A Voice for Climate Justice

Of the many high-visibility figures associated with the global climate movement, Mary Robinson may have the best claim to the moral high ground. Her admired service as President of the Irish Republic elevated her to that stage, but her decision to take on the job of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights made her humanitarian ambitions clearer still. Now she runs a foundation in her own name, dedicated to climate resilience and mitigation, and in that capacity she is worth listening to, as in this short interview.

What particular claims does she bring to the climate discussion as it moves toward Paris? Her position can be summed up in the phrase 'Climate Justice,' but she moves beyond the phrase to the realities at ground or sea level. When President Tong of the island nation of Kiribati announces planning for his people's "migration with dignity," Robinson adds her voice to his, declaring "no world leader should have to plan" for such a contingency. Whether on behalf of African farmers, mostly women, whose crops are threatened with irregular weather patterns, or peasants whose lands risk inundation for 'green' hydro-electric projects, Robinson's exposure to the world's poor enables her to articulate the dilemmas and impending catastrophes that threaten the least responsible, most vulnerable populations. What should we notice particularly in her remarks?

• Green climate funding: while others are wondering how the Fund will ever reach the promised level of $100 billion by 2020, Robinson suggests that much more--as much as $300 billion annually--would be a more realistic number, both to build resilient infrastructure in threatened locales and to mitigate the inevitable dislocations and disasters from rising seas and changing weather. This funding gap--that's us, the global rich, she's talking about--now looms as perhaps the greatest challenge to global consensus at Paris.
• Migrants and refugees: like others, Robinson sees in the growing migrant pressure of  displaced Africans on Europe the first signs of much greater displacements to come. While her first emphasis is resilience, that is, adaptations that will enable people to remain in their homelands, she also notes that "the world is grossly underprepared" for the migratory pressures that climate change will cause.
• Women: Robinson is particularly aware that the burdens of adaptation and community will fall disproportionately on women, who are already the binding agents in many at-risk societies, and she is concerned to elevate a class of female leaders who will be able to weigh in on the adaptations and emergency measures to come.

It is easy to get lost in the complex discussions of alternative technologies and projected changes in greenhouse gas emissions, in the multiplicity of national INDC plans and changing data for understanding the often inscrutable operations of climate. In the face of such uncertainties Robinson's moral compass--like the pope's--is sure, and her leadership a welcome turning to the human realities that will define us as a species as the century wears on.

Hillary Clinton, Climate Warrior?

The good news about Candidate Clinton's climate-focused speeches this week involve trust: we can trust that Clinton's team have thoroughly tested the waters of public opinion, and her remarks clearly signal majority voter support--some polls say by a 2-1 margin--for action on anthropogenic climate change. While Republicans have more or less trapped themselves in various shades of climate change denial--and will need to be resolute if they hope to tap the $1 billion reportedly available from the Koch brothers' political action funds--Clinton clearly sees the climate issue as a winner. But what will that mean in terms of real policy?

Her headline claim is for massive conversion to solar--a 700% increase over 10 years, so that 33% of US electricity will be renewable by 2027 (i.e. within 10 years of her inauguration). While her emphasis was on solar, observers have noted that wind may be a better bet, especially in Iowa, where the sector is already advanced. Furthermore her pledge is not precisely a call to action: the increase in solar will depend more on Congress and state legislatures, as tax subsidies, net metering, and other public supports will need to drive solar conversion for the foreseeable future while cost advantages still weigh against it. Wind power, currently 10 times larger an industry in the US than solar, may have a better chance of retaining subsidies as it brings more jobs to the table. For all her good intentions, President Clinton may find she has less power than Candidate Clinton suggests, particularly if Congress remains Republican.

Likewise her intention to carry forward President Obama's 'war on coal' is reassuring in comparison to conservative ideologues determined to maintain the coal industry to the bitter end. In the short and middle term, though, the Supreme Court may weigh in more heavily than the President on this initiative. Clinton has focused more on taking care of displaced coal industry workers--fine in itself--but she isn't proposing much that's new to reduce either coal-burning or export.

Meanwhile, Clinton's preternatural caution still contains her positions, despite a certain flamboyance in her presentation. She refuses to pronounce on the Keystone oil pipeline, citing a confused loyalty to Obama as her excuse ('I was involved in that policy and must therefore recuse myself, especially as I haven't been involved in it for the last several years ...'??).  Likewise the problem of methane leakage is absent from her pronouncements so far. And serious carbon taxes, which most experts agree will be the real driver of energy transformation, are not part of her program--not yet.

Candidates Sanders and O'Malley may come to the rescue here. Both intend to outflank Clinton from the left on climate issues. If and when a robust debate opens up within the Democratic primaries, these two may push her to redefine her position. The fact that she already is willing to treat climate change as a major part of her platform is in that sense promising. But her benign, sun-drenched early pronouncements must be met with tough-minded criticism if we are to see more significant and effective policy proposals.

Which Side Are You On, Secretary Muniz?

I was taken with the Boston Globe Magazine's profile yesterday of US Energy Secretary Ernie Muniz. I confess I hadn't paid much attention when he was appointed, beyond the parochial pride that another Massachusetts resident was taking the lead in environmental affairs. But here he was, fresh from his success as John Kerry's co-negotiator of the Iran deal, a heavy-hitting physicist but also a regular guy who plays senior league soccer with his pals, wears his gray hair shoulder-length, and stands up to climate change deniers wherever he finds them. I found all this reassuring, because Muniz is captain of the US team that will play such a major role in the Paris conference and various other international conversations about climate.

Curious, I did a little poking around, and saw that there is a more critical side of the story. Muniz is very much a champion of the nuclear power industry, and also a supporter of fracking, and natural gas expansion in general--the "bridge to renewables" theory that is Obama's standing policy. But on the whole Muniz represents the shift in Obama's second term toward a healthier attention to climate issues, just in time for the Paris milestone. Then I looked a little further, and found an article published by my friend Justin Elliott on the ProPublica site two years ago, at the time of Muniz's confirmation, and I begin to see just how murky the record can be, even for a 'good guy' like Muniz.

What Elliott and others document is the tight connections binding a player like Muniz to big energy interests and his own self-interest. At MIT Muniz was in the position of lauding BP and its "diversified portfolio" of energy initiatives at the moment when BP was pledging $50 million to the MIT Energy Initiative Muniz directed--and a few months before BP's offshore drilling devastated huge tracts of the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly Muniz's institute published a report favorable to fracking, without noting that Muniz served on the board of ICF International, a major fracking company, making $150,000 per year beyond his MIT salary while promoting the company's interests in his academic--'frackademic,' as they say--role. (Details in this transcript from "Democracy Now.") Muniz has similar corporate board connections to the uranium industry, while advocating strongly for nuclear power.

So what to make of Secretary Muniz and his business entanglements? There is nothing exactly new here, and indeed President Obama pointed to Muniz's strong ties to "energy companies" as evidence of his qualifications as secretary. Muniz's attachments, as Elliott notes, are very much a reflection of Obama's "all of the above" energy policy, which should be understood as an endorsement of all existing energy interests, including the most environmentally questionable.

Is this best we can hope for? A highly competent, scientifically astute Secretary of Energy who feathers his own nest while defending the corporate interests who fund him? It is easy to imagine a much worse energy department--just look at the 8 Bush-lite years. But somehow the complacency of "all of the above," with its corporate partnerships and don't-rock-the-boat timetables, feels weirdly anachronistic in the face of a ticking doomsday clock. Maybe the Secretary of Energy shouldn't be such a regular guy after all.

Cassandra Got a Bad Rap

I feel obligated to comment on the brouhaha that has arisen over the publication earlier this week of an alarming article by 17 eminent climate scientists, led by James Hansen. A full report of the controversy appeared yesterday in the Dot Earth blog by Andrew Revkin at the New York Times, while a briefer, quite lucid (and more sympathetic) account was posted this morning by Elizabeth Kolbert at the  New Yorker website. Hardcore readers can hear Hansen offer 'context' in this audio of a conference call with reporters linked by Revkin. All in all it's an important event, though I'm not sure how clear the moral is.

A few key facts: first, Hansen et al. published the paper as a 'discussion paper,' not yet peer reviewed,  and intended for critical comment. Such publications are not meant to be definitive, but at the same time the authors used a publicist to highlight the importance of the findings--which are in fact quite alarming. In very brief, the paper--which Hansen distilled over the past 8 years by his account with 300 citations from reputable sources--suggests that with the impending collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, sea levels might well rise much faster and higher than previously estimated, to the point of 'swamping' coastal cities within several decades.The draft goes on to suggest the dire humanitarian and civil breakdowns that would be expected from such a disaster.

A pressing question is posed by Revkin: is it responsible to publicize such a preliminary 'discussion paper,' as Hansen clearly set out to do? He himself cites the urgency of the Paris conference as justification for getting the material into view--and he's right in a sense: the tone of complacency in much of the discussion leading up to Paris--and the near-total acceptance in mainstream articles of the 2C measure as a threshold for 'safety'--does indeed call for strident language, especially from scientists like Hansen who command a large audience. I agree with Hansen that putting forward this dismal scenario--which has considerable support in the scientific community, even as other scholars rush to challenge it--is a useful addition to the discussion leading up to Paris.

But the more pressing question is the substantial one: should we all be looking more closely at the range of scenarios, including disastrous feedback accelerators like the melting ice sheet (and there are others), rather than clinging to more optimistic, slower estimates, and dubious markers like the 2C benchmark? Is the problem with Hansen et al.'s work not that it is premature, or debatable, but that it is demoralizing, disempowering, ultimately counter-productive? In point of fact, from my non-scientist's angle, we will never quite know where we are with climate change, what's coming, or at what rate: climate just isn't knowable to that degree. So the question as we sift all this scientific data, hypothesis, and debate, is really not 'what's true' but what is useful: i.e., where do we draw that fine line between complacency and apocalypticism? How do we maintain an appropriate urgency in the tone of the discussion without scaring the world's leaders and its electorates into running away from it? Hansen may not appreciate this dilemma--it's not his role--but his work can usefully drive the discussion toward a more focused attentiveness. At this pivotal moment I don't see how that can hurt.

About Japan

About Japan. One of the world's wealthiest and most developed economies, Japan has just filed its INDC greenhouse gas reduction plan with the UNFCCC, and received a grade of "inadequate" from the Carbon Action Tracker website, a respected independent research agency. Japan is of course just one of 195 national players, though an important one, but the inadequacies of its INDC submission--which Carbon Tracker says would lead to a temperature increase of "more than 3-4 degrees C this century" if used as a global standard--point to some symptomatic problems in the UNFCCC initiative. What exactly makes Japan an under-performer?

• First, Japan measures its carbon reduction against 2013 levels, rather than using 1990 or even 2005. This means its proposed 26% emissions reduction by 2030 is really an inflated number--Japan has greatly increased emissions in the last few years, making the 26% really much less in 1990 terms.  
• That "sleight of hand" as some have called it points to another dimension of the problem: Japan, after the Fukushima disaster 4 years ago, entered an abrupt phase of transformation in its entire energy system, with considerable increases in coal and other fossil fuels to replace its collapsed atomic sector. Is that quite special circumstance an acceptable justification? Don't all countries bring their own special cases to the bargaining table?
• But Japan is not only turning to coal in the short term. It is planning to build dozens of new coal-fired power plants, making coal a major part of its energy plan through mid-century and beyond. Thus the inflated 2013 denominator is really intended to obscure a policy turning in the wrong direction.
• Furthermore, Japan continues to finance major coal-fired power projects all over Asia--its role in exporting emissions is perhaps more damaging than its domestic consumption.
• And finally, like Russia, Canada, and other forested countries, Japan is claiming considerable mitigation from existing forests, even though the carbon-absorption of its forests is projected to decrease radically in coming decades (from deforestation?). But a loophole in the UNFCCC calculations fails to include existing carbon capture in the status quo, so that a country like Japan can claim it as an enhancement even though it is actually a net reduction. But who exactly is this phony bookkeeping intended to fool?

In short, Japan's submitted plan represents a sort of gamesmanship on the global circuit, a way to present a respectable set of numbers to the Paris conference even though those numbers are misleading and not very meaningful. Will the conference as a whole be an exercise in gamesmanship and obfuscation? One hopes not, but the example of Japan is certainly dispiriting. 

Africa's Energy Choices

Ottmar Edenhofer, chief environmental economist with the Potsdam Institute and co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group III on climate change mitigation, is one of the largely invisible heroes, specialists at work on the climate problem over decades. As he prepares to step down from WG III he was recently interviewed on a wide range of climate policy topics, the link for which is here, and worth reading in its entirety.

As a follow-up to my previous post on the Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa, I would signal one particular remark of Edenhofer's, because it makes clear the urgency of resolving the development questions that intertwine with climate mitigation. Here is Edenhofer's remark:

"... we see a renaissance of coal in Africa. Incredible, large-scale coal renaissance, in particular, in countries which are economically successful. So, up to now, the increase of emissions in Africa is basically driven by oil and gas, but now coal becomes more and more important. Africa could become the future China. So up to now, so we do not see, or we do not count Africa as a main emitter, but it could be the case in 10 or 20 years when they have built up the whole infrastructure. And Africa is now at a bifurcation point. So what does this mean for a short-term entry point? It does mean that exactly in a time where people in Africa, decision-makers, decide at what path that they should go, so we need a strong [market] signal. And we need a policy which makes low-carbon technologies much more competitive compared to coal.

So how can this be implemented? The most important thing, it seems to me, is carbon pricing. "

This catches me off guard because I am in the habit of thinking of greenhouse gas emissions as a problem of the large economies: the US, the EU, China, India. Small economies in Africa and Latin America slip from my view, written off as irrelevant in scale. So when Edenhofer points to Africa as "the future China" in a decade or two--tomorrow, in the time scale of climate change--he gets my attention. Not just because all that coal is a disaster in itself, but because, as he suggests, it's not too late for Africa. China, India, the US--major coal interests are in place, and will need to be painfully, slowly displaced. But if Africa is at the point of "bifurcation," the promise of intervention is much greater. How? The Green Climate Fund, the sustainable growth goals--in short, all the international bodies that are looking for resources to help convert the emerging economies along sustainable lines. The moral imperative is clear (and the papal encyclical made it even clearer): developed nations have created the problem, and we owe the rest of the world this mitigation money, lots of it. But can we harness our political will to do the right thing? 

Global Hopscotch, or the Road to Consensus?

While I was off the grid for a week one of the three Big International Meetings of 2015, the Financing for Development conference, took place in Addis Ababa. Missed it? It wasn't exactly page 1 stuff, but here's a couple of things to consider: 1) these international gatherings (193 nations represented) seem to generate an atmospherics all their own, so that the road from Addis Ababa, passing through New York in September en route to Paris, might indeed be thought of as one continuous journey toward global health and sanity. And 2) the specific topic, development support for the G77 and other poor nations will be a make-or-break issue for achieving consensus in Paris.

So how did the Financing for Development conference do? Here are a few scorecard items:

• Global tax fairness: the touchiest agenda item was a proposal to address corporate tax evasion, tax havens, the widespread avoidance by multi-nationals of taxes in countries where they extract products and profits. Proponents wanted to set up a UN-based agency with powers to compel corporations to pony up. What they got was a promise to look into it at the UN or OECD level--not much to write home about.
• Funding for development: after much discussion, delegates had to settle for acknowledging existing sources of development funds, with some attention to technology transfers and other technical improvements, but NO NEW FUNDING--strike two.
• Finally, the conference reaffirmed the Copenhagen goal of establishing a Green Climate Fund, at a level of $100 billion/year, starting in 2020, but again found NO NEW FUNDING sources for the fund, which so far has pledges worth about $10 billion. While the conference went further in identifying resilience along with abatement as a purpose of the fund, the failure of richer nations to get behind it--the US, for example, is already making plans to divert existing funds, given the difficulties of getting any new money out of this (or any other?) Congress--poses a major threat to any global agreement on climate. Without visible funding to support the climate initiatives of countries--African ones in particular--with great ideas but little capital to implement them, the Paris conference risks splitting, as Copenhagen and all the other COP conferences have done, on this question of accountability: the developed countries, who largely cause the climate problem, aren't willing to pay for solutions outside their own borders.

So the rather general and process-ridden document produced in Addis Ababa will move on to the UN conference on Sustainable Development Goals in New York this September, where the general assembly will have another chance to develop some real support. International bureaucrats have a way of ending these events with cheerful glances toward the next venue, though not all were able to summon that cheer. Indeed, as Jean-Paul Adam, delegate from the beleaguered island nation of Seychelles, remarked, "It's not a question of financing for development, but financing for existence."

Is the Paris Conference on Track?

As the Paris conference approaches, and extremes of weather seem to dominate the news, more eyes are turning to the climate crisis and its many proposed mitigations. But how many are drawn to the UNFCCC process itself? I for one think the challenge of harnessing 195 nations to a significant and complicated common cause is a fascinating venture in itself--quite apart from the stakes in this particular instance, which may include human survival. If you feel the same attraction to this venture, to the vagaries of global diplomacy and the UN's arcane procedures, you might want to look at this article, which offers a critique of the INDC-gathering process which lies at the heart of the Paris conference and anything it might hope to accomplish.

INDCs are the voluntary national plans, each one intended to reflect the particular or 'differentiated' capacities of individual nations, great and small. The conceptual process is that each nation will say how much it is capable of, the UNFCCC will add these promises together, and declare whether the world is on track to a palatable future, calibrated at temperature increases of no more than 2 degrees Celsius. Neat. Of course 2C may not be a safe goal. And promises may not be kept. In any case the INDCs submitted so far--representing more than half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions--don't seem to be headed towards 2C. But at least, in a cards-on-the-table moment sometime this fall, as the UNFCCC does its calculations, we'll know where we stand, globally. If the process produces meaningful results, that is.

It's at this point that Ed King's critique, posted on the RTCC website, raises a crucial question. There are so many heterogeneous ways to measure climate change and its many mitigations that the INDCs may add up to a jumble, not an answer. For starters, there seems to be no standard baseline: some measure against 1990 levels of carbon, some choose 2000, or 2005, or even 2013, depending on which denominator yields a more impressive gain (with less investment in change). Re- and de-forestation projects offer other hard-to-account variables. Intensity--i..e. energy per unit of GDP--is a different method from counting overall emissions, one that is preferred by the less developed nations, who insist on their right to grow, and thus emit, but hope to adjust the efficiency of their energy systems (with first-world assistance). Even the most basic displays of greenhouse gas production are highly variable in format.

King's point is well taken: someone, presumably the UNFCC itself, needs to standardize a methodology, and soon, in order to process the INDC information that is accumulating at its doorstep. Otherwise the conference may produce a garbage-in, garbage-out calculation that makes individual diplomats feel useful but does the rest of us little good. The UNFCCC's official meetings on this topic are scheduled for October, but of course securing the agreement of the 195 participating governments is a task that had best be going on right now. Wish them well.

Air Travel and Climate Change

The long-running saga of London's Heathrow airport and its need for a 3rd runway took a next turn yesterday with a commission report that made a convincing case: Heathrow is at capacity, London continues to grow as a global financial center, demand is expected to rise by a whopping 200% in coming decades. On the other hand, the usual suspects--noise, pollution, degradation of adjacent neighborhoods--defeated the runway once before, and may do so again, since their champion is London's flamboyant mayor, and the Tory party's shadow leader, Boris Johnson. Yesterday's report changed the odds, but didn't resolve the issue.

Entirely missing from the New York Times (AP) article, and only mentioned in passing by the Guardian, is another troublesome fact: airplanes are major emitters of greenhouse gases, with no real technological remedy in sight, and the quick fixes--crowding more people onto fully booked flights--largely played out. So how will the UK--and every other wealthy country, and some not-so-wealthy ones--address the fact that ever-increasing demand for air travel is at cross purposes with essential climate goals?

It's a thorny problem, but Guardian columnist Andrew Simms wades in with some useful thoughts. Decrying air travel's "massive carbon free-rider pass," Simms suggests we take a closer look at what generates the heavy demand. Business travel, an essential feature of the global economy? Not as much as you'd think: 11% of the UK's international flight traffic by his count. Middle class affluence? Half of the UK's population--the poorer half, one imagines--don't fly at all, while 15% of the population--from posh addresses--represent 70% of all flights, largely for "leisure" travel. These affluent 'frequent flyers,' as Simms perhaps hyperbolically notes, are headed mainly to "recognized tax havens." In any case, their flights are arguably inessential if not frankly self-indulgent.

What to do? Simms addresses the business travel question by noting the success of teleconferencing during the no-fly period that followed a volcanic eruption in Iceland a few years ago. Businesses found a low-carbon substitute for airplanes in the internet, and some have retained that model. For the rest, Simms suggests what any economist would: very high taxes to capture the externalized pollution costs of air travel, to reduce demand (and relieve the need for a new runway). But would this really work in the luxury travel market?

What I imagine is a small group of the highly privileged for whom price incentives don't work all that well. Raise taxes and drive out the price-sensitive middle class, while those tax-haven-bound high rollers will just pay--as they do for 1st class and other amenities--without really noticing the extra cost. Is this a feature only of luxury markets, or a paradigm for all carbon exchange markets? Will they be a mechanism to reduce emissions overall, or a way for the rich to fund our shared catastrophe with accumulated wealth so great they can--and do--spend it without regard? If airline travel--the discretionary kind--is ecologically unacceptable, does it help to raise the cost? Or does it need some other kind of control? These aren't the questions driving the Heathrow debate at present, but we can thank Mr. Simms for enlarging the debate in that direction.

Is Brazil Down with the Climate Program?

Maybe President Obama meant it when he declared his intention to make climate change a main focus of his second term. (It was hardly visible at all for the first term, but that's old news.) In any case, after his historic agreement in China last fall, his rhapsodic--though rather thin on specifics--encounter with India's prime minister Modi last winter, now it's Brazil's turn. President Rousseff was in Washington to celebrate a 'US-Brazil climate partnership' whose purpose seems to be to maximize Brazil's INDC proposal for the Paris conference. Brazil's plan will reportedly commit to generating up to a third of its power by renewable sources by 2030, a sizable step though less than the global goal of 40%.

But as with any large economy--and Brazil is the largest greenhouse gas emitter after the US, China, and the EU--the story is a complicated one. Brazil has reduced its emissions considerably over the past decade, partly by slowing deforestation in the Amazon. But its current commitment is to eliminate illegal deforestation while permitting landowners to cut 20% of their trees. Reforestation of the 750 million hectares cut down since 1970 is proceeding at a minuscule rate, and the problems of illegal cutting are well-documented. Critics note that Brazil is also making little effort to curb growth in its burgeoning transportation--read: private auto--sector, while exploitation of large off-shore oil reserves continues apace. In short, the problem of rapidly developing economies whose energy consumption rises a lot faster than conversion to renewables is epitomized in Brazil.

Can the US partnership help move Brazil toward greener solutions? We may see an answer in the formal submission of Brazil's INDC in  October, but really the answers will more likely come later, after Paris, after the US has a new president--and after more weather disasters like Brazil's current drought add urgency to the question.