by Alex Evans | Jul 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
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…
by Daniel Korski | Jul 16, 2008 | Conflict and security
Bush, Obama and McCain have in the last few days all talked about Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In my view all three shirk the need for 1) a new political settlement in Afghanistan, including through negotiations with “pragmatic” Taliban elements, 2) a new trans-Atlantic push on Pakistan and the region (and not only a CT-focused approach), and 3) the need to invest in the Afghan National Police.
Here is what they have said:
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jul 9, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
Gideon Rachman’s feeling a bit down in the mouth. He had been planning, he says, to write his column this week on the obvious subject – the G8 – but then he had lunch with Alan Beattie, the FT’s world trade editor. As Gideon reports, Alan said “Let me guess, you will say…” – and then proceeded to forecast the entire planned column with uncanny accuracy.
Better yet, Alan then emailed Gideon with a standarised column on international institutions. It goes like this:
By reporters everywhere
An ineffectual international organisation yesterday issued a stark warning about a situation it has absolutely no power to change, the latest in a series of self-serving interventions by toothless intergovernmental bodies.
“We are seriously concerned about this most serious outbreak of seriousness,” said the head of the institution, either a former minister from a developing country or a mid-level European or American bureaucrat. “This is a wake-up call to the world. They must take on board the vital message that my organisation exists.”
The director of the body, based in one of New York, Washington or an agreeable Western European city, was speaking at its annual conference, at which ministers from around the world gather to wring their hands impotently about the most fashionable issue of the day. The organisation has sought to justify its almost completely fruitless existence by joining its many fellow talking-shops in highlighting whatever crisis has recently gained most coverage in the global media.
“Governments around the world must come together to combat whatever this year’s worrying situation has turned out to be,” the director said. “It is not yet time to panic, but if it goes on much further without my institution gaining some credit for sounding off on the issue, we will be justified in labelling it a crisis.”
The organisation, whose existence the White House barely acknowledges and to which hardly any member government intends to give more money or extra powers, has long been fighting a war of attrition against its own irrelevance. By making a big deal out of the fact that the world’s most salient topical issue will be placed on its agenda and then issuing a largely derivative annual report on the subject, it hopes to convey the entirely erroneous impression that it has any influence whatsoever on the situation.
The intervention follows a resounding call to action in the communiqué of the Group of [number goes here] countries at their recent summit in a remote place no-one had previously heard of. The G[number goes here] meeting was preceded by the familiar interminable and inconclusive discussions about whether the G[number goes here] was sufficiently representative of the international community, or whether it should be expanded into a G[number plus 1, 2 or higher goes here] including China, India or any other scary emerging market country that attendees cared to name.
The story was given further padding by a study from an ambulance-chasing Washington think-tank, which warned that it would continue to convene media conference calls until its quixotic and politically suicidal plan to ameliorate whatever crisis was gathering had been given respectful though substantially undeserved attention.
Ends
by Alex Evans | Jul 9, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
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.
by Alex Evans | Jun 26, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
WEF has just published a statement on climate change ahead of the G8 from what appears more or less all of the world’s CEOs (A is for ABB, Abercrombie & Kent, Agility, AIG, Airbus, AkzoNobel, Alcoa, AMD, ANA, Anglo American, Arup; B is for Bain & Co., Bayer, BG Group, Booz & Co., BP, British Airways, BC Hydro, BT… oh, you get the idea). They say this:
Addressing climate change will require clear and honest communication as to the scale of the challenge we all face. Lord Stern describes the problem for us succinctly:
“Current annual global emission flows are around 40-45 Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtC02-eq).
About 45% of current global emissions come from developing countries and this is set to grow.
A 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050 equates to an aggregate annual flow of around 22GtC02-eq.
As there will be around 9 billion people in 2050, this implies per capita emissions per year of about 2-2.5 tonnes CO2-eq.
Currently, US emissions are more than 20 tonnes of CO2-eq per person per year, Europe and Japan 10-15 tonnes, China 5 or more tonnes, India around 1.5 and most of Africa much less than 1 tonne CO2-eq per person per year.
The consequence is that rich countries will have to take the lead and demonstrate strong cuts.
Since around 8 billion people will be in currently developing countries, those countries will also have to be in the range of 2-2.5 tonnes CO2-eq by 2050, otherwise the world average for the total would be unachievable.
Refreshing to see some actual numbers rather than the usual guff about “developed countries taking the lead”, isn’t it?
