Is Big Business the Solution?

In reporting yesterday on the flurry of diplomatic activity in advance of the COP21 climate conference I perhaps should have noted another international gathering: the Business and Climate Summit taking place today and tomorrow at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Big business leaders from all over will converge to share a "Vision of a Low-Carbon Society"--but what will they do to help bring it about?

In an op-ed in yesterday's Guardian French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and UNFCCC executive Christiana Figueres attempted to answer that question, but I'm not sure their answers were perfectly convincing. Yes, corporations can and will have already developed plans to reduce their energy consumption--within the limits of what production requires. And they have declared their interest in using renewable energy and "supporting sustainable development"--but surely their shareholders will insist that these feel-good objectives will only happen in the context of a maximized bottom line.

What is perhaps truer is that corporations are more alert now to investment opportunities in alternative energy and related technologies--but only if public initiatives establish markets for them by increasing the cost of fossil fuels (through carbon taxes and exchanges). Likewise corporations can, as Fabius and Figueres note, factor in the costs of climate risk and adaptation--but only if those costs are made real, either by public mandate or by actual disasters. Concretely, why should Royal Shell or Gazprom write down the cost of their fossil reserves unless some public entity makes those reserves unburnable? What interest would they have to initiate the accounting for such enormous losses on their own?

Symptomatic of this impasse is the op-ed in yesterday's Monde (here, in French) by two well-meaning executives, Jean-Pascal Tricoire of Schneider-Electrique and Pierre-André Chalendar of Saint-Gobain, the former a global electricity company, the latter a giant construction supply firm. Both are involved in climate-related trade associations, both declare their interest in decarbonizing the global economy. How? By declaring that energy efficiency is compatible with growth. By encouraging limits on energy consumption (but is that compatible with growth?). And by calling for higher prices on carbon-based energy, which they claim is the policy of their trade associations. Really?

Finally Tricoire and Chalendar acknowledge that only government can reform the energy markets that will allow profit-seeking corporations such as theirs to implement the policies they call for. Unilateral moves to pay more for energy are not to be expected. They, like the rest of us, look to the UNFCCC process in Paris to establish those regulatory parameters within which they can seek to decarbonize their enterprises. Can business play some role? Yes, by supporting the government initiatives that will made sustainable energy more competitive, and allow private markets to adjust. Is it a good sign that conglomerate corporate executives are standing up to support those goals? Of course. Will the Business and Climate Summit alter the energy landscape? Not by itself--but it may, as it intends,  add to the momentum for the real action in Paris, 200 days from now.

Diplomats Fiddle While Planet Burns?

Are the world's political leaders starting to accept the 'last chance' logic that argues for major substantive agreement at the Paris conference in December? Diplomacy is a shifty business, where appearance counts for more than reality, but there is a real flurry of activity out there, which may be putting some actual deals in place before the Paris COP becomes a Götterdämmerung. Here's a quick round-up of current initiatives:

• G7: the energy ministers finished talks in Hamburg last week in preparation for the June meeting of the world's largest capitalist economies, where two of the protagonists--President Hollande and Chancellor Merkel--are promising substantial commitments. Merkel, who will chair the G7, has pledged action on the $100 billion annual Green Climate Fund to help developing countries adapt and mitigate, while Hollande declared his support for legally binding agreements in Paris--a sticking point for the US, among others. Within the G7 itself, Canada and Japan--along with the US--are seen as the recalcitrants, in need of 'peer pressure' from their more enlightened European counterparts. 
• Meanwhile ministers from 35 nations are meeting in Berlin today at the 6th Petersberg Climate Dialogue, hosted by Chancellor Merkel. At the session, a pre-meeting for the Paris COP-21 conference, Merkel affirmed her support for strong carbon pricing measures.
• Plans are taking shape for the 3rd International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa in July. This meeting is seen as a way to build pressure for the wealthier nations to direct new development funds to the Green Climate Fund proposed in Copenhagen 6 years ago but not yet properly funded. 
• The Addis Ababa meeting will prepare for  a UN-sponsored conference on Sustainable Development to be held in New York in September. The intention is to renew the Millennium Development Goals, drafted by the international community in 2000 with little reference to the climate issue, in a framework which will peg development to climate-related goals, both for mitigation and adaptation.
• And the Paris conference itself? National proposals (INDCs) have been overdue for several weeks now. Liechtenstein and Andorra have come through with proposals for major reductions in their absolutely minuscule greenhouse gas emissions, as has Gabon, the first African nation to submit a plan, whose national carbon market, though small, at least represents an admirable prototype. Of the larger economies, since Russia's duplicitous proposal to count its forests as a carbon-reduction system, only Canada has arrived on the scene, with plans to reduce the methane leakage from its deplorable tar sands production fields. Canada's overall plan got a 'substandard' rating from the World Resources Institute.Will the large and significant economies use the remaining months to improve their attitudes?  

In short, the production of hot air in international forums is increasing steeply, while actual commitments are still sluggish. Will the former encourage the latter? That is really the Big Question for our time.

Monkeying with the Planet

William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of economics at Yale and one of the most durable and respected students of the economics of climate change, has just published an article in the New York Review of Books, dated June 4, that merits the attention of anyone interested in the climate issue. Nordhaus is reviewing a new book called Climate Shock by two equally eminent academic economists, Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman, subtitled The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet, and in the technical terms of such analysis, the consequences are dire indeed: the authors postulate, among other effects, a 30% decline in global output over a brief time, an economic disaster of unimaginable severity. Nordhaus focuses on several particular issues within the larger framework, and I want to summarize his most salient points:

1) The authors,using statistical probability analysis, focus on 'tail' effects rather than the more predictable losses--often calculated at 5%/year--due to expected changes in rainfall, sea level, and other already visible factors. Tail effects--the term refers to the outlying parts of a bell curve distribution--are by their nature unpredictable. The authors don't pretend to describe them but rate the likelihood at 10% that mean temperatures will rise 6 degrees Celsius this century, and that some dire unforeseen events will produce "the end of the human adventure on this planet as we now know it." Imagine the 'trigger points' or negative feedback loops many have pointed to, or intensifying weather events, sudden collapse of the antarctic ice shelf ... or some other large event no one has thought of yet. These distinguished economists postulate--for reasons not really explained in Nordhaus's review--that the chance of such an occurrence is 10%, not  a certainty but not great odds either.

2) So why, in the face of the unprecedented global threat has the response of the world's nations and peoples been so ineffectual over the three decades we have been pretty sure of the problem? Nordhaus lists many reasons--scientific complexity, political expediency, and so on--but, economist that he is, he homes in on the 'freerider' problem: in effect, the nations and their policy makers are unwilling to make large sacrificial investments on behalf of the whole earth when others, 'freeriders,' would benefit without making the same sacrifices. He attributes the inertia of policymakers to this problem, which he considers virtually insoluble.  Interestingly, Nordhaus ignores the UNFCCC process and the Paris conference it is leading up to, even though the 'peer pressure' mechanism built into that process is intended to give incentives to national governments by making public their own proposals along with those of others, so that the relative 'fairness' of each national plan can be viewed. Will it work? Clearly there are bugs as the plans start to accumulate (I'll discuss these details in a future post). But Nordhaus dismisses the UNFCCC voluntary plan because he has something more muscular in mind--which I'll turn to in a moment.

3) A third salient point addressed in the book and the review is the possibility of 'geoengineering' as a silver-bullet solution in the absence of more measured but unobtainable ones. The primary silver-bullet the authors address is the fanciful proposal to load the stratosphere with tiny mirror-like particles to reflect away a portion of the solar radiation entering the atmosphere, and thus lower global temperatures. Nordhaus and the authors point out the obvious: the potential for disaster in such an experimental procedure is enormous, as is the possibility that geoengineering would lead to climate warfare. What is perhaps most notable is the increasing mention of such schemes--and there are others afoot--which have the merit of being relatively cheap, while leaving in place the hugely profitable energy sectors as we know them. Fending off such Frankenstein-like temptations will become an increasing part of the climate issue, as this book begins to make clear.

In response to the bleak picture of Climate Shock, Nordhaus, after reviewing the global policy failures from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen, has one positive suggestion, which he calls the "Climate Club." This would be a voluntary association of nations--like a membership club--who determine to undertake together the hugely expensive business of market-reduction of greenhouse gas, increasing by 10 or 20 times the cost of carbon emissions, and thus forcing rapid conversion from fossil fuels to renewables. Club members would agree to follow these draconian steps, but also agree to punish those nations who fail to join the club with drastic tariffs, thus excluding those rogue states from trade within the Club. The Club in effect becomes a stick to beat non-compliant nations into compliance, an enforcement tool to overcome the pernicious freerider factor. In effect, it's the UNFCCC plan with stricter policies and stringent enforcement.

Is Nordhaus's Climate Club politically feasible? At the moment it's hard to imagine. But so are those 'tail' effects. Might some version of a tail effect concentrate our attention, and thus pique our interest in the Climate Club solution, before all is lost? That seems to be Nordhaus's wager, and it's worth considering.

Arctic Species Suicide

Thanks to Bill McKibben (once again) for making clear, in an op-ed in today's Times, just how big a disaster is Obama's decision to proceed with oil drilling in the Arctic. One reason is the enormous environmental risk incurred by drilling in this remote, stormy sea rich in wildlife and perhaps impossible to 'restore' after the inevitable spills. The Times suggests caution in its editorial, which itemizes a series of inept failures that have characterized early stages of the project.

But the incredible truth is that the Times and President Obama have completely missed the essential point, forcefully summed up by McKibben: no new exploitation of oil, arctic or tar sand, or coal, or any other fossil fuel makes ANY SENSE AT ALL in relation to our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero. This is not primarily a 'clean environment' issue--it's about survival. By framing the discussion around safety concerns, clean-up safeguards, risk management, and so forth, the Times, and President Obama, and of course Shell Oil are effectively denying, as McKibben says, that science has real consequences.

So how should we understand this extraordinary decision by the President? Obama as we know is a pragmatist. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt: he believes climate change is serious, greenhouse gases need to be reduced, renewables developed, coal replaced. But he knows that the push-back from Congress, from global corporations, from a dubious electorate, and financial interests who can't fathom the writing down of trillions of dollars in assets--he knows that all these forces are too powerful to oppose. So he continues with half-measures via executive order. He makes vague promises regarding the future, knowing he will have no say in energy policy beyond next year. And he supports a slightly reformed version of arctic drilling, with some safeguards against the threat of spills, but no barrier at all against the over-consumption of oil that continued exploration all but guarantees.

What does this mean? It makes clear that Naomi Klein and others are right: the climate change problem can't be resolved within the forcefield of our existing political and economic structures. The fight for a livable atmosphere must lead us to the struggle for a sustainable social order, not the one we have now--where Shell Oil can command policy decisions that are ultimately insane--but a cooperative system oriented to the needs of the most vulnerable. We must insist that the Paris conference speak for the poor, the islanders on the verge of inundation, the refugees from floods, storms, and desertification. Those are the voices President Obama doesn't hear. Those are the voices we need to empower.

Surviving in the Anthropocene

As I mentioned in my last post, and in a few previous ones, I have been reflecting on philosopher Dale Jamieson's masterful analysis of the Climate Change dilemma in his Reason in a Dark Time. Rather than review the lengthy argument of the book--which examines the historical, economic, ethical, scientific, and political complexities of addressing the climate issue over the past 30 years--I want to reflect on Jamieson's concluding thoughts, beginning with the notion that "our lives [are] worth living ... in accordance with our values." He calls those values "green virtues", and notes that while they "are not an algorithm for solving the problems of the Anthropocene, [...] they can provide guidance for living gracefully in a changing world while helping to restore in us a sense of agency." (p. 200) In short, we--and our descendants, forever--will have to live with the enormous challenges consequent to Climate Change, but we can still act meaningfully, ethically, with purpose.

How? Jamieson proposes a seven-fold list of policy priorities that we humans, and our governments, and perhaps the UNFCCC super-government can usefully pursue to at least limit the most dire consequences of the changes we have wrought.  Here they are:

• Include climate adaptation in the plans for economic development, particularly in the poorer developing nations, who stand to be the greatest victims, and the most blameless--and the most in need of funds for this purpose from the wealthy--and most culpable--nations;
• encourage the development of carbon sinks, most particularly tropical forests (but not the sci-fi-like geo-engineering schemes hubristicly proposed in some quarters);
• price energy at its true cost;
• tax carbon and/or set up working global carbon exchanges with serious limits on total allowances;
• force adoption of existing technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rather than wait for the vagaries of market adoption;
• expand research, particularly primary scientific research, in the complex fields that relate to climate; and finally
•  plan to live in the Anthropocene: that is, understand how our relationship to nature has changed, how little of 'nature' rests outside human influence, and thus what an enormous responsibility we have to this no-longer-natural environment we have irrevocably altered.

While Jamieson offers further conclusions, and leaves much to discuss in arriving at these prescriptions, I want to look more closely at that last Big Idea: to embrace the Anthropocene. This notion was apparently coined about 15 years ago by Noble-laureate chemist and climate scientist Paul Crutzen, who updates and discusses his intentions in this more recent article from Yale University's journal Environment360. Crutzen asserts that by leaving aside anachronistic notions of nature independent of us humans, by acknowledging our responsibility in creating our environment, we can better learn to take our stewardship of the earth more seriously, in three specific ways. 1) We can abandon what he calls "hyper-consumption" in favor of modest, need-centered growth. 2) We can direct scientific research toward meeting the "needs of the poorest" and creating what he calls a "durable bio-economy." And finally, 3) we can develop our culture to support what he calls, quoting Alexander von Humboldt, a "world organism," a mutually sustaining and non-competitive world system for keeping our anthropogenic environment in balance.

I'm still learning to think in terms of the Anthropocene, with its enormous implications, and perhaps you are too. I want to cite one recent discussion, in the Left journal Jacobin, whose author, Andreas Malm, takes Crutzen and others to task for naturalizing the current deplorable state of the earth and its climate by attributing this condition to 'us', to the 'natural' fact of human preponderance, which is how he understands the term 'Anthropocene.' It's not 'us,' Malm insists--it's the capitalist world system and its tiny cadre of super-beneficiaries in the .1% who are wrecking our environment and refuse to stop. He cites the analysis of Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything to underscore his point--and he has a point. The system of exploitation we live in is not inevitable--though it can surely be understood as a, or rather as the human project. But, as Crutzen doesn't say, we will never achieve the responsible stewardship thrust upon us in the Anthropocene until we tame the impulse for hyper-growth, hyper-consumption, profit at all costs. The conceptualization of the Anthropocene--despite Malm's critique--is not the problem; rather, its domination by irresponsible profit-seeking corporations is, and we will never fulfill Crutzen's vision, or Jamieson's, of a responsible Anthropocene until we free ourselves from the domination of ExxonMobil and Shell, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and all the rest.

Boston's Undersea Airport

I have been meaning for several weeks to write a more substantive review of philosopher Dale Jamieson's important book Reason in a Dark Time. Jamieson examines with exceptional rigor the history of climate change policy, and the scientific, economic, and ethical complexities of it as a policy issue, all in an effort to explain how it is that the global polity and its leaders have so thoroughly failed to address this mother of all public policy issues. The book is illuminating, but also therapeutic: though we may all feel guilty, as I do, for our collective failure, and its implications for those who will come after us, Jamieson lets us see a certain inevitability to this course of events, which is in real ways bigger than us all.

One of the uses of Jamieson's discussion is his professional attentiveness to choosing terms carefully. For example, he makes a careful distinction between two sorts of prevention: abatement, which would mean eliminating some measure of greenhouse gas pollution, and mitigation, which would reduce its impacts, by increasing forest lands to absorb more carbon, for example. Both of these measures are to be distinguished from adaptation, which presumes effects of climate change--higher temperatures, raised sea levels, displaced rainfall--and seeks to address those effects--by building sea walls, for example, or relocating populations. While policy makers have discussed, ineffectually, various means of abatement and mitigation, setting ambitious goals but failing to meet them, adaptation has been a touchy subject. Marshall Islanders don't want to hear about adaptation, which in their case means extinction or relocation, and taxpayers in Miami or Boston aren't keen either on adding huge public works projects to their budgets.

In that framework, then, it is interesting to consider last Monday's publication, by MassPort, of its climate change plan for Boston's Logan Airport, a large regional facility perched precariously at sea level in Boston harbor, facing the North Atlantic and clearly endangered by the rising oceans and increasingly severe storms that appear to be built into its future. Some highlights:

• Goals for abatement are impressive: 40% less greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 (over 2012 levels, rather than the more standard 1990 benchmark), and 80% reduction by 2050--a very ambitious program. How to achieve it? Well, airplanes, which emit a lot of pollutants, are much fuller now than 15 years ago, so Logan sends out more passengers on fewer flights, which has led to an 8% emissions reduction since 2002. That neat trick can't be reproduced indefinitely, however, and emissions have already gone UP more than 5% from 2012-13. DOWN 40% in the next 5 years is hard to imagine, and down another 40% by 2050 is harder still--unless air travel is seriously curtailed,or some entirely new (hydrogen-based?) power source is developed.
• There's a second way to measure the airport's carbon footprint--the energy the airport itself consumes--and here the goal of 25% reduction by 2020 may be less fanciful: greener buildings, installation of solar panels, and gas-powered buses are known ways to reduce energy consumption. But these abatements are all serving an inherently profligate technology--air travel--an 'inconvenient truth' MassPort is in no position to address.
• Meanwhile, given the inexorable fact of emissions and energy consumption, what about mitigation? That's what environmental groups like the Audubon Society are asking, but the report contains no answers. Carbon capture? Still experimental, though China is working to develop practical models. Tropical rainforest protection? Exotic and expensive, but if every airline ticket contained a surcharge for forest protection, air travel would externalize less of its hidden costs to the planet, and forests would be permitted to do their work of mitigation (instead of being cut down to produce beef for McDonalds ...).
• But the real work of the plan--as opposed to these somewhat fanciful aspirational goals for abatement--concerns adaptation: Logan will soon have gates and dikes to channel overflows, and pumps to clear submerged runways. "Critical equipment" in buildings will be elevated. All this to address rising sea levels of 2-6 feet (though many projections imagine levels twice or three times that high by century's end), and storm surges like Sandy (which narrowly missed taking out not just Logan but much of downtown Boston).

In short, Massport is taking small steps toward prevention (and announcing much larger goals with no real plan to meet them). But it is also preparing to operate an airport that will someday, maybe soon, be below sea level--Schiphol west--in a landscape that may look like Holland's. That's a sobering thought the report glosses over, but the rest of us might think about. 

Another Stern Warning

Lord Stern is at it again. Former Chief Economist for the World Bank, an economic policy academic whose appointments have included Oxford and the London School of Economics, MIT, the École Polytechnique and the Collège de France, the People's University of China and the Indian Statistical Institute, recent president of the British Academy and current chair of Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change, Lord Stern made waves with his 2006 report, commissioned by the Blair government and widely regarded as the most significant call to arms on climate from within any major government. The Stern Review predicted economic consequences due to climate change equal to 5% per year of world GDP, and recommended investments of 2% of GDP--an unheard of number in the trillions--as a reasonable level of response to the problem.

Now Lord Stern, through the Grantham Institute, has published a report that examines the proposals offered up so far by the world's governments as they prepare for the December Paris Climate Conference. The numbers, Lord Stern tells us, are not so good. Using the formal filings of the EU and 7 other nations, along with the announced goals of China and the US, Stern's assessment is that the aggregated UNFCCC process will not yield policy changes in line with its goal to keep temperatures from rising no more than 2 degrees C. This is not particularly new news, but when the conclusions come from perhaps the leading authority in the world on the economics of climate policy, it's worth noticing.

Of more interest is the politics of Lord Stern's new report. As reported in today's Guardian, the point of the report is to get this bad news on the table now, well in advance of the official assessment the UNFCCC will itself make in November. As Stern's co-author Bob Ward notes, a similarly negative prognosis coming from the UN just before the conference could "cast a shadow" on it, whereas coming in May, this "summing," as the Brits say, could encourage the Paris conferees to create a "mechanism for raising ambition after the summit, while also encouraging countries to go further in their INDCs [i.e. individual national plans]." Prophylactic therapy, in other words, before the malady is full-blown.

In short, the Grantham's report is intended to drive the UNFCCC movement through and past the Paris moment, which will be equivocal at best, so that it retains and gains momentum among the world's nations for policy change. This in contrast to the Copenhagen conference in 2009, which was the occasion for widespread despair and little progress. So thank you, Lord Stern--we needed that, especially those of us who live in countries still mired in various stages of denial. No, the little bitsy changes that are happening will not spare us steep, intolerable temperature increases with horrendous climate consequences, but yes, if Paris becomes a launch pad for more dramatic policy initiatives, we might still make effective progress towards averting the worst.