by David Steven | Oct 15, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
Gary Rosen:
Democrats [are] in an awkward position. If they were to follow the lead of the Nobel committee, which commended Gore for recognizing “the measures that need to be adopted” to remedy the problem, they would commit instant political suicide.
Gore advocates drastic, immediate measures to end global warming. As he wrote in an op-ed on the eve of this past summer’s Live Earth concerts, if we do not act “within 10 years,” we are likely to reach a “tipping point” making it impossible “to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization.” In response to this dire situation, he would have the United States “join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global-warming pollution by 90 percent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide.”
The pitter-patter you hear, behind the earnest applause for Gore’s Nobel Prize, is the sound of Democrats in flight, running from such ideas as fast as their feet can carry them. A radical shift to clean energy is on the agenda of no mainstream politician, least of all those now on the stump in Iowa and New Hampshire. For all the talk of a growing consensus about climate change, the only point that commands general assent is that the planet is growing warmer and that human activity is responsible in some measure. All agreement disappears when it comes to how seriously to take the problem and, especially, how to deal with it.
by Alex Evans | Oct 13, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
Steven Clemons at the Washington Note has an interesting observation about Al Gore this morning:
I think that Al Gore has just become the [McDonald’s founder] Ray Kroc of Climate Change initiatives.
Gore’s win seals the deal that he owns the global climate change franchise. Everyone big in this game — from firms, to NGOs, to governments — will need the Al Gore seal of approval on whether some initiatives are good or bad. That’s going to be interesting. Al Gore is going to be an NGO of his very own, and he’s probably going to have to get a sticker machine so that stuff he likes can bear his seal of approval.
But there is a bigger, more complicated and admittedly cynical dimension to the Gore win.
It keeps climate change policy from being something that anyone else can take a lot of credit for, particularly the Clintons — unless they can work out a deal.
Well, that’s doubtless true. But what complicates things even more is that Al Gore’s stance on climate change is about as content-rich as McDonald’s is nutritious. For we still have no idea what Al Gore actually thinks we should do about climate change. Sure, we’ve heard him sounding the alarm bell. But on the really big questions: what to do at the international level after Kyoto expires in 2012, how to bring developing countries into the fold, the small matter of agreeing a global stabilisation target: nothing, nada, rien.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I tried to ask Gore about this during one of his presentations, at the Royal Society of Arts last year. Did he accept that stabilising the climate safely would entail a quantified ceiling, and that this would mean developing country targets; and if so, what thoughts did he have on what would constitute fair shares to the atmosphere? Gore blustered and blew, but nevertheless definitively ducked the question.
by David Steven | Oct 12, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
A UN body and a US Democrat – it’s the reddest of red rags for the American right…
Update: Breaking:
Although former Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize this week for his work as a global-warming performance artist, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled early today that President George Bush would receive the gold medal, the diploma and the $750,000.
Update II: Jonas Kyratzes:
Seriously, people. There are certainly more disgusting figures than Gore – Bush, Kerry, Blair, etc. But just because he’s occasionally put forth an idea which isn’t catastrophically idiotic (Bush), appallingly opportunistic (Kerry) or just butt-crawlingly evil (Blair), doesn’t mean he should be elevated to being the god of the Vaguely Progressive There’s Something Wrong With The World But We Refuse To Use Our Brains To Analyze It movement.
Pajamas Media has a huge round-up, which is mostly in the same vein.
It’s the Gore-problem in a nutshell. He’s persuaded a lot of Americans to take climate seriously, but left others even more entrenched in their belief that it’s a ‘vast left-wing plot‘.
Update III: Time to consult the Goracle…
Update IV: Rush Limbaugh: Gore should hand the award over to “genuine agents of peace: General Petraeus, the U.S. military, and its commander-in-chief [George Bush].
Iain Murray has an especially helpful suggestion: “Who Else Should Al Gore Share the Prize With? How about that well known peace campaigner Osama Bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance – and that of the Nobel committee – in his September rant from the cave.”
Melanie Phillips: “Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Gore— along with the wretched Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose own untruths would fill a book — perfectly symbolises a western world that has lost its reason and its capacity to tell truth from lies.”
Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld: He’s killing the planet through hypocrisy and blame. If you disagree with him, you’re a heretic and if you agree with him, you’re doomed.
by David Steven | Oct 11, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
Is it just me or are good statistics on climate change ridiculously hard to get hold of?
The natural point of comparison is with development indicators. Want a ranking of where countries sit on the rich/poor continuum? Try the Human Development Index which “measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living.” Data are available for 177 countries and stretch back to 1980. There are oodles of similar indicators.
Or want to know about HIV/AIDS in, say, Mozambique. UNAIDS has stats for 2006 that include:
- Basic facts – number of people living with HIV; prevalence rate; deaths due to AIDS; number of AIDS orphans etc.
- Behavioural data – proportion of men and women who have had casual sex in the past twelve months; who used a condom when they last had casual sex; who had sex before they were fifteen; and who correctly identify ways to prevent HIV.
- Policy data – in particular, how much of its own money a government is spending on the epidemic.
The data are easy to find, easy to read and have been carefully selected. They’re also there for every country in a standard format. Read them and you feel you really know the epidemic.
So, let’s turn to climate change.
A dataset for concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere is not too hard to find, but I am struggling to find a current figure for all greenhouse gases, expressed as a carbon dioxide equivalent. Search for CO2e and you hit a Cantor Fitzgerald trading company and plenty of glossaries, but not the figure itself. (Alex tells me it’s around 455ppm.)
What about emissions? What I’d like to know, for as many countries as possible, are:
- Per capita emissions and trend (perhaps as an average rate of change over a 5-year period).
- Greenhouse gas intensity (how much a country emits to make a dollar of GDP) and trend.
- Annual rate of emissions growth, dating back to at least 1990 (the Kyoto baseline year).
- Climate stabilisation targets that countries have taken on under Kyoto or have set themselves.
EarthTrends gives me per capita emissions, but only to 2003, and only for greenhouse gases separately; a single CO2e figure could be calculated quite easily, but it’s not there. It’s similar for carbon intensity – data to 2002 and no data at all for other greenhouse gases. Getting their data is a pain too. No rankings. Hard to get all a country’s data in one place. And so on.
UNFCC, meanwhile, has data on total CO2e emissions. For countries without Kyoto targets, however, data often stops at 1994. The Kyoto countries make it to 2004.
Wikipedia lists Kyoto obligations and also EU targets for 2012, but I haven’t been able to find a comprehensive list of the patchwork of formal and informal commitments countries have taken on. Even the US has a target, to reduce greenhouse gas intensity by 18% between 2002 and 2012.
So…
- Climate data is patchy and often dated…
- …by God, it’s hard to find…
- …and even when you find it, the formatting is terrible. Look again at the HIV/AIDS data – a masterpiece of selection and layout in comparison.
- Rankings are also under-supplied. The US target sounds (even!) less impressive when you see that it produces only a couple of thousand dollars of GDP for each tonne of carbon emitted, putting it 39th on this list, and 4.5 times less efficient than top country, Switzerland.
- We are a million miles (kilometres?) from settling on standard data measures. When a leader says they favour a 550ppm atmospheric ceiling – do they mean carbon or carbon equivalent?
- CO2e, surely, should be the gold standard. What do we need to do to get everyone to accept that?
Look, this is dull but, surely also, a big deal.
Information – like a stable climate – is a global public good. You badly need everyone to be using the same data sources. Even if they disagree, you want them to do so using a common set of facts and concepts (that’s why we have the IPCC).
And that’s before we get to data on the human drivers – the opinions, attitudes, decisions and behaviours on which a low-carbon economy must be built (or not as the case may be). As Alex mentioned earlier, we’re writing a paper on this at the moment for the London Accord.
What do electorates believe and why? What deal on climate are they prepared to accept? Which groups are driving the debate in country? And what influence are they seeking to exert?
Look how illuminating behavioural data are for HIV/AIDS. In Mozambique, 84% of men have had sex with a casual partner in the last year, while only a third of them used a condom the last time they had casual sex. There, in a nutshell, you have the reason why one in six adults are HIV positive.We have nothing as good as this for climate.
There is one consolation though. When so much of this problem seems almost beyond solving, at least this is one deficit that can be quickly, easily and cheaply put right.
Update: Real Climate points out that there are two different CO2 equivalents floating around:
Firstly, it is often used to group together all the forcings from the Kyoto greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, N2O and CFCs), and secondly to group together all forcings (including ozone, sulphate aerosols, black carbon etc.). The first is simply a convenience, but the second is what matters to the planet.
Imagine debating the economy if people used terms like ‘inflation’ or ‘GDP’ to mean completely different things!
by Alex Evans | Oct 11, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system, Influence and networks
Remember Global Business Network, the California-based outfit of former Shell scenario planners that produced the widely-discussed report about abrupt climate change for the Pentagon? Well, they’ve just published a new set of scenarios on energy futures. The report sets out four stories about possible futures:
- ‘The Same Road’, a business as usual scenario in which “the world continues much in the same direction it appears to be going now in regard to energy and environmental concerns around climate change”, i.e. without much happening;
- ‘The Long Road’, in which “the world undergoes a significant shift in economic, geopolitical and energy centers of gravity”;
- ‘The Broken Road’, the story of a future in which “the world continues in much the same direction as today, but is then hit by a severe event that overturns established systems and rules”; and
- ‘The Fast Road’, in which “reasoned decisions and investments about energy and climate risk are made early enough to make a difference”.
It’s a nicely crafted set of scenarios, and it’s worth reading the whole report. But what’s especially noteworthy here is the canny theory of influence underpinning the exercise. For although the work was undertaken by GBN, together with participating companies including Dow Chemical, General Motors, HSBC, Merck, Mittal Steel, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Shell and Toyota, the work was actually commissioned by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program on energy efficiency.
Really smart move by the EPA. For the companies ended up concluding just what EPA must have hoped they would: of the “steps that all business should take now to ensure energy success regardless of the future” [emphasis added], their number one conclusion was:
Master the fundamentals of energy efficiency. Build an energy efficiency culture through executive leadership – appointing an empowered corporate energy director and team, setting aggressive goals, measuring and tracking energy performance…
…you get the picture. What EPA figured out here was that instead of simply hurling reports about the desirability of energy efficiency at said companies, it would make more progress by making them the co-owners of a broader conversation about energy futures: one that drilled right down to their core assumptions about energy, climate change and what sort of future they’d choose if they could. That, of course, provided both a more attractive offer to the participating companies, and a terrific chance for EPA’s energy efficiency staff to put their case. Well played, EPA.
