Friday, October 30, 2015

Climate in a Different Voice

On one side, 195 nations, diplomats, ministers, heads of state, and an army of UN functionaries prepare to address the climate crisis in Paris in just a month. On the other, Pierre Rabhi, 77 years old, 'peasant-philosopher,' organic farmer, author of poems, novels, articles, tracts and numerous interviews expounding his conception of 'agro-ecology.' In an interview in yesterday's Le Monde (here, in FrenchRabhi expressed his skepticism that anything very significant will emerge from a 'High Mass' like the COP 21 summit. Perhaps his long life swimming against the stream has disqualified him from appreciating the powerful institutional forces arrayed for Paris. But maybe that long experience is worth considering.

Rabhi is Franco-Algerian. He was born, and lived his early life, in a Saharan oasis village in the south of Algeria. Seeking opportunity for his son, Rabhi's father sent him to France, where he completed high school, returned to Algeria, then went back to France. He studied agronomy, with his wife started a farm in the Ardèche region, and began writing about ecological issues affecting the long-term health of the land. In the early 1980s he was invited to Burkina Faso to help convert the despoiled, over-fertilized commodity agriculture there to a more balanced, sustainable model. At 77 he continues to live, farm, write, and teach from his base in the Ardèche.

"The problem with COP 21," Rabhi says, "is that they want us to believe they can solve the problem without attacking the sources of [ecological] imbalance ... Will they stop industrial fishing or intensive agriculture, and thus stop pillaging the oceans and the earth?" he asks. "Will there be a just redistribution of resources between North and South?" "It's not the planet that is in danger," he insists, "but the human species. The Earth herself has seen others come and go."

There are a thousand practical objections that could be leveled at Rabhi's fundamentalist ecologism. But in his focused and balanced way of life he is living out a paradigm that--unlike the rest of us and our desperately consumptive way of living--is actually sustainable. The promises made in the UNFCCC documents and drafts are far less real than the orchards and fields on Rabhi's farm. The demand for growth at all costs, as he notes, risks to trump the good intentions of all the green-minded advocates who will convene in Paris.

Rabhi is more poet than planner, more prophet than pragmatist, but his vision may be worth more than a thousand pages of programmatic interventions. If we don't understand what he means by 'agro-ecology,' if we don't grasp the equilibrium that defines sustainability, we are likely to wander from one partial, inadequate solution to another without making the fundamental structural changes in our economies, global and local, that are our only real hope.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

The Bumpy, Winding Road to Paris ...

With the Bonn UNFCCC meeting winding down on Friday, and about 150 national INDCs on file, most of the official preliminaries to the Paris climate summit are completed. So how does it stand? Here's a very rough scorecard on some key elements:

  • Greenhouse gas reduction: this is really the crux of the question, and estimates aren't terribly encouraging. Optimists point out that if the INDC pledges are kept, we will see lower emissions going forward from 2020 than if 'business as usual' prevailed--a slender claim. Most analysis suggests that current proposals will lead to a 2.7 degree Celsius mean temperature increase during this century--a figure that many see as catastrophic. Even the 2C official target leaves many climate scientists alarmed, and 2.7 C, with all the possible feedback effects, is deemed unacceptable by most observers. Can this situation be salvaged? The solution would be to consider the Paris agreements a platform for 'ramping up' to more stringent measures, and a mandated 5-year review to that end may become part of the agreement. The tricky part: leaving Paris with an upbeat assessment, not of what has been done but what will be done going forward. Spinmeisters needed. 
  • Green Climate Fund: meeting the promise, made 6 years ago at Copenhagen, to add $100 billion in new climate development funding annually starting in 2020, is widely regarded as essential to any agreement in Paris. The Fund is intended to help poorer countries (who bear much less responsibility for the climate crisis) to mitigate and adapt to the conditions of climate change, and to enhance their own decarbonization efforts. Difficulties abound in formulating a plan for the Fund, and among the unresolved differences in Bonn last week are the following thorny questions: Are the 'rich' contributor-nations just the usual OECD, mostly Western powers, or should newcomers like China, Brazil, other 'southern' success story-nations, and OPEC producers be expected to share the burden? Is indemnity for 'loss and damage'--a potentially large and urgent component--part of the deal, or (as the US strongly insists) should this delicate subject, with its bottomless demands, be taken off the table in Paris? Are existing funds being rebranded to look new, and thus reduce the levels of new funding? How does private sector investment funding factor into the total? While a team of game theorist-observers are betting that that a much larger amount--$350 billion/year--will be pledged for 2030--when all the signatories will be dead or retired--they also are predicting weak language in response to short term demands--an explosive prediction at this point.
  • Governance: the issue of what binding powers, if any will be built into the Paris agreement continues to loiter on the margins of discussions. Those same game theorist scientists predict that general conformity to the UNFCCC process will be held as binding, but specific national goals might not. There is some push to insist that no nation be allowed to 'backslide' from its Paris INDC commitments--but with what sanctions? Meanwhile, as Republican governors take the Obama administration to court in an effort to undo the EPA regulations he has put in place, and Republican senators and presidential candidates promise to reverse the US commitment altogether, the rest of the world is justifiably anxious about the world's largest economy, tethered to a major political party that maintains an insanely anti-scientific posture.
So those are some of the tensions that need to find resolution at Paris, or God willing before the conference opens. Delegates at Bonn last week called for intervention from ministers and heads of state to cut through some of the tangles, and this may happen at a ministerial conference scheduled by France's Laurent Fabius for November 10th.

Meanwhile, I would point to a tangential but promising event: MIT last week, while rejecting disinvestment from fossil fuels, announced a plan to consolidate $300 million in an interdisciplinary 5-year climate research initiative to address many facets of the climate crisis. As research institutes around the world follow suit, a model emerges: technological and scientific solutions are developed--capital investment funds are leveraged from wealthy nations and corporations--and a UN-sponsored governing structure takes responsibility, with broad support from both OECD and G77 nations, to regulate the flow of investment and implement new technologies. Sound plausible? All the tensions leading up to Paris--not to mention the cynical insistence of big oil producers who refuse to moderate their projections for fossil fuel production--say it's naive. But it's the model that needs to be moving forward on the road to Paris.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Crossing Swords in Bonn

It wasn't what US negotiator Daniel Reifsnyder was most hoping to hear. Reifsnyder, who has spent 20 years as a US climate diplomat, has the hot-seat position of co-chair of the UNFCCC committee charged with presenting a manageable draft agreement to the Paris conference in less than six weeks. That document ballooned with hundreds of pages of concerns mostly of the so-called G77 less developed countries + China (actually more than 130 of them), who are lobbying for stronger contributions from wealthier nations. After last summer's difficult session in Bonn, Reifsnyder and his co-chair, Ahmed Djoghlaf of Algeria, agreed to undertake the draft reduction themselves, promising to bring it back to the plenary group of 195 nations in Bonn this week. Yesterday was the official plenary review of that pared-down draft.

Nozipho Mxacato-Diseko, an Oxford-educated, formidable diplomat from South Africa who chairs the G77, immediately challenged Reifsnyder's omission of key elements, and she did so in a particularly challenging fashion: she told him and the room she was reminded of the apartheid regime, when black Africans like herself were required to prove why they should be allowed to vote. "In essence we are disenfranchised, and have to negotiate our way back into the process," she summed up. With broad support from her caucus, she led a two-hour procedural debate, never mind the brevity of meeting time left to refine the document.

Described as "genial," Reifsnyder can't have been happy to be compared to the authoritarian apartheid regime. But setting aside the rhetoric, the exchange points to what may be a constant theme in Paris: the draft was shortened because the demands of the needier--and far less complicit in climate change--nations are many. The Geneva draft was a compendium of those demands, and it went on and on. To make a streamlined version is to revert to broad principles while neglecting the substantial details that will encourage the world's poorer nations to feel some trust in the process.

And if they don't? The EU, the US and other developed nations may still see it in their interest to reduce carbon emissions--and even Canada and Australia, with less intransigent governments in place, may join them. But will the giants--India and China in particular? The G77 consensus has been an important vehicle for bringing China to the table--and an unresolved dispute in Paris may send them away again, and will certainly encourage India to pursue its non-compliant policies.

So Ms. Mxacato-Disenko speaks not only for the discredited past of her country but for a global future. If she feels disenfranchised, we should all be worried.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Corporate Climate Crimes: Take ExxonMobil to the Hague!

When I read about the research of archaeologists and anthropologists, filling in the story of the human adventure, from our evolutionary ancestry to the global dominance of homo sapiens, I sometimes get the sinister feeling they are bringing the story to completion. What used to seem boundless--human life on earth--now seems like a closed system, its finale increasingly imaginable.

One important piece of that story to fill in is of course the climate change chapter: if anthropogenic climate change is on course to do us in as a species--a hypothesis at least worth considering--it is worth looking back to see how the leaders of the human clans managed to do so little for so long, until the consequences become unavoidable. A major part of that story has been assembled and published in recent weeks by the Pulitzer-winning climate blog Inside Climate News. After eight months of careful archival research into ExxonMobil's management of information about climate science, the blog's researchers are able to document a story that amounts to an enormous crime against humanity on Exxon's part.

The investigative team first shows an earlier timeline for the decisive climate research, dating to the 1960s and 70s, carried out by Exxon's own scientists working with academic and government researchers. These studies already documented the threat of a carbonized atmosphere in terms that are very close to current estimates.  Exxon's researchers for a decade or so published those findings in peer-reviewed journals, and urged corporate managers to consider a narrow time frame--5 to 10 years--to turn the energy sector away from fossil fuels before change became irreversible. This message reached Exxon executives around 1980! As Harvard History of Science professor Naomi Oreskes notes in a recent New York Times post, the whole history of climate change might have taken a different turn if Exxon's executives had acted properly at that moment.

But of course they didn't. In 1988 James Hansen sounded the alarm at a US Senate hearing, and the following year Exxon undertook its massively funded 20 year campaign of disinformation, obfuscation, confusion, and denial. We are living with the desperate consequences of that enormous corporate crime.

In his Guardian article last week Bill McKibben called this crime "the most consequential lie in human history"--a not unreasonable claim under the circumstances, though he also notes that world-weary types will merely say 'I knew it all along.' Two US Congressmen have called on the Department of Justice to investigate, though of course there is no real remedy, no restitution we could claim for the decades lost to confusion and denialism. It is nonetheless essential, as McKibben and Oreskes make clear in their different voices, if only for the historical record, to take note, to bear witness--to say 'these evil stewards did this, for their own greed and profit, to our incalculable loss.' ExxonMobil's official response, recorded in yesterday's Guardian, was "This is complete bullshit." Yes, alas, it is, but not the way they mean it.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Today's Bad News

Following the increasing tempo of climate policy news in advance of the Paris conference can be a rough ride. Each day new experts pronounce in public forums quite different from the relative obscurity in which they have been working all these years. And all their pronouncements are then spun according to the bias or humor of the media outlet that carries them. It can be bewildering, and also rather an emotional crossfire depending on which news comes to one's attention. Here then is a somewhat random trio of stories I came upon this morning:

  • First, another overall assessment of the state of national proposals (INDCs) submitted to the UNFCCC in advance of the conference. There is supposed to be an official tally that adds up the impacts of these promised policy initiatives--that tally should come from next week's meeting in Rabat, Morocco--but many observers are doing their own calculations. Today's assessment, reported by the BBC, comes from the think tank Climate Analytics. Their calculus suggests that if all existing promises are kept, the global temperature rise will amount to 2.7 degrees C--well above the danger threshold many have postulated. This is good news in relation to the 3 and 4 degree rise many feel the planet is heading for without intervention, but still an unacceptably dangerous course.
  • Meanwhile a group of climate policy academics, publishing jointly in Nature, are suggesting that the 195-nation individualized ('differentiated') method for determining climate policy interventions is itself fatally flawed. They cite research that shows that such approaches--going all the way back to Kyoto in 1997--generally produce a beggar-thy-neighbor sort of agreement, rather than the global standard required collectively. Their suggestion: a global carbon tax or charge that would affect all emitters equally and produce a single predictable result for carbon reduction. Alas, this approach will not be taken up in Paris, for reasons deeply embedded in the COP process, and more generally in the ways that nations relate to one another in international forums.
  • As if to prove their point, analysts from Climate Wire, publishing last week in Scientific American, take a close look at Turkey, whose economic growth, largely coal-powered, is one of the world's fastest, and whose GHG emissions will be among the world's largest by current trajectories. Turkey, the authors report, has been reluctant for years to participate in international agreements, and shows no signs of changing--despite its enormous potential for solar, wind, and geothermal energy solutions. Worse, Turkey muddies the assessment by producing high-minded statements of intent while committing to no such policies in actuality.  This crucial nation thus has made itself a poster child for international non-compliance--just as the Climate Wire analysts predicted.
Is there any solace in this disheartening set of news stories? One source might be the resolve many are voicing to consider the Paris agreement an interim step, to be followed by regular (5-year?) reviews to 'ramp up' policies. Support for such a provision in the Paris agreement seems to be building.  A different sort of solace lies in the very fact that these discussions are all over the media--the BBC in this case. The transparency of the problem has never been greater, and thus the inadequacy of the proposed solutions. That doesn't guarantee that more appropriate solutions will be forthcoming--but if the Paris meeting is accelerating this level of disclosure and analysis, it may be doing something necessary--if not sufficient--to bring the world to its senses.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Take the Climate Crisis to the Streets?

As plans fall into place for the COP 21 Paris conference, more plans surfaced yesterday for the other Paris climate event, the one that will be happening concurrently in the streets of Paris, in other cities, and in social media everywhere. Calling its event 'Climate Games,' the ad hoc coalition is publicizing a dispersed, anonymous clearing house for protestors to carry out rigorously nonviolent actions--called 'adventures'--that might include blockades, public art and theater, and ... who knows what? (An amusing sample of possible 'adventures' can be found here.)

The organizing coalition includes over 130 citizens' groups, among them 350.org, the anti-globalization group ATTAC, OxFam, Greenpeace, many smaller French environmental and social welfare organizations, and a number of high-profile activists like Naomi Klein. ATTAC has provided an early indicator of what this might look like: teams of activists have begun invading Paris bank branches and appropriating desk chairs, until they have 196 of them--one for each national delegation, who can thus symbolically seat themselves in chairs supplied by 'the people' rather than the banks. Blockades--a major part of the plan--will not disrupt the actual proceedings or impede delegates, but will instead establish ten 'red lines' across Paris--each representing a non-negotiable demand for a viable climate agreement, and each accompanied by a team of artists, performers, and agitators amplifying the message of that particular 'red line.'

All of which raises two questions for me: 1) is this necessary? And 2) is it useful?

On the first question, the premise of 'Climate Games' is that the agreement shaping up in the official UNFCCC process is inadequate, that the conference won't act boldly and speedily enough to avert climate change disaster, and that we have a moral obligation to push the conference toward more urgent agreements. Is this true? Almost all informed observers agree that what the national INDC proposals include will not keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (the arbitrary but widely accepted red flag level) this century. Some, including venerable climate scientist James Hansen, anticipate a much more rapid rise in sea levels than previously predicted, while other scientists are raising the specter of irreversible tipping points that would lead to unmanageable temperature rise within a generation or two. So there is real scientific basis for thinking that the gradualist approach--carbon neutrality by the end of this century--is simply irresponsible.

A slowly modified status quo is what governments are proposing because they are the status quo. They represent existing financial and corporate interests, and they aren't willing--or indeed empowered--to alter those power relationships. If solar and wind can turn a profit, if energy companies are given incentives to redirect investments to renewables, if development aid emphasizes clean energy projects ... then the steamship might slowly change course without any real structural change in power or financial relationships. One could easily argue that such is the overarching strategy of COP 21, of the whole UN process--and of President Obama's 'all of the above' policy, or China's solar + coal + hydro growth-based planning, or India's 'first we address poverty' proposal. Meanwhile we carbonize our atmosphere beyond the point of no return, and displace hundreds of millions of people--not to mention other species--in the process.

If this view has merit--and of course the science is always debatable as to the depth and rate of climate change--then the protestors are right: people's voices need to sound the alarm over the quiet hum of business as usual inside the conference hall.

But will protest work? It has taken 3 decades for the urgency of the climate issue to reach a threshold of public awareness, certainly in the US but perhaps--given the previous failures of the COP movement--globally as well. Those who need to change the most, to support the most dramatic transfers of resources and of lifestyle perquisites, are not surprisingly the most skeptical. Will the ingenious guerilla communications strategies of 'Climate Games' persuade them? Or rather antagonize them, and make the movement seem even more marginal than it already does?

Some have already questioned the 'games' metaphor, and I think that's right. This is a deadly serious business. The oil executives who are determined to burn every drop they can extract aren't going to be cleverly persuaded. The utilities executives (and the UK's Chancellor Osborne) busily taking away solar subsidies from homeowners can't be teased out of their self-interest. If the more dire scientific assessments are correct, then a more urgent strategy may be needed. Power, enormous wealth, and global privilege will not be yielded up because it's the right thing to do. They will have to be fought--maybe not now, not yet, but soon, under conditions of chaos and despair. 'Climate Games' may be merely a supercilious prologue to (armed) climate struggle, or climate disaster.


Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Home Stretch for Paris

As I've noted from time to time, the COP 21 Paris Climate Conference may be scheduled for early December, but the real work is happening this fall. In that light a milestone of sorts was achieved last week as India filed its national plan, the last such plan expected from a large economy. With that in place, analysts are able to see what the overall results look like: not great in relation to the 2 degrees C temperature rise postulated as the 'goal,' but a lot better than the 'business as usual' low bar alternative.

On another plane the conference is shaping up around the draft document that the 195 member states have been negotiating all year--and for several previous years--and that draft, released on Monday, was the object of much commentary. Most visible for American readers is the hopelessly snarky account given in Andrew Revkin's normally respectable Dot Earth blog in the Times. Revkin's focus is the UN practice of creating drafts with unresolved alternative phrases in brackets--the better to see what stands and what still needs to be worked out. Revkin has some fun with this: the title of his post refers to "a draft climate [agreement][accord][pact]" and goes on to cite some really substantive alternatives still pending resolution. For example, this opening statement:

"Parties aim to reach by [X date] [a peaking of global greenhouse gas emissions][zero net greenhouse gas emissions][a[n] X per cent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions][global low-carbon transformation][global low-emission transformation][carbon neutrality][climate neutrality]. "

Yes, there are big differences in these various formulations, and the negotiators have a lot of work to do--scheduled for the end of this month--before the document can be taken up by the full conference. But as Revkin himself admits, that work is actually being done--heroically, the long way, the only way it can be to reach global agreement. This is just what didn't happen in advance of Copenhagen, and the result was a hasty, incomplete, closed door agreement among major powers that left all the other participants dismayed. For all Revkin's ironic asides, the process this time--though it may go down to the wire and could still fail in some respects--has been far more transparent, participatory, and promising thus far. For what it's worth, the Guardian managed to report on exactly the same status of the drafting process without making fun of it at all.

More useful by far would be to consider what could still be achieved, what is missing altogether from the document, and how, beyond Paris, the 2 C goal might still be achieved. Some of this information finds its way into this account by Megan Darby of Climate Change News. Darby notes some important omissions: air travel and nautical shipping, both major sources of GHG emissions, are not addressed. Carbon markets are relegated to subordinate documents, as is the whole vexed question of the Green Climate Fund, or more generally the financial transfers from wealthier to poorer nations to cover adaptation, mitigation, or 'loss and damage' expenses. This 'climate debt' from the historic polluters--i.e. wealthy industrialized nations--to the less developed, less responsible nations, is perhaps the toughest pending issue, though it may be finessed by shadowy accounting, i.e. citing existing funds and relabeling them.

In any case, for those of us wondering if the Paris conference stands a chance of success--by whatever measure--we don't have to wait passively till December. The pieces are falling rapidly into place, and the results of the conference, good and bad, can be glimpsed already in the documents that are surfacing.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

'Realists' Run Amok

You may think there is good news in the air: the pope has reset the climate discussion, even India has filed a modest plan to reduce emissions, and many are voicing optimism that at least a gradual improvement in the GHG emissions prognosis will emerge from the Paris conference. And Britain's top banker, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, issued a warning the other day--not his first--to financial corporations to begin accounting for all that 'stranded' fossil fuel they will never see brought to market. Lovely.

But here comes Jeremy Warner, veteran business correspondent for The Telegraph, throwing cold water of capitalist reality on all that happy talk. In his reply to Carney he says in effect, 'Come off it--we all know nothing will change, all available fossil fuel will be burnt, and more added to the pile. Temperatures will rise till we no longer have a civilization that runs on oil or anything else. Get used to it. There's no other way.' That's the position of 'realists' in this discussion. Mostly they go to their well-paying jobs and keep quiet in public. So thank you, Jeremy Warner, for making clear just how confident those 'realists' are, how determined to carry on--while there's anything left to carry. Here are some money quotes from Warner's article:

"It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of modernity is based on hydrocarbons. Without coal, oil and gas, we’d still be in an age of limited life expectancy, subsistence farming and riding to market on horse and cart. However much we might wish it, this dependence is not going to change for a long time to come.Thirty years of extraordinarily costly research and development has resulted in a renewables industry that today accounts for a stunning – wait for it – 1 per cent of global energy supply  [...]

"Mr Carney made much in his speech of the idea – hatched by the UN sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that up to a third of the world’s proven oil, gas and coal reserves would have to be left in the ground, or “stranded”, if the rise in global temperatures is to be limited to the prescribed 2 degrees. What is he doing lending credence to such a tenuous concept? Even if the numerous assumptions – all questionable enough – behind the calculation turned out to be true, it is wholly unrealistic to think that once the limit has been reached, the world is suddenly going to stop burning hydrocarbons. Consider the facts. The world produces oil at the rate of roughly 93 million barrels a day. Just to meet this demand, the oil industry needs to be constantly investing in and developing its reserves. If it were to stop, production would naturally deplete at a very rapid rate, and in an age of still exponential demand growth, the price of hydrocarbons would go through the roof.."
So there's the challenge. Madmen are running our global economy, determined to heat up the atmosphere at all costs, certain there is no alternative, oblivious of all the longterm suffering and destruction they will cause. Renewable energy, more efficient use of existing energy, innovative new sources of energy--all these responses must be accelerated, supported, subsidized. Powerful men want to keep things as they are to the bitter end. They won't stop--thanks for the tip, Mr. Warner. They must be stopped. 

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Going My Way?


Dear Readers of this Blog,

November 30, and the opening of the COP 21 Paris Climate Conference, draws nearer. Are you planning to be there? I'm trying to decide myself, and wondering what groups might be planning to make the trip. Not to the conference hall (25,000 official delegates, plus credentialed press, celebs, politicians, etc. will make the scene at Le Bourget pretty crowded). No, I'm wondering whether to be in the street with an even larger mass of folks--but I'm not eager to be there by myself. Any groups planning to be on site? Preferably Boston-based, but not necessarily. Let me know if you know of potential contacts, either by commenting on the blog or sending me a personal email at jgbwhelan@gmail.com. Thanks, and maybe I'll see you there!

Brent