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 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.
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
I was about to pull together some of the main threads in the IEA’s 2007 World Energy Outlook (executive summary here), but Martin Wolf beat me to it in yesterday’s FT, so here are a few of his highlights from the new report:
If governments stick with current policies (which the IEA calls the “reference scenario”), the world’s energy needs will be more than 50 per cent higher in 2030 than today, with developing countries accounting for 74 per cent, and China and India alone for 45 per cent, of the growth in demand.
Fossil fuels are forecast to account for 84 per cent of the increase in global energy consumption between 2005 and 2030.
Some $22,000bn (a little under half of 2006 world gross product) will need to be invested in supply infrastructure, to meet demand over the next quarter century.
In the IEA’s own words, “a supply-side crunch in the period to 2015, involving an abrupt escalation in oil prices cannot be ruled out”.
Sitting straight yet?
For me, two big themes stand out in this year’s outlook. The first is the oil markets, which remain extremely tight. The overall figures for global production are not keeping pace with the increase in demand; Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute argues that they show “a pronounced loss of momentum in the growth of oil production” over the last few years. In 2004, the total was 82.90 million barrels of oil a day (mb/d). This rose to 84.15 mb/d in 2005, and then 84.80 mb/d in in 2006. In the first ten months of this year, output has fallen back slightly to 84.62 mb/d.
Naturally, none of this has been lost on analysts who support the peak oil argument – an increasing number of whom now claim that the peak was passed some time between late 2005 and early 2007. Their attention has in particular focused on a report from the Energy Watch Group, commissioned by the German government, which concluded that:
world oil production … peaked in 2006. Production will start to decline at a rate of several percent per year. By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame.
Not being a geologist, I won’t attempt to pass judgement on that claim. Many in the oil industry vehemently deny that a peak is anywhere close, and since peak oilers themselves tend to argue that the production peak will only be definitively discernable in retrospect, a few more years of falling production would presumably be needed before a peak could be called for sure.
But what the IEA’s new energy outlook really tells us is that you don’t have to be a peak oiler to be worried about the energy outlook. Although some investment in new supply is happening, it’s a long way short of the astronomical levels called for by the IEA. Take, for instance, Javier Blas’s excellent FT analysis piece today, which quotes the Secretary General of OPEC – which according to the IEA will account for a rapidly increasing proportion of global oil supply – as saying that its members have committed close to $120 billion in supply expansion projects.
$120 billion? Well, great. Only another $21,880 billion to go, then.
The second stand-out part of the report for me is the climate change part of the piece. Among the highlights that Martin Wolf picks out from the report:
Under the reference scenario, emissions of carbon dioxide will jump by 57 per cent between 2005 and 2030. The US, China, Russia and India alone contribute two-thirds of this increase. China becomes the world’s biggest emitter this year and India the third largest by 2015.
Even under the IEA’s more radical “alternative policy scenario” CO2 emissions stabilise only by 2025 and remain almost 30 per cent above 2005 levels.
Look at these figures in the light of the IPCC figures on emissions levels and stabilisation scenarios (here‘s the relevant section of the latest assessment report – you want table 3.5 on page 198). According to the IPCC, the ‘alternative scenario’ – with emissions peaking in 2025 – puts the world on course for a stabilisation level of around 590 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent, and warming of around 4 degrees Celsius (though caveat recent data in Science about the risks of predicting temperature increase from concentration data). And that’s assuming a rapid decline in emissions after they peak in 2025. It doesn’t look good.
Wolf is refreshingly blunt – and right on the mark – when he says that on global warming, “despite the blather, nothing effective has been done or yet seems likely to be done”. And this is perhaps the most challenging element of the world’s energy outlook – not just the need to meet exploding demand for energy while slashing carbon dioxide emissions, but the fact that in order to pull off this extraordinary feat, the real heavy lifting is on the demand rather than the supply side of the equation. According to the IEA’s own projections, it’s energy efficiency, more than renewables, nuclear, clean coal and so on, that make the difference between the reference scenario and the alternative policy scenario.
The problem is, tackling the demand side is the hard part of climate mitigation – and domestic energy efficiency and road transport (as opposed to business energy use) are the really hard part. Changes of this kind are all about influencing the behaviour, values, assumptions and narratives of a very large number of people; technical policy fixes don’t go that far here. David and I will be publishing a paper next month, commissioned by the London Accord, on public perceptions of climate change, which has a lot to say on this area. There’s a lot of work to do…
by Alex Evans | Nov 15, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK
Gordon Brown’s first foreign policy speech, delivered on Monday evening at Mansion House, was nicely drafted, well argued and competently delivered. Its central argument: that “international institutions built [in 1945] for just 50 sheltered economies in what became a bipolar world … are not fit for purpose in an interdependent world of 200 states where global flows of commerce, people and ideas defy borders”.
Although virtually all media coverage of the speech – Times, BBC, PA, Independent, Telegraph, New York Times, Melanie Phillips in predictable form in the Spectator, Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian – led exclusively either on Iran or on the relative weight accorded to the UK’s relationship with US and EU, this was really a speech about multilateral reform. In particular, it was about reforming international institutions to equip them to deal with six new trends: “failed states and rogue states”; terrorism; global flows of capital, goods and services; the emergence of China and India; climate change; and “a new global competition for natural resources”, especially energy.
(It’s interesting, by the way, that he emphasised natural resource scarcity, rather than just energy security on its own. To give credit where it’s due, Brown spotted that agenda well before most of his peers: the Treasury’s December 2004 paper on long term economic challenges for the UK, for instance, made the same point. It’s also very interesting that Brown has instructed the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit to undertake a review of the UK’s food security, as reported in the Observer last weekend. I’m doing a presentation for the Strategy Unit team in a couple of weeks’ time, which I’ll post here once I’ve written it.)
But as the New Statesman put it pithily in their leader this week, the real question for Gordon Brown’s multilateral reform agenda is “how will he succeed when others have failed?”.
Take, for instance, what he had to say on conflict in fragile states, where there was a strong call for moving from a reactive to a preventive stance on conflict, and for “the first internationally agreed procedures to prevent breakdowns of states and societies”. Fine in principle – but hard to see how Brown will make much headway on this given that moves in 2005 and 2006 to arm the new UN Peacebuilding Commission with a prevention mandate quickly foundered in the face of ferocious developing country opposition.
Similarly, there was a proposal for “Security Council peacekeeping resolutions and UN Envoys [to] make stablisation, reconstruction and development an equal priority”. Again, this was a little unclear: no mention of the Peacebuilding Commission here either, or of the fact that one area where the UN has actually got much better is in integrated mission planning.
But the really key section was the last one, on renewing multilateralism at the global level, where Brown argued the need to “judge success not by the number of initiatives in conference halls but by practical action for change”, and that “we need fewer rather than more international bureaucracies”. So, he went on, we need:
- A less introspective EU – “outward looking, open, internationalist, able to effectively respond both through internal reform and external action to the economic, security and environmental imperatives of globalisation”;
- Security Council reform – where Brown noted that “permanent members do not include Japan, India, Brazil, Germany, or any African country”;
- A broader G8 “to encompass the influential emerging economies now outside but that account for more than a third of the world’s economic output”;
- A “new coalition of democracies and civic societies joining together as allies for progress, with leaders in politics, economics and civil society all pushing forward reform”;
- A transformed IMF “with a renewed mandate that goes far beyond crisis management to crisis prevention”, with particular focus on early warning;
- On environmental protection, a “strengthened role” for the UN and the World Bank becoming “a bank for the environment” as well as for poverty reduction.
It’s hard to argue against any of these ambitions. But it’s also hard to avoid the impression that a lot of them were lifted directly from the 2004 High Level Panel report, as if the 2005 World Summit had not yet taken place (coincidentally, David Miliband chose this week to deliver a speech which revolved around a multilateral institution – this time the EU – being at a “fork in the road”. Sound familiar?)
Nonetheless, what Brown has achieved here is to set out a pretty good framework – a ‘scaffolding’, if you will – on which he can hang fresher and more detailed foreign policy ideas in due course. To my mind, there was just one key trick that he missed. For all that Brown correctly identifies the emergence to global prominence of China and India as a game-changing development, what he doesn’t do in this speech is take the next step and ask: given that effective multilateralism will increasingly depend on Chinese and Indian buy-in, what do they want from it?
Update: Daniel Korski at ECFR is annoyed that Brown didn’t mention enlargement.
by Alex Evans | Nov 6, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
Hillary Clinton made a big speech in Iowa yesterday on clean energy and climate change. Here’s the FT coverage, here’s the speech, and here’s the 16 page plan. A few highlights and observations:
First, check out the reframing of climate change as an issue. “For this generation of Americans, climate change is our Space Race. It is our home-front mobilization during World War II and it is our response to the Great Depression.” This kind of language marks a clear break with the more usual discourse of ‘small actions’ as the solution to climate change – energy efficient light bulbs, TVs off rather than on standby and so on – and comes across as more commensurate with the more alarmist narrative about the scale of the problem. (Some obvious influence here from the ‘new Apollo Project’ language that Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus talk about in their seminal essay The Death of Environmentalism.)
Second, look at the headline emissions target: the US would cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, “the amount necessary to avoid the most dangerous and destructive consequences of climate change”. No bones about it, that is an impressive pledge; for comparison, the UK has pledged a 60 per cent cut in CO2 emissions by 2050 (n.b. that a CO2 target is more demanding than would be the same number for all greenhouse gases; and that Gordon Brown has said he’ll review that figure to see if it needs to be tougher).
Third: an economy-wide cap and trade scheme, with one hundred per cent of permits auctioned (instead of being ‘grandfathered’, i.e. allocated in proportion to existing emissions). And there’s a veritable smorgasbord of other domestic measures as well: an energy efficiency programme to reduce electricity consumption by 20% below projected (and n.b. that word ‘projected’) levels by 2020, a 25% renenwables target for 2030, and Al Gore’s proposed new ‘Connie Mae’ program to “make it easier for low and middle income Americans to buy green homes and invest in green home improvements”.
But here’s the really interesting bit: what she says about the international end of climate policy.
Other countries like China and India, they see we’ve done nothing. They feel free, therefore, to do very little. That is not the way we can lead. We have to prove that moving away from a carbon economy is good for growth and lead the world to a new binding agreement to reduce emissions dramatically.
The President’s failed unilateral energy policy is a part of our failed unilateral foreign policy. It’s deprived us of the credibility and the leverage we need to solve the climate crisis. I’ll change that by leading the process to develop a new treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire in 2012.
One of the worst messages the President sent was when he took office and rejected completely Kyoto. He could have said we don’t like Kyoto but we’re immediately starting a new process. But that didn’t happen.
Well, come January 2009, I’m sending a different message. I want to act quickly to help develop a new treaty. I will engage in high level meetings with leaders around the world every three months, if that’s what it takes to hammer out a new agreement. My goal will be to secure a deal by 2010. We can’t wait for two more years.
I will establish an E8 that’s modeled on the G8 which is where the big industrial economies come together. We need the world’s major carbon-emitting nations to come together to tackle these challenges.
The plan document provides a little more detail, hinting (or so it looks) at the possibility of an overall stabilisation target, though probably not a binding one:
Hillary would act quickly in 2009 to restore U.S. leadership in the global warming arena by playing an active role in developing the post-Kyoto treaty. As a guide to the treaty, Hillary would propose a science-based goal to limit global warming to levels needed to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. She would re-engage in negotiations, work to bring rapidly developing nations like China and India along, and convene high-level meetings every three months with the goal of getting a new deal in place by 2010, two years ahead of Kyoto’s expiration.
Although Edward Luce reports in the FT that “Ms Clinton said she would negotiate mandatory targets that would bind all the world’s polluters – including China and India”, I can’t see an explicit reference to that in the speech or the plan – so it must be derived either by inference from her reference to a “new binding agreement”, or from briefing by her campaign team. (It’d be interesting to know which.) I remain of the view, set out in my recent paper on what happens after Kyoto, that it’s unlikely that any Democrat President could accept a binding target for the US without China and India following suit – but presumably there are limits to how explicit Hillary wants to be about that at this stage.
Usual disclaimers apply, of course, not least that a lot more work will be needed to show how the measures here get the US on track for the very demanding 80 per cent headline target. But the overall impression is that Clinton is serious about the agenda – there’s a lot more here than rhetoric. And it will be interesting to see whether Clinton’s detailed policy platform and wide spread of ‘big ideas’ opens up some political space in Europe for some of the policy interventions that have remained just out of reach for the last decade – especially on energy efficiency.
