes to the United Nations University in Japan, who yesterday launched a new site on the three scarcity issues entitled Our World 2.0: one to add to the bookmarks list…
Update: I’ve done a piece on the G8 and joining up the dots on scarcity issues on Comment is Free.
Like Alex, I spoke at the United Nations University symposium on climate change and innovation on Friday – and one notable theme was the ferocious kicking that Kyoto received from some of the speakers.
Nordhaus, writing with Michael Shellenberger, has called for Kyoto to be scrapped in the current issue of Democracy. “Kyoto is dead,” they write, “and that’s a good thing. In its place, we need massive global investment in new clean energy technology.”
Gwyn Prins takes a similar line, an argument he set out in a pamphlet written with Steve Rayner, and subsequent op-ed for Nature (which he says received a bigger response than anything the journal has previously published).
On Friday, both attempted to bang a few nails into Kyoto’s coffin. Gwyn, in particular, was adamant that the protocol had long been dead. Only a few diehards – emotionally incapable of accepting they are wrong – had failed to admit its passing:
We have to find a way, diplomatically, for the Europeans to join in [to a new approach to climate control] without losing face. You don’t get progress if you tell people that they must admit they made a mistake. Most of us don’t like to admit that we have made mistakes.
Prins and Nordhaus agree on a great deal. On Kyoto, they argue that:
Its targets have had no impact on those countries that adopted them – not even slowing the rate of increase in their emissions.
In Europe, any emissions reductions that have occurred are due to factors that precede the implementation of the Kyoto protocol.
European emissions are rising faster than American ones (a ‘hard fact’ that embarrasses European politicians who relish looking down on ‘ugly Americans’ as Gwyn put it).
On a future climate regime, they contend that:
Kyoto’s failure means that the Copenhagen agreement should exclude binding targets.
Instead, a ‘bottom-up’ approach should be adopted, with investment in technology at its heart. This will reduce emissions more effectively than binding targets.
Leadership on climate is shifting away from Europe and towards the United States.
I am going to leave future frameworks to another post. In this one – and below the jump – I look at Kyoto’s impact on Europe. There’s a lot of detail in the main post, so here are the key conclusions:
It’s too early to say whether Kyoto has worked as advertised in Europe – but the evidence suggests that Europe as a whole will meet, or even exceed its targets.
Later reductions in emissions seem likely to be due to policy responses to Kyoto. Governments are reacting to the pressure that a binding target applies.
It’s likely that Europe would be emitting more if Kyoto had never been ratified – and it’s a real stretch to argue that the US is doing better than the EU on emissions.
Talking heads including James Hansen, Ted Nordhaus, David and me on what G8 leaders need to do on climate change next week – shot at last week’s UNU climate conference in Tokyo.
