Might the World's Governments Flunk the Climate Exam?

Anyone who thinks that international regulation is our best hope for containing climate change should be noticing as various nations submit the first drafts of their proposed policy initiatives (called INDCs--don't ask) to the UN's FCCC, in advance of the December conference in Paris. And any non-expert (like me) who wants to evaluate these proposals has a friend in the Climate Action Tracker website, which attempts to align these proposals on a common 'fairness' scale, where fairness tries to account for both the net proposed greenhouse gas reduction and the particular capabilities of each nation. In that way the CAT website mirrors and anticipates the evaluation the UNFCCC will itself be making later this year, as it tries to measure and align the full set of 195 national INDCs.

But with 6 or so nations already responding (including the EU, Russia, and Japan--major players--as well as Switzerland, Norway and Mexico), how does it look? Well, not so great. The CAT's ratings system includes categories of 'sufficient' (i.e. if all nations met this standard, the odds of holding temperature rise at 2C would be strong); 'medium' (not good enough for 2C, but might combine with more 'sufficient' plans to meet that goal); and 'inadequate' (if that's the best these nations are willing to do, then we'll all cook with increases of 3-4 degrees C or worse).

So how are we doing? The various Europeans are hovering at sub-par levels rated 'medium,' while the Russians and Japanese are 'inadequate,' for a variety of reasons explained on the website. Both of course claim to do better, but dubious counting strategies fail to meet CAT's standards.

Is this analysis the last word in official scorekeeping on this issue? Surely not--there are too many variables and interests, and no doubt many other evaluations will be forthcoming. Is CAT a good start? I think so, especially where at this relatively early date there is still time for international 'peer pressure' to weigh in on the 'inadequate' plans and bump these governments up to higher, more promising standards. Of the most urgent candidates for such pressure, India and  China rank highest, closely followed by ... US.

How Green is Green?

Who's that lady all dressed in green? Is this the next President of the United States, who will preside over the implementation of Paris Climate Conference agreements to reduce greenhouse gas for good? Or is she the accomodationist Secretary of State whose cozy relationship with fossil fuel corporations and sovereign state producers will carry over into the White House? It's a complicated story for sure, but this article in today's Guardian offers some useful background in sorting out the Candidate's probable stance. A good sign: her leading advisor, John Podesta, has already made gestures to put the climate issue high on her agenda. A sure bet: she will be preferable on this issue to whichever of the climate change-denying, anti-science Republicans runs against her--but at this late stage in the gathering climate crisis, is being more sensible than Ted Cruz or Rand Paul good enough?

Good News/Bad News

Recents events suggest we are finally getting a handle on this climate thing. Current data suggests this climate thing is spinning further and further out of control. Take your pick.

Good news: the US's officially measured greenhouse gas emissions declined slightly in the past year.

Bad news: a major reason was conversion of power plants to natural gas, but the fracking that lowers gas prices and drives the conversion is probably causing considerable (but unmeasured) methane leakage, offsetting the gains.

Good news: Obama's use of EPA regulations to close coal-burning power plants will help the US meet its (modest) UNFCCC emission reduction goals for 2025.

Bad news: Led by the attorney general of West Virginia, numerous states have brought suit to challenge the EPA's jurisdiction. That suit will be heard in the DC federal court of appeals--one of the most conservative in the nation--with the likely outcome to be decided in the highly politicized US Supreme Court. Even the threat of overturning the EPA regs will have a serious dampening effect on the ongoing UNFCCC process.

Good news: Russia, a recalcitrant state with respect to climate issues, has filed its proposal for emission reductions with the UNFCCC, and it's in line with expected standards: a 20-30% reduction over 1990 levels by 2030.

Bad news: much of Russia's 'plan' includes counting its already existing forest reserves as carbon sinks, thus inflating its claims and doing very little to add to decarbonization going forward.

And so on. There are so many fronts to the climate change issue, so many factors and data points and disputed data points and different ways of seeing both the problem and the solutions that it is almost impossible to get a clear fix on where we stand. That's one reason I am so invested in the Paris conference: after the 195 states have submitted their individual plans, and before the conference itself, UN officials plan to evaluate the aggregate effect of all these somewhat asymmetric and inherently confusing plans. That should bring some clarity on public-sector response (assuming governments comply with their own plans, which given the vagaries of politics is far from evident). Independent market factors--such as the financial collapse of 2008, which did more than any government to reduce emissions--represent another crucial, unpredictable variable. And imperfectly understood climate causation is another. In short, we are swimming in data of many sorts, with some clear directionals in mind, but where the tides will take us is anybody's guess.

On Loss and Gain in the Climate Struggle

I have spent many hours over the last few days at the Harvard divestment protest rallies, and the experience has been an intense one, at times almost too much to bear. On the one hand it is inspiriting to stand with a sizable group of people, listening to speakers, all of whom share an understanding of the magnitude of the crisis we face. So often, among other people, even highly educated and informed ones, this simply isn't the case. On the other hand, though, the sense that this awareness is shared by a small and ineffectual minority is hard to ignore while a powerful university and its self-important members carry on their business as usual, hardly slowing down to notice the ragtag assembly that has kept a few administrators from their offices, but has apparently made no difference at all to the University's plans for investing its immense wealth. To engage with this issue is to immerse oneself in loss--of which more later in this post.

But first, a few vignettes from the protest:

On Wednesday the speakers represented faith communities--Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, seminarians and ministers, visionaries. The most singular speaker was a Pacific Islander, one of the Pacific Climate Warriors who last November used their traditional canoes to blockade the coal port of Newcastle, Australia. This woman related how she had at the age of 40 suddenly found the opportunity to become a mother, agreeing to adopt a baby at birth. The delivery was scheduled for several weeks after the blockade but it arrived early, so this woman was watching her baby's birth by skype while Australian police were brutally clearing her and the other Warriors from the waterway. "The baby looked so calm," she recalled, "while I was bawling." Her husband and mother were there to help with the birth and the baby, and when she told them how sorry she was to be absent, they told her, No, you are just where you need to be, where this baby needs you to be at this moment.

Today felt less dramatic as I joined a 'blockade' of sorts in front of Harvard's administrative building, University Hall. The students who have organized these protests are warriors too, and they have been tireless all week, sleeping outside to maintain their blockade, keeping up a chanting, chatting, orating, giddy presence in Harvard Yard. But the administration has simply reiterated its refusal to negotiate divestment and withdrawn, leaving the students little to push against, while the vast majority of their fellow students and teachers carry on with their routines, visibly indifferent to the whole business. The blockade today was spirited in its way--a delegation from Montreal, who are waging the same struggle at McGill University, brought international solidarity to the picket line and enlivened things a bit--but I couldn't help feeling some sadness, not with the Divest Harvard activists but with their isolation from the main currents of University life. Theirs is a prophetic witness, but it's getting late for prophecy.

Which brings me back to loss. My other absorption this week has been with Dale Jamieson's remarkable book Reason in a Dark Time (2014), a book I learned about from Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker piece and mentioned a few posts ago. Jamieson is an academic philosopher, a rigorous thinker who has set out to explore the question of how and why we human beings have failed so completely, despite all the urgent warning signs, to address the climate change crisis. Not are failing but have failed: the change is upon us, and Jamieson knows better than more casual observers how far we are from any meaningful remedies. There is some sadness, then, in this book, but a certain comfort as well, as he explores the long trajectory of scientific discovery--a path necessarily long, given the complexity of climate and its newness as a science, though disastrously elongated by the deliberate efforts to obfuscate and undermine legitimate research. That too is a predictable consequence of the ignorance, greed, and narrow self-interest that are woven into our human tapestry. I haven't finished Jamieson's book--he promises to suggest some mitigating actions, though no 'solutions' as such--but I find that the effort to examine quite closely all the difficulties embedded in our systems of science, economics, politics and ethics, all the ways we have fallen short even when applying our strongest intellectual tools to this problem, makes it seem less of a debacle, an atrocity, and more of a tragic condition, another dimension to our already tragic and tenuous grip on things. As one of the faith leaders-the Buddhist, I believe it was--encouraged us, we need to address this problem, this crisis, not with anger but with love. I'm trying, and Jamieson's lucid explanations make that easier to do.

Why divest? Why Harvard?

The numbers are simple: X amount of coal, oil, or gas, consumed, produces Y amount of additional CO2 in the atmosphere, which causes Z degrees of temperature rise. Scientists discuss and debate all the particulars of that equation: just what damages will result from how many degrees of temperature rise, and how much carbon emission produces what effects. But no one seriously disputes the framework of the problem.

Likewise the argument of "leave it in the ground" is an inevitable corollary. Of known fossil fuel reserves, any consumption beyond 20-30% will produce catastrophic results. This number varies too: exploration and discovery of new reserves drives up the fraction--70-80% of reserves--that must not be used. Transfers from dirty coal to clean, from coal to gas, and so forth, might arguably drive those numbers down, but no one can seriously dispute that vast amounts--trillions of dollars worth of available fossil fuel deposits--must be written off, unused and unusable, to avert a species-threatening catastrophe. This is scientific knowledge, and only an irrational fool could dispute it.

Except, of course, that the mega-corporations that produce and market fossil energy DO dispute it: both in their official corporate communications, and more seriously in the fact that they continue to open up exploration sites and increase their reserves, as if those new reserves would of course be usable, right up to the brink of total disaster. And that's where divestment enters the story. Divesting from carbon-fuel producers is a symbolic act, modeled on the South African apartheid campaign, a way of saying "No, your way of doing business is unacceptable to the world community." It's also a practical--though still largely symbolic--way to withhold capital from corporations who would use it to open up new fossil-fuel exploration. "Not in my name" is a powerful moral statement.

But why Harvard (and Yale and Oxford and Swarthmore and many other prestigious institutions)? Isn't Harvard the site of useful research, both scientific and political, the sort of place where the many climate discrepancies might be sorted out, where thorny questions of energy economics and policy change are studied? Doesn't Harvard make a strong claim on Veritas=Truth? Yes, but it also makes a rigorous separation between 'Truth', researched fact, and practical action in the world. President Faust is adamant that Harvard's role is narrowly educational; meanwhile, its endowment, the largest academic endowment in the world, increased its fossil fuel holdings BY A FACTOR OF 7, i.e. they bought 7 times as much carbon-related stock as they previously owned, just last fall--at the very moment when the UN was convening a global summit on the climate crisis, and 400,000 of us were marching in the streets of New York for climate solutions.

Harvard's administration believes in a radical disconnect between the truth of its research and the force of its institutional presence in the finance markets. Harvard's administration is wrong. There is no time left for such sophistic distinctions. If global climate disruption is an impending disaster--and we know it is--then every institution with discretionary control over $39 billion of capital assets (or any amount, really) needs to step up and take responsibility. And Harvard in particular, whose administration has inherited 380 years or so of probity, whose Veritas 'brand' is the gold standard for academic prestige world-wide, who claims to represent all that is good and great in the world of science and reason--that Harvard cannot be Harvard and maintain its duplicity. It must not invest its resources in contradiction to its values. Harvard's administration needs to listen to its students, and tell them "Thank you" for saving Harvard from its own worst tendencies.

Harvard Heat Week: Day 1

Student climate activists with Divest Harvard began their week-long protest today by blockading the offices of President Faust and the Harvard Corporation in Harvard Yard. Today's theme was 'Alumni,' and a hundred or so graying activists from previous campaigns joined in supporting the students, now in their third year  of demanding that the world's richest university remove fossil fuel investments from its endowment portfolio. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Harvard '82, set the tone when he recalled how President Eliot declared in 1869 that it would take "many generations" to determine whether educating women made sense. Veterans of Harvard's South African divestment campaign noted that Harvard was among the last major institutions to get on board, preferring a nominal policy of 'constructive engagement' that in practice meant supporting the status quo while carrying on no meaningful engagement. It is clearly fanciful to imagine that its shares of petroleum stocks do anything other than fund the destructive expansion of those industries.

One speaker quoted Thoreau "Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine." He recognized an audience member, a Harvard Divinity School student recently released from federal prison after serving two years for disrupting a petroleum rights auction on public lands: life as "counter-friction."

Within the University community, alumni are organizing to withhold gifts from the University. A Divestment Fund has been created, and alumni signed cards pledging donations to that fund, which will revert to Harvard only when it divests from fossil fuel corporations. Some dozens of alumni were planning to sit-in at the Harvard Alumni Affairs office in the afternoon, an act of civil disobedience for which arrests were expected. More counter-friction.

Harvard's administration has been adamant that endowment portfolios will be exempt from policy considerations, even one as morally urgent as climate change. President Faust has instead cited the University's role in supporting research, even though, as several speakers noted, the endowment funds support spurious pseudo-research by large petroleum corporations intent on obfuscating the science of climate change. After Heat Week plans were announced, Harvard arranged a panel discussion for this afternoon, with an array of well-known scientists and moderated by popular talk-show host Charlie Rose, presumably to dramatize its role in advancing scientific inquiry. McKibben and others suggested that decades after climate science pointed to the growing crisis, it may be time for concrete action, rather than more panel discussion. Others noted with some appreciation Harvard's ability to convene experts such as presidential science advisorJohn Holdren or IPCC co-chair Christopher Field. The panel event is a classic instance of Harvard strategy to reframe the question more favorably, while the substantive issue of divestment remains out of sight.

Meanwhile at the rally outside Harvard's Massachusetts Hall another expert had the final say: former Colorado senator Tim Wirth, who in 1988 invited NASA climate scientist James Hansen to present the first comprehensive testimony on climate change to the US Senate. As a career politician, Harvard overseer, and environmental advocate with a distinctly patrician air, Senator Wirth made clear that "we aren't here to beat up Harvard--that would be a waste of our time." Rather, he noted, the goal was to help President Faust out of the "corner" where she finds herself. His suggestion: an open public consultation, such as MIT recently conducted, where the divestment issue could get a public hearing and perhaps reach some consensus. Wirth's remarks sounded oddly conciliatory after the more urgent messages of speakers who preceded him--his were the words of a pragmatist, a compromiser who understands that in politics no one gets everything they want. Given the powerful forces within the Harvard Corporation and the larger financial class they represent, perhaps Wirth is right, that 'beating up' is futile and procedural niceties necessary. But will the melting ice caps and rising temperatures wait for the orderly process Wirth suggests? Civil disobedience raises the volume. Maybe dire circumstances make that the right move.

The Heat is On

Heat Week began today in Cambridge as activists convened by 350.org gather to demand that Harvard University join the movement to divest its vast endowment funds from fossil fuel corporations. Though I was in transit and had to miss the kick-off festivities, I'll be in Harvard Yard tomorrow for Alumni Day, and all week as religious leaders, student leaders, and climate scientists hold demonstrations, teach-ins and vigils to bring Harvard over to the divestment side. Given the size of the endowment, the prestige of the University, and the timing--clearly public awareness of the issue is building as we head toward the decisive meeting in Paris later this year--this week-long rally and protest should mark a bold step forward for the Climate Change movement. Stay tuned to this space as I report on the events--or better yet if you're in the neighborhood tomorrow, join in: 9am, Harvard Yard.