Getting it Wrong in Guatemala

Mechanisms fall neatly into place for bringing low-carbon development to the world's poorer countries. The UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) reviews projects worldwide and certifies them for low-carbon efficiency. That allows them to gain funding from EU countries, whose Emissions Trading System (ETS) allows investors to earn carbon credits for capital they invest in such projects, which credits become part of the EU's overall carbon reduction strategy, as presented to the UNFCCC in Paris this December. Eventually the 'Green Climate Fund,' which recently opened for business in Korea and is slated to receive $100 billion/year if wealthy countries keep their promises, will act as a sort of World Bank for such projects.

It's a neat system, until you look at it up close in, say, Guatemala, where the $250 million Santa Rita dam and hydroelectric generating plant are Exhibit A. Certified by CDM, the project was moving forward with support from local landholders, but peasants, thousands of whom will be removed from their lands by the project, began to object. Elite proponents responded with shootings, beatings, and threats, tactics reminiscent of Guatemala's 'dirty war' of the 1980s when 200,000 Guatemalan peasants were brutally killed. Augusto Sandino Ponce, whose landowner father was a lieutenant of General Rios Montt in that campaign (Rios Montt was  convicted of genocide by a Guatemalan court in 2013), was implicated in the shooting of a crowd of peasants last spring, resulting in several deaths.

The international community became concerned last August when two children were executed by a drunken gunman employed by the hydroelectric company. Their uncle, David Chen, a community activist and the apparent target of the shootings, was meeting at the time with the rapporteur for the InterAmerican Human Rights Commission, which had begun to investigate the attacks on local farmers.

Will projects like Santa Rita become the hallmark of the climate movement in developing countries? The CDM has been widely criticized for its narrowly quantitative criteria, and an NGO watchdog, Carbon Market Watch (CMW), has begun to monitor its work. Proponents cited the gains to local farmers from cheap, clean electricity, but others have noted that most of that electricity will be sold in international markets. The scale of the project, with its 40-foot dam, requires evictions and disruption of the local economy, and in that context a haunting detail is worth noticing: when Sandino Ponce's gunmen fired on local peasants last April, the people were gathered to celebrate a ritual where the farmers ask the earth for permission to plant their crops. Clearly those farmers understand something profound about environmental stewardship. As all the nations and powers of the world meet in Paris to recalibrate the global economy along sustainable lines, could those farmers be empowered to share with us what they know?

Climate Warrior

Arjuna, warrior hero of the Mahabharata, includes among his epithets Bhibatsu, meaning 'he who fights fair.' According to the website of Arjuna Capital, a small Massachusetts-based sustainable investment management firm, Arjuna, a skilled archer, stood for enlightened engagement in society, and so does Arjuna Capital. In that spirit Arjuna (the company) joined non-profit As You Sow to introduce a shareholder resolution at last year's ExxonMobil annual meeting, requiring that the petroleum giant acknowledge the declining value of its potentially stranded assets, i.e. carbon reserves that we all know must never be used, in the interest of human survival. ExxonMobil fended off the resolution by noting the hypothetical possibility of stranded fossil-fuel assets, while rating it "highly unlikely" that it will be constrained to leave those assets in the ground.

So this year Arjuna was back with a new resolution, calling on ExxonMobil (and also Chevron) to divert funds from new exploration--the search for even more reserves it would be species-suicidal to exploit--back to shareholders in the form of buy-backs or increased dividends. Alas, the SEC--which has power to restrict shareholder resolutions--blocked the ExxonMobil resolution while inexplicably allowing the quite similar Chevron one to move forward.

So does it help to have the keen-eyed archer Arjuna on our (human) side? What these resolutions make clear is how determined the oil titans are to carry on, building bigger reserves, exploiting them at the most profitable pace they can, while funding pseudo-scientific research to 'prove' they aren't intending to destroy the planet as they pocket billions of dollars in profits. Actions like Arjuna's neatly frame the problem, in much the same way as the divestment movement does. Of course the mega-corporations are right: we can't just stop exploiting fossil fuels without replacement energy sources. This claim is disingenuous, though, when coupled with efforts--well-documented now--by the oil companies to sabotage the development of alternatives, starting with the adversarial research they fund. We have to approach the problem from the other end, developing efficient alternatives and taxing carbons at their real cost, before it will make financial sense for those reserves to stay in the ground where they belong. Meanwhile, keen-eyed Arjuna is taking aim at new exploration, the most outrageous aspect of corporate climate denial. Let's hope the SEC will change its mind and let him shoot. 

A Vision

Carol Anne Duffy, Britain's poet laureate, has written this poem, "Parliament," a modern allusion to Chaucer's "Parlement of Fowles," to acknowledge the ecological plight we face. It seems worth reprinting here:

Parliament

Then in the writers’ wood,

every bird with a name in the world

crowded the leafless trees,

took its turn to whistle or croak.

An owl grieved in an oak.

A magpie mocked. A rook

cursed from a sycamore.

The cormorant spoke:

Stinking seas

below ill winds. Nothing swims.

A vast plastic soup, thousand miles

wide as long, of petroleum crap.

A bird of paradise wept in a willow.

The jewel of a hummingbird shrilled

on the air.

A stork shawled itself like a widow.

The gull said:

Where coral was red, now white, dead

under stunned waters.

The language of fish

Cut out at the root.

Mute oceans. Oil like a gag

on the Gulf of Mexico.

A woodpecker heckled.

A vulture picked at its own breast.

Thrice from the cockerel, as ever.

The macaw squawked:

Nouns I know -

Rain. Forest. Fire. Ash.

Chainsaw. Cattle. Cocaine. Cash.

Squatters. Ranchers. Loggers. Looters.

Barons. Shooters.

A hawk swore.

A nightingale opened its throat

in a garbled quote.

A worm turned in the blackbird’s beak.

This from the crane:

What I saw - slow thaw

in permafrost broken terrain

of mud and lakes

peat broth seepage melt

methane breath.

A bat hung like a suicide.

Only a rasp of wings from the raven.

A heron was stone a robin blood

in the written wood.

So snow and darkness slowly fell

the eagle, history, in silhouette,

with the golden plover,

and the albatross

telling of Arctic ice

as the cold, hard moon calved from the earth.

--Carol Anne Duffy

Mayors Join Climate Race

The mayors of 30 of Europe's principal cities joined today in signing a message of cooperation and solidarity as they promote "local solutions" to a global climate problem (in English here). Tomorrow the mayors will meet in Paris, part of a world-wide 'local government' day for climate intervention (though the only North American venue I have detected so far is Vancouver). As masters of an estimated 2 trillion euros in annual budget appropriations, the mayors--who govern the capital cities of nearly all the EU countries--will look for ways to cooperate in supporting green infrastructural investments, and share strategies for improving key sectors such as energy-efficient housing rehabilitation, mass transit, energy procurement, and 'smart growth.' The mayors, representing 60 million of Europe's inhabitants, will also pledge to use their influence on national and continental energy policies as the EU and its member states prepare their national proposals for COP 21.

Are such initiatives useful? Apart from the fact that local governments are indeed on the front lines of many energy-related policies, the mayors' concurrence on the importance of climate questions seems significant. Assembling 30 big-city mayors around any set of issues is a major achievement, and the targeted policy areas point to the strategic importance of cities. Whether practical consequences in terms of shared policies and technologies or cooperative purchasing and sponsorship will result is hard to predict but worth watching. Cooperation among disparate peoples must be one of the hallmarks of any successful UNFCCC climate conference. Europe and its mayors play an especially important role in modeling that transnational cooperation.

One World , Two World-Views

Nothing is so stimulating as bitter polemic, and in that spirit I have been breathlessly immersing myself in the Battle of the Ecomoderns and the Environmentalists (see previous posts, 2/16 and 2/20), most recently in this devastating review of Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything by Will Boisvert on the Breakthrough Institute's website. At issue are two authorial sensibilities: one female, intuitive, given to deep emotion and grand designs, the other exactingly male, scientifically rigorous, skeptical, dismissive. But beyond that chasm in sensibility, what Boisvert highlights is a truly interesting and important distinction between two conflicting approaches to the climate crisis--and much more.

Klein starts from the premise that corporate capitalism, in its untrammeled pursuit of profits, cannot supply the framework for reducing carbon emissions and converting to a sustainable global economy. Within the family of eco-socialist, communitarian, localist, organic environmentalists, she argues for speedy and absolute conversion to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and tidal (but not hydro, with its devastating ecological side effects), and she celebrates the transfer of power this might entail from the centralized hierarchy of a corporate and financial elite to the local councils and peoples who might administer the new sustainable economy, with its reductions in transport, heavy industry, militarization, consumption. One hears the music of natural religion, and even the Goddess, particularly when these themes are amplified by Boisvert's jaundiced critique.

On the other hand, Boisvert and others like him at the Breakthrough Institute are perhaps less acutely sensitive to the ideological music of their own arguments than they should be. Call it Scientism, their world-view assumes technological solutions to the problems not just of climate change but of poverty and human encroachment on the natural sphere. They see the twin forces of market economics and technological advancement leading to consolidation of the human population in densely aggregated-- and thus ecologically efficient--metropolises, freeing up tracts of marginally cultivated land to return to its natural condition, as in the reclaimed New England forest. They imagine, without really drawing out the timeline, that techniques of carbon capture will save the climate from over-consumption of carbon fuels without any need for market tampering, and without the romanticized inefficiencies of solar and wind entering the equation. Above all, they promote cheap, clean, dense, infinitely expansive nuclear power as the answer to the energy question.

Without taking time to explore the many nuances of this clash of visions, the stark difference in energy policy is the one I want to highlight as we look ahead to the Paris conference. Will the individual national plans for carbon reduction (the INDCs that are supposed to be piling up at UN headquarters in coming weeks and months), will these plans for energy conversion be looking to the traditionally 'sustainable' methods of solar, wind, hydro, possibly tidal or geothermal? Or will they envision a major expansion of the nuclear sector--a technological 'silver bullet' but arguably also a Pandora's box of safety and security issues, along with the unresolvable issue of toxic waste, and enduring questions about relative cost? Of course the answer won't be either/or: the 195 COP 21 nations will file 195 variants on 'the solution,' and there will no doubt be some mixing and matching of these divergent approaches. In the long run, though, the world is heading towards a crossroads: different energy technologies can co-exist, but the corporate capitalist systems of control are inherently hegemonic. Either that hegemonic system will survive and indeed direct the global energy transformation (or take us over the cliff), or it will give place, as Klein proposes, to a different regime altogether. That's a big set of questions--and a good reason to embroil oneself in the evolving answers.

Paving the Road

The beautiful object in the photo is a) Turkish tiled floor? b) a schematic model of a carbon molecule? No, it's c) a close-up photo of Scott and Julie Brusaw's driveway in northern Idaho. More specifically it's the solar-paneled driveway they installed through their company, Solar Roadways, to demonstrate the viability of the oversized (12'X12') panels. With help from a community grant, and another from the federal DOT, they have gone on to install solar roadway panels in a parking lot in Sandpoint, Idaho. Someday they would like to replace ALL our highways with solar roadway panels--a project they say would produce three times the US's current electrical needs.

Will that happen? Not soon. With the DOT grant, and more than $2 million raised online through Indiegogo with the help of this youtube video the Brusaws have planned larger prototypes and begun the expensive laboratory testing that will address doubts about strength, durability, and safety. While DOT spokesperson Eric Weaver has expressed skepticism whether Solar Roadways' plan for replacing highways is "realistic," he does believe it could work for "smaller scale purposes" such as "pedestrian roadways."

And indeed the town of Krommenie, a suburb of Amsterdam--bless the Dutch!--just last fall installed a 70-meter stretch of bikeway using solar panels developed by the Dutch research institute TNO--the first actively-used prototype for the technology. Does this matter? Not yet. But the determination of people like the Dutch researchers, the Brusaws, the 50,000 people world-wide who donated research funding, and the townspeople of Krommenie who took a chance with public funds to see if they could live a little greener--all this tells an important story about the ingenuity, optimism, and dedication that may rescue us yet.

Another Front in the Climate Wars

One of the subtle perversities of the climate problem is the potential effect of certain feedback loops--systems where warmer temperatures create conditions that produce still more warming. Such diabolical loops are not always counted in climate projections, and they produce a certain consternation when uncovered.

Nature magazine, in tomorrow's edition, will present a study of the Amazon rainforest, dating back to the 1980s, whose distressing conclusion is that a substantial decline in the health of the immense forest has seriously compromised its growth, reducing in turn its value as a carbon sink by as much as 50% over the past two decades. Causes for the decline are complex, but warmer temperatures and attendant reduction in rainfall are thought to be part of the problem. While protection of forests, especially tropical ones, not just in the Amazon region but in southern Asia and Equatorial Africa, has long been part of the climate change agenda, with today's report the profile of this problem in the discussions leading up to Paris may become more prominent.

Though the report is published behind a paywall, a summary can be found here, with fuller reports in The Guardian and Le Monde.

Small State Thinks Big

Activists in Rhode Island, led by a student and a professor from Brown University, have proposed a comprehensive carbon tax, which will be the first such state-wide measure in the United States if it passes. Other jurisdictions, such as Boulder, Colorado, Montgomery County, Maryland,  and certain counties in California have introduced such measures, as has British Columbia. Internationally, various European countries impose carbon taxes on particular energy sectors, and China has recently begun to tax some inefficient coal-fired plants, but none of these is as comprehensive as Rhode Island's would be. Australia had one of the broader-based carbon-tax programs, but its current right-wing government repealed it last year.

As drafted by student Solomon Goldstein-Rose and professor Timmons Roberts, the Rhode Island bill would tax every form of fossil fuel entering the state at a standard rate of $15/ton of CO2 emissions. Some of the money collected would be returned to state residents and businesses to compensate for elevated energy prices, with the remainder dedicated to Governor Raimondo's green infrastructure fund. She has not indicated her support for the bill, which will be reviewed in legislative hearings starting next month. Numerous climate change advocates including NASA scientist James Hanson have long advocated for carbon taxes, rather than cap-and-trade schemes, as the most direct way to capture externalized costs of carbon pollution and use market forces to promote carbon-free energy.

Briefing the Ambassador

As I suggested in my previous post, the United States, as the world's largest economy and largest per capita carbon polluter, holds many of the high cards in the global climate negotiations, and the man charged with playing those cards is our special envoy Todd Stern. Stern has laid out a detailed view of his approach in a speech delivered at Yale University last fall, a few weeks before President Obama's historic joint announcement with China's President Xi of their carbon reduction goals. Taken together, the speech and that announcement seem to give a clear picture of the negotiating stance the US will adopt in Paris.

Here are some questions I would like to put to Ambassador Stern:

• Do you feel the American record on climate change issues since 1992 is an impediment as you represent our nation at Durban or Lima or any of the other international venues? What credit can we claim, and how much apology do we owe the world community?
• Many have suggested that the US’s proposed reduction of 26-28% over 2005 levels is inadequate to meet the 2 degrees C temperature increase goal. Can you suggest how quickly you expect the US reduction goal to “ramp up” over several 5-year cycles? And shouldn’t we have a specific target in mind for 2040 or 2050 to put us on track for a 2C increase?
• You point to the “holy grail” of market advantage for non-fossil fuels, but—especially in a period of falling oil prices and increasing demand for coal—what steps will need to be taken, both nationally and internationally, to create that market advantage? Shouldn’t some form of international carbon taxation be on the agenda for Paris?
• Critics of the UN FCCC process have suggested that the only way to ensure that we don’t burn too much carbon to stay within the 2C goal is to budget it, or impose restrictions at the level of consumption. Scientists have given us fairly clear measures of how much carbon consumption will take us beyond the 2C limit: how can we justify exceeding those levels?
• You cite the interesting statistic that worldwide fossil fuel subsidies might amount to $500 billion annually—an outrageous fact in view of our global climate goals. Where should we start in the United States to begin phasing out those subsidies?

• What would you hope someone in, say, 2075, might say about your efforts, and what do you fear they might think, not just of you, but of all of us in our nation and generation?

Ciphers or Saviors?

Earlier this week Guardian columnist George Monbiot railed against the clan of UN climate negotiators, describing them as "hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives" in pursuit of "radical new deckchair design" for our global Titanic. I want to return to his argument, which merits attention. But first I want to introduce the US deckchair-arranger, arguably the most powerful of these global attendants, and a man of whom David Corn was asking, just 6 years ago in Mother Jones, "Can this man save our planet?"

His name is Todd Stern, and he certainly seems to be trying. Mr. Stern spent 5 years as a policy advisor in the Clinton administration, and was the US's chief negotiator in Kyoto in 1997. As a fellow at the Center for American Progress he continued to follow and write about the evolution of climate policy, and in 2009 he returned to Hillary Clinton's State Department as special envoy for climate change. He has gone on record to insist that fossil fuels will "obviously" have to be left in the ground and written off as assets, and more recently he warned that the whole UN process is at risk of breaking down without some perceived success at the Paris conference. This is a man who takes his job seriously and has engaged with the climate problem since before most of us knew there was one.

On the other hand, it is fair to ask whether Stern and the US position he has shaped and promoted is adequate to the dimensions of the problem. Monbiot is not alone in asking whether the gradualist approach of the UN process is too timid, too slow, and even dangerous in promoting false optimism. Activists including Bill McKibben of 350.org join Monbiot in pointing to "leave it in the ground" as a starting point, not a consequence. They would work backward from a "budget" of carbon emissions beyond which the goal of 2 degrees C is considered unreachable. 80% of that 'budget' of fossil fuels is already burned, so the rest would have to be carefully allocated, with some (unspecified) strict control on further exploitation or consumption. Such an approach would be aggressive, even coercive, but its proponents insist that any less stringent method inevitably takes us beyond the tolerable level of carbon, and puts the earth in almost certain peril of temperatures well above the 2C level. Indeed many climate researchers already believe 2C is a fanciful hope at this point, and reliable studies suggest that even with the eventual restraints of the UN process, we are headed for temperature increases of 4-6 C, or 11 degrees Fahrenheit--levels at which our species survival would be in serious doubt.

Like his boss, the President, Stern strongly advocates for a low-carbon, growth-based future--and yet Obama's "all of the above" energy policy is completely at odds with Stern's call to "leave it in the ground."  Stern has remarked that "the holy grail ... is for non-fossil energy to become a better business proposition, all-in, than fossil fuels," but that approach would seem to leave our fate in the hands of global businesses, whose indifference to and outright subversion of the climate debate is notorious.

So are we sailing toward Paris with Captain Stern and his UN crew, blithely enjoying the icebergs while they last? Or might we arrive at a scene of unprecedented international cooperation? Are dedicated public officials like Todd Stern offering false hope, as commentators like Monbiot would suggest? Or are they proceeding in the only feasible way to reach some achievable resolution? The question is hugely complex, and induces passionate and contradictory answers. It is a question I will be probing in future posts as if our lives depended on it.

A Different Road to Paris

These folks are also on the road to Paris--a real road. They are pilgrims, part of the World Council of Churches' "pilgrimage of justice and peace," and will end their journey at the Paris conference in December. Other groups of pilgrims are crossing Africa on foot and by bicycle in solidarity with victims of climate change present and future, with support from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Under the banner of "climate justice" and in support of a legally binding and universal agreement, with the support of Pope Francis, Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, and numerous Christian and ecumenical organizations, these pilgrims bring another dimension to the climate change movement.

But what exactly does the action of pilgrimage convey? Three thoughts come to my mind:

1) Through its traditional associations with penance, the pilgrimage acknowledges human responsibility and expresses remorse for the excesses that have brought us to this crisis. Americans, producing vastly more greenhouse emissions per capita than most of our fellow earth-dwellers, might particularly want to sign on to that aspect of the pilgrimage.

2) Continental in scope, these pilgrimages also suggest the vast climate migrations that will most likely become part of the tragedy of climate change, as densely populated regions become uninhabitable through inundation, drought, or other extremes of weather. As part of the growing discussion on adaptation and resilience, those of us in nations privileged by wealth or location might begin thinking how we can absorb millions of climate refugees in coming decades.

3) Finally, the act of pilgrimage--whether to Canterbury or Mecca, Jerusalem, Llasa or Santiago de Compostela--suggests a turning to some instance of a Higher Power or God. This thought becomes poignant for me when I read about the broad experience of grief felt by scientists who have researched and documented climate change for more than three decades, issued warnings and proposed interventions, only to see their work ignored and at times defamed. Knowing sooner and better than the rest of us what was and is at stake, their emotional response--depression, anger, futility--has in many cases been acute. Where else can they turn?

While the religious framework is often seen in opposition to the scientific, my own religious response to this potential for despair increasingly draws on the reality exposed by 20th century physics of an infinite and expanding universe. While our own future may seem dim, that reality offers the hope at least, even the probability, that somewhere in infinite space there are sentient creatures not so foolish as to destroy their only habitat. The encounter of modern physics with old-fashioned Anglican Christianity is captured in a wonderful hymn, written by Robert Bridges and set to music by Herbert Howells, whose final lines read
                                   
                             Evermore
                             From His store
                             Newborn worlds rise and adore.

Or as Kafka put it:  "There is plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope--but not for us."

Even the Bankers are Calling for Divestment

Last week the Bank of England expressed its concern to Britain's major insurance companies that their investment portfolios might be at risk from overvalued fossil-fuel stocks. Speaking to a conference of insurance executives, an official from the bank's prudential regulation authority suggested that large financial institutions could take a "huge hit" if major reserves of fossil fuel are left "stranded" by policies that reduce carbon emissions, whether by market regulation or legal injunction.

Last week's warning follows statements by BoE governor Mark Carney last fall, suggesting that "the vast majority" of fossil fuel assets "are unburnable" within sustainable climate policies. Former US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson made similar observations in a New York Times op-ed last summer, comparing the "carbon bubble" of overvalued energy stocks to the housing bubble of 2007, and the financial collapse it caused in 2008.

In short, financial leaders are coming to realize that "leave it in the ground" is not a wild-eyed slogan but the expression of a sane and inevitable truth. Not all: Shell oil executives are on record saying"We do not believe that any of our proven reserves will become stranded." That is, Shell intends to extract and burn regardless of the consequences. But Carney, Paulson, and other financial leaders are starting to assume that Shell, the Koch brothers, and other fossil fuel promoters can and will be restrained.

In effect, these leaders--as well as the conservative Financial Times--are making the case for fossil fuel divestment, though in different terms from movement activists. Unlike Naomi Klein, Paulson and the BoE believe the writing down of "stranded" fossil assets can happen in an orderly way within the capitalist model. Perhaps--though the resistance of Shell et al. suggests otherwise. It is nonetheless useful to know that the Davos crowd is no longer ignoring the fossil fuel dilemma but embracing it--for better or worse.

Required Reading

The Guardian has begun serializing the introduction to Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything. Klein's book, a carefully researched and unblinking summary of recent climate science, is notable in the way it situates the climate problem--and our utterly failed response to it--in its proper social and political context. If you haven't read it, I strongly urge you to do so. The Guardian's excerpts come in manageable bites--pour yourself a glass of wine, and take deep breaths as needed. Keep in mind that she is moving toward an exciting and deeply progressive set of proposed solutions.You can find the first installment here 

Little Switzerland ...

... last week became the first of the world's nations to file its climate change plan with the UN office charged with organizing the Paris conference. All 195 COP 21 nations are expected to file such a plan, by April if possible, so that the results can be aggregated. In October the UN will try to determine whether these individual voluntary national plans add up to an adequate global blueprint, whose goal would be to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees C.

Switzerland, representing slightly less than .1% of the global economy and about .1% of its carbon emissions, is not a major player, but by filing the first INDC or national plan, it sets an important benchmark. So how did Switzerland do?

• Overall, the Swiss propose a 50% reduction (from 1990 levels) of carbon emissions by 2030, with aspirations for 70-85% by 2050. This places them above the EU's proposed target of 40%, but the details raise questions. Noting that their per capita carbon emissions are already below the world average--Switzerland produces a lot of 'clean' hydro power, but imports most of its energy in fossil-fuel forms--Switzerland proposes to decrease domestic carbon emissions by only 30%, while achieving the rest in "carbon markets and other offsets." Perhaps someone can enlighten me on just what this means.
• Environmental critics note that the overall goal is not fleshed out with specific proposals for achieving it. This will, I expect, become a leitmotif of most of these INDC national plans, and a serious problem for the whole UN process: it's easier to set a figure--as the US has rather vaguely done--but much harder to set down proposals that will challenge vested interests.

• A bigger criticism, from the Swiss environmental group Alliance Sud, is that “there is no word about climate finance and support for developing countries." This notion that the wealthier nations of the world--and Switzerland is surely one of them--will create a solidarity fund to helpo poorer nations meet their goals will be a major bone of contention in any final deal. Switzerland's draft plan sets an unfortunate example in this regard. 

So--it's exciting in a way to see this process start to unfold, but alarming that one of the wealthier and perhaps 'cleaner' nations is not setting the bar as high as it might. With its melting glaciers graphically displaying the consequences of indifference, perhaps Switzerland can be prodded to do more.

More Breaking News

In my previous post I noted a breakthrough in media coverage: The Guardian has declared its intention to make coverage of climate issues a priority, despite the elusive definition of what constitutes an 'event.' What I should also have noted is the strong, indeed revolutionary position taken by the editor, Alan Rusbridger, in defining the issue.

Rusbridge essentially endorses the argument framed by Bill McKibben and 350.org that "trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuels" must not be burned if we have any hope of maintaining habitable temperatures on our planet. That is, trillions of dollars of assets need to be written off as assets and left in the ground. Make no mistake: this is a RADICAL proposition, consistent with Naomi Klein's argument (most recently put forward in This Changes Everything) that to address the climate issue effectively poses a major challenge to capitalism as we know it.

Rusbridger, on behalf of The Guardian, endorses a paradigm-shifting, revolutionary vision of economic reorganization, and brings it into the mainstream. That's news.

All the News

Yesterday The Guardian printed a page-one editorial by its distinguished editor, Alan Rusbridger, announcing its intention to devote considerable reporting resources, and a major portion of its Friday homepage, to climate change issues. Rusbridger attributes this change in priority, if not policy exactly, to his own conscience, as he prepares to retire, and to the bleak prospect, in the absence of substantial interventions, of a future--quoting a scientific source--“incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable and civilised global community.” Strong words.

Rusbridger interestingly notes the difficulties for news media in covering the future, in reporting on events "in the realm of prediction, speculation and uncertainty," as he puts it. That The Guardian is advancing with its climate change coverage despite this impediment is one more mark of its journalistic courage--but also a salutary warning for the rest of us. I have complained in previous posts of the scanty coverage given to COP 21 events in the New York Times, which seems to have no dedicated reporter for this topic and relies on fragmentary dispatches from Reuters and the AP. This omission from the newspaper of record contributes to a failure of awareness that is particularly damaging in what is far-and-away the world's most carbon-polluting nation (per capita).

Elsewhere I observe that Le Monde gives COP 21 particular coverage, as France assumes its responsibilities as host to the conference. The mayor of Paris, Ann Hidalgo, along with the regional president for Seine-St.-Denis, the actual site of the conference, are planning a full calendar of events from now till the end of the year, which should guarantee substantial coverage in France's lively press. But what about the rest of us? Will, for example, the Hindustan Times treat COP 21 (and its government's recalcitrance) as a major story? How about Xinhua or the China News Service?

The Guardian has set a high standard by committing to this level of coverage. Let's hope the rest of the news industry feels challenged to follow its lead.

In Case You Missed It ...

Last week the European Union, the world's largest economic entity, set out its goals for carbon reduction between now and 2050. You may have missed the story--it got minimal notice in the Times, and a bare mention in the Guardian. And the announcement is provisional: the EU Commission's draft needs to be reviewed by the 28 member states, who need to determine their national objectives, before a final version is submitted to the UN COP 21 process by the end of this month. Still, a few elements of this version might be worth the world's notice:

• First, the overall target: 60% reduction of carbon emissions by 2050 (in relation to 2010 levels), a rephrasing of the previous goal (50% of 1990 levels), and thus a disappointingly low threshold, not adequate, in the view of environmental groups, to reach the global goal of a 2 degrees C increase in global temperature this century.
• Second, the politics: by getting its draft out early, the EU is presumably trying to get the two other major entities,  the US and China, to commit sooner and more specifically to goals which, aggregated, would drive the larger process by their overwhelming size. Europe is the 3rd largest emitter, not big enough to leverage the global process by itself, but more amenable by far than the two larger polluters.
• Finally--and this is the real story, buried in fine print--the EU is calling for a legally binding protocol, with UN enforcement and 5-year monitoring, of whatever agreements are put on the table in Paris. Will this sit well with Senator Imhofe or the Chinese Central Committee? Maybe not, but it is a useful conversation to be launching now, 9 months before the Paris agreement risks being dispersed in generalities and good wishes.

Now the public sphere, here especially and wherever else it can, needs to take up that conversation, if the 'shaming' or national peer pressure mechanisms are going to work. Otherwise, we should all be working on those massive walls to keep out the seawater and desperate climate migrants ...

"Paris changes ..." (Baudelaire)

Something new on the iconic face of Paris, as though the Mona Lisa were sporting a nose ring or a new gold tooth: yes, that's a wind turbine on the Eiffel Tower, one of two vertical axis turbines recently installed as part of a more general renovation, according to The Guardian.

The installer, US-based Urban Green Energy (UGE), claims the turbines will produce 10,000Wh of electricity/year, enough to power the 1st-floor commercial spaces of the world's most photographed structure. But more importantly, the turbine project puts a little more wind in the sails of the UN conference as it lurches toward Paris. Well done!