by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
When I was the IPPR’s energy research fellow, I always loved working with Dieter Helm – a total iconoclaust who’d infuriate the green establishment by poking holes in their shaky claims about how cheap it would be to sort out climate change. He could always get away with it for the simple reason that he knew energy policy better than they did. He was at it again last week in the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. and Europe refuse to acknowledge that halting the relentless rise in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will take a significant slice out of economic growth. It will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable. We are simply living beyond our — and the planet’s — means.
This is not a welcome message for politicians to give to their voters. But it happens to be what is required to tackle this global crisis. Not since the late 1930s, in the run-up to World War II, has such a massive restructuring of major economies been required. Nobody told the British or American people then that the challenge of creating a wartime economy was going to be cheap. They should stop pretending that the enormous challenge of decarbonizing the major economies can be done on the cheap, either.
Thank goodness for straight talkers. Absolutely. I’d be a rich man if I had a pound for every enthusiastic green who told me that the bad news is that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are just round the corner and will be here in a few minutes, but that the good news is all I need do is remember not to leave my phone charger plugged in. People ain’t stupid. When the gap between the problem narrative and the solution narrative is that wide, they assume one of two things: that it’s already too late to solve the problem, or that the scale of the problem is being exaggerated in the first place.
by David Steven | Mar 15, 2008 | Conflict and security
In a recent post on Global Dashboard, I wrote about resilience, drawing on thinking that Alex and I have been developing together for a new project we hope to launch later this year.
The post was triggered by David Miliband’s argument that one of the defining features of the era we live in is a shift in the balance of responsibilities between state and citizen. It was a mistake to assume this would lead to greater stability, I argued. The key question is whether, when faced with a distributed threat, our systems become more resilient or less so.
Lloyd Anderson, head of science at the British Council and an ecologist, pointed out to me that it is helpful to think about three levels of influence on a system: trends, stresses and shocks.
Trends are gradual shifts in a system’s composition and context. Shocks are immediate and catastrophic. Stresses sit somewhere in the middle, and tend to affect a complex system in a particular way. Under pressure, the system ‘resists’ change up to an unpredictable point. It then shifts rapidly – and usually irreversibly – to another equilibrium.
We pay plenty of attention to shocks and trends. The former sell newspapers, while the latter keep social scientists in work. But stresses are deadly, both because they fly beneath the radar, and because they have the potential to lead to deep-seated changes that undermine the basis of our way of life.
Take two examples: the 2003 heat wave in Europe and the slow-burn insurgency in the Niger delta. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Mar 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks, UK
You just can’t keep a good man down. You might think he’d want a rest after a decade as Prime Minister. You might suppose he’d have his hands full sorting out the Middle East. You might reckon he’d be busy planning his impending role as the next President of Europe. But – pah!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K9rVRuehGU]
Tony Blair is to lead a new international team to tackle the intractable problem of securing a global deal on climate change which would have the backing of China and America. The former prime minister believes he can help prepare a blueprint for an agreement to cut carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, and has the backing of the White House, the UN and Europe, including Gordon Brown.
He told the Guardian he has been working on the project with a group of climate change experts since he left office last summer, and will publish an interim report to the G8 group of industrialised nations this summer. “This is extremely urgent. A 50% cut by 2050 has to be a central component of this. We have to try this year to get that agreed, because the moment you do agree that, then you have something for everyone to focus upon. We need a true and proper global deal, and that needs to include America and China,” Blair said.
Mark Lynas has more in a Comment is Free piece published today. (Incidentally, if we’re still focused on two degrees C – as we should be, and as Mark certainly is in his CiF piece – then it’s worth noting right at the beginning that the IPCC says in its Fourth Assessment Report that to limit warming to between 2.0 and 2.4 degrees, then the global emissions cut by 2050 needs to be between 50 and 85 per cent. Hard to avoid the suspicion that we’ll need to be at the deep end of that emissions reduction range in order to come in at the low end of the temperature increase range.)
by Alex Evans | Mar 12, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Our friends at Avaaz have a new campaign on biofuels (full text below the fold). Biofuels are already absorbing 20 per cent of the US corn crop, and that figure’s expected to rise to 32 per cent by 2016. As Avaaz’s email puts it,
Each day, 820 million people in the developing world do not have enough food to eat. Food prices around the world are shooting up, sparking food riots from Mexico to Morocco. And the World Food Program warned last week that rapidly rising costs are endangering emergency food supplies for the world’s worst-off. How are the wealthiest countries responding? They’re burning food.
Go sign the petition to G20 leaders in advance of this weekend’s summit…
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Mar 12, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
As if to prove the point I made back in January about Ban being the ‘scarcity SG’, given his interest in climate change and water scarcity, here’s a piece of his on food prices from the Washington Post today. What he thinks needs to be done:
First, we must meet urgent humanitarian needs. This year, the World Food Program plans to feed 73 million people globally, including as many as 3 million people each day in Darfur. To do so, the program requires an additional $500 million simply to cover the rise in food costs. (Note: 80 percent of the agency’s purchases are made in the developing world.)
Second, we must strengthen U.N. programs to help developing countries deal with hunger. This must include support for safety-net programs to provide social protection, in the face of urgent need, while working on longer-term solutions. We also need to develop early-warning systems to reduce the impact of disasters. School meals — at a cost of less than 25 cents a day — can be a particularly powerful tool.
Third, we must deal with the increasing consequences of weather-related shocks to local agriculture, as well as the long-term consequences of climate change — for example, by building drought and flood defense systems that can help food-insecure communities cope and adapt.
Last, we must boost agricultural production. World Bank President Robert Zoellick has rightly noted that there is no reason Africa can’t experience a “green revolution” of the sort that transformed Southeast Asia in previous decades. U.N. agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development are working with the African Union and others to do just this, introducing vital science and technologies that offer permanent solutions for hunger.
