by Alex Evans | Nov 13, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, London Summit
Ahead of this weekend’s G20 summit, David and I have published a short paper entitled A Bretton Woods II worthy of the name. Key points:
– The summit is unlikely to be able to live up to its billing. Leaders do not yet understand the nature of the problem well enough to be able to implement viable solutions. However, the problem is more fundamental than a simple lack of shared awareness.
– History suggests that leaders will only think the unthinkable on institutional reform once the challenge they face has really hit rock bottom. But history also suggests that we are wrong to think that the worst of the crisis is now past, given that many past banking crises have taken five years or more to unravel.
– Bretton Woods 1 looked across the whole international economic waterfront in 1944, while this weekend’s summit will be much more narrowly focused. Leaders will make a big mistake if they try and tackle finance in isolation, given the growing impact of resource scarcity, and that 2009 is supposed to see another ambitious global deal – on climate.
– We need to recalibrate what we expect from globalization through a serious debate about subsidiarity. Where has globalization gone too far, too fast? Where do we need more integration at a global level? These were exactly the questions that preoccupied Keynes in 1933, when he weighed the relative benefits of global versus local across a range of variables. We need a similar debate today as a precursor to serious international economic reform.
– Leaders need to extend their horizons in (at least) five directions: onto longer time scales; beyond financial regulation into wider resource scarcity challenges; into other international processes, especially climate; towards grand bargains with emerging powers; and beyond government, to non-governmental networks.
Full version after the jump, or better yet here’s the pdf.
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by David Steven | Oct 21, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Global system, Influence and networks
In the summer, I gave a talk at the United Nations University G8 symposium on climate change, where I explored the threshold between conflict and cooperation on carbon control.
Belatedly, the talk is online – either as a pdf, or you can read the full text after the jump.
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by David Steven | Oct 19, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence
Imagine you’re advising China or India – or perhaps a poorer developing country such as Ghana – on their preparations for the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. What sort of deal should these countries be prepared to accept? What would seem fair?
Nick Stern sidles up to these questions in his paper – Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change. His starting point is that global emissions need to drop to around 20 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (and then further to around 10GT CO2e in the decades that follow) – that’s around 2 tonnes of CO2e in 2050 for each of the world’s 9 billion people or so.
Stern believes that there is no choice but for countries to converge on this per capita average:
This target for per capita emissions by mid-century is so low that there is little scope for any major country to depart significantly above or below it. If one or two large countries were to manage only to reduce emissions to, say, 3T or 4T per capita, then it would be difficult to see which other major grouping of countries would be able to get emissions close to zero: and the global target would be unlikely to be reached.
So…let’s imagine the Americans have accepted this logic (suspend belief for a moment) and have a proposal for reducing their emissions from over 20T today to Stern’s 2T by 2050. They enter the negotiating room expecting other countries to do the same.
How would you advise China, India or Ghana to respond? They start from a very different point – around 5T per Chinese citizen, 2T for an Indian, and maybe around 1/2 tonne for a Ghanaian.
Now, as Stern admits, for them, simple convergence would be a pretty rough deal.
All major groups getting to 2T/capita is a pragmatic approach and not a strongly equitable one. It takes little account of the greater per capita contributions of the developed countries to the historical and future contributions to the stock of GHG emissions.
My instinct would be to urge the Chinese, Indians and Ghanaian to forgo what might be a fun, but ultimately unproductive, squabble about historical emissions. Be magnanimous about the past, I’d suggest. Instead focus on what really matters – who’s going to be allowed to emit what over the next forty years.
Because however far Chinese, Indian or Ghanaian emissions are allowed to increase before they start to drop towards 2T – its absolutely certain that their total emissions between now and 2050 (on a per capita basis) will be significantly lower than America’s.
In other words, there’s no trajectory that can be drawn that gives these countries a fair share of the next generation emissions ‘cake’.
So what deal would you advise them to strike?
by Leo Horn Phathanothai | Oct 16, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
With a global recession looming, international efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may be in jeopardy, as concerns are voiced in the US, Canada and Europe about the wisdom of adopting measures that would impose an additional cost burden on already fragile economies. Such thinking is misguided, and it is dangerous. A recession may in fact ease the introduction of carbon emissions trading schemes.
At the recent EU summit in Brussels there was widespread reluctance to meet pledges all EU governments made last year to cut CO2 emissions by 20% by 2020. Eight Eastern European countries – including Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — released a joint statement urging the EU to balance the wish for cleaner air against “the need for sustainable economic growth” at a time of “serious economic and financial uncertainties.” Italy threw its weight behind these countries, threatening to veto the proposed EU plans.
Likewise in the US, top power industry executives seized the opportunity to lobby for delaying carbon emissions legislation, at the recent New York Utility Conference. More dramatically in Canada, the Liberals were dealt an electoral defeat on Wednesday largely on the basis of their strong advocacy in favour of a carbon tax (see story here).
All this backtracking is akin to forfeiting the forest for the tree. Financial crises are short-term phenomena, global warming on the other hand is with us for the long haul, and the window of opportunity for addressing it is fast narrowing. The prospect of economic recession does not in any way reduce the magnitude or the urgency of the climate problem, nor does it provide any compelling reason for delaying action. Or as EU President Barroso put it:
“Saving the planet is not an after-dinner drink, a digestif that you take or leave. Climate change does not disappear because of the financial crisis.
Moreover, as David Wheeler of the Center for Global Development argues, smart carbon regulation will be easiest, not hardest, to introduce during a recession, since a slowing economy emits less, and smart cap-and-trade regulation can “lock in” this head start on emissions reduction at almost no cost during the recession. His proposal for the US is to:
• Immediately pass a cap-and-trade bill that sets the initial total limit at the pre-recession emissions level, and schedule a progressive decline in the overall limit that will achieve the needed long-run goal.
• Establish an annual auction for 100% of the emissions permits.
• Set aside a healthy share of the auction proceeds to provide a compensating rebate for every American
In this way the consumer is shielded from cost increases, and the power provider incentivised to develop less carbon-intensive energy options for the future.
It is amply clear that big emitting developing countries such as China and India will not make significant commitments to curb their greenhouse gas emissions unless the US and EU lead by example. With only about a year to go before the new global deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol is due to be reached in Copenhagen conference, the US and EU have no room to falter. More than ever, political courage and leadership is needed to ensure global efforts to address climate change are not jeopardized.
by David Steven | Oct 10, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks
I’m just back from RUSI, where I spoke about the future of resilience. Full text is below the jump, or you can download the PDF.
The talk complements one from April, at RUSI’s Critical National Infrastructure conference. Alex and I also have a paper on the subject in a future edition of Renewal.
Brief pitch: in turbulent times, we need to build on the work done by emergency planners, and take a broader look at how to make global, national and local systems more resilient to risk. (more…)
