Talkfests have their place when it’s not actually clear what to do about a problem. When you know what has to be done, they’re delaying tactics. And it’s hard not to view the latest developments in the politics of global warming in that light: the White House has invited a bunch of the world’s biggest carbon emitters for a summit on climate change in September:
US President George W Bush has issued invitations to 11 other countries, including the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN), to attend the September 27-28 meeting in Washington intended to work towards setting a long-term goal by 2008 to cut emissions…
China and India are among the countries invited to the September conference, which will also include Japan, Canada, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Australia, Indonesia and South Africa, the US official says.
It seems highly unlikely that anything will come of the meeting, which probably suits Bush just fine. This Greenpeace blog claims it’s an attempt to derail the process for negotiating the next phase of the Kyoto agreement, as does Dean Baker at the American Prospect
This summit proposal looks like yet one more attempt at delaying any concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and obstructing the international efforts already in place to address global warming. In other words it is a continuation of the policy that President Bush has pursued on global warming since he took office, but in order to be effective, it must be presented as a “clear shift.”
It’s hard to see the EU members, not to mention China and India, doing anything but biding their time. They know perfectly well that Bush’s job approval rating is 28%, that the Democrats control both houses of Congress (though only just), and that all of the Democrat presidential candidates, and at least John McCain from the Republicans, are going to support substantial and binding cuts in emissions. Why do a deal that has little prospect of getting through Congress and will be renegotiated in 2009 anyway?
The contents of that post-Bush deal should be something that is concentrating the minds of Australian politicians. But there’s no sign of it so far. John Howard remains the very last person to fall off the conga line, it seems.
Complete waste of time.
The technology solutions to CO2 reduction are already in place. Domestic energy useage can be reduced to
& again it raises the rather large elephant in the room problem – that corporations are greenhouse gas emitters, polluters of water & air, irrational consumers of resources – & are any of these governments willing to address the issue that they & their economic masters wish to portray profit-making as the only goal of human society?
The rationality of the market? It would appear that unbridled profit-taking has got us into this mess – it would seem highly illogical to imagine that such economic & political processes have the vaguest notion or ability to get us out of this.
Bernice, I disagree.
Plenty of other environmental issues have been dealt with by regulation, without abolishing capitalism as we generally understand it. What makes this one different?
Maybe bringing multinational corporations to heel is a good thing. Maybe it isn’t. But I’m yet to be convinced it’s a necessary precondition for fixing climate change.
NAFTA has given us the beauty of corporations successfully challenging environmental protection legislations in both state & federal jurisdictions, on the basis that having to spend monies or curtail damaging environmental practices impinges upon the ability to generate profit.
Or salmon farmers here in Oz who successfully used WTO precedents to argue for the importation of pilchards as food. Pilchards infected with viruses to which local pilchard populations had no resistance, leading to enormous kills of fish species pivotal in the marine environment food chains of southern waters.
Or corporations who buy up emergent technologies that may develop alternatives to their products, while being lesser greenhouse gas emitters – technologies that are then shelved, research halted, knowledge lost.
I wish I could believe there is the slightest chance that corporations will act with anything other than suicidal self-interest, but their past actions would require the ignoring of an appalling history of greed & stupidity. An interesting act of anti-rationalism surely.
One of my worries is that there is something kicking around called the Brazilian proposal (or similar). The suggestion is that the countries that historically put the most carbon up there should be the ones that cut back, while those that didn’t should be allowed to do their share of emitting before they are expected to cut back.
This may appeal as fair and the way the EU allows industrialising countries like Poland to increase their emissions within the context of an overall EU cut-back encourages this approach. I just don’t think we have the luxury of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia etc. making up their own targets to suit themselves, which is the approach that Bush and Howard seem to favour.
Those salmon farmers are hardly massive corporations. Thousands of small businesses, or individuals, can and do damage the environment just as efficiently as one multinational.
Brian: no we don’t.
But Brian you’ve hit upon the reason I believe any managed solution to AGW will prove beyond the capabilities of the human race: it would require either that developing countries acquiesced in a permanent inequality vis a vis the already wealthy, or that the wealthy voluntarily cut their standards of living to share the global sacrifices. Neither is going to occur, which is why I’m a climate change fatalist.
Robert, would you like to name one environmental issue that has been satisfactorily dealt with by regulation.
To pick one of dozens, how about ozone depletion.
Complete waste of time.
We all know that the solution is to put a price on carbon, right across the economy; domestic, industry, government, transport, agriculture … no exceptions. Of course, no politician will do that.
Imagine if you will the lead up to the 2010 election. Oil has hit $120/barrel, prices at the pump are north of $2/L, there is ‘enormous pressure on working families’. Now does anyone seriously believe Prime Minisiter Rudd or Opposition Leader Turnbull will propose a carbon tax in that kind of political environment? Of course not! More likely there will be an auction to see who can lower (the already frozen) fuel excise.
hole in the ozone layer – it has been fixed has it? No more worries?
Jinmaro: I wouldn’t say “no more worries” but it seems like the problem has stabilised and is starting to improve – see the Wikipedia.
Carbonsink, any realistic carbon price won’t affect the fuel price much. Accompany it with a tax cut and I suspect you’ll get the punters onside.
Brian, we obviously don’t have that luxury. But I don’t think we need to be fatalistic about it.
Do you know about contraction and convergence? Sets up a schema under which we may (_may_) be able to get both developed and developing nations on board and head swiftly towards deep cuts.
It might work. Better chance than anything else I’ve seen…
I’m worried that ‘carbon’ is a Trojan Straw Horse, a deceptive problem dealt with mendaciously. I loathe long posts but…
Step back to the Industrial Revolution – it wasn’t just about bolting bits of metal together but a new way of using energy.
A century or so earlier wood had given way to charcoal for tightly packed urbanoids, though it had been used for at least a couple of thousand years by highly specialised trades/guilds who kept the secret.
Coal was just a dirty rock until the sudden need for (previously) unimaginable amounts of energy, in as small as space as possible, thus the dark satanic mills and the Midlands became â??the black countryâ??, from fallout.
The British Navy (unlike the young Prussian navy) resisted oil power until almost too late. This led to the baleful creation of the trucial States & Kuwait and a bit of Mesopotamia renamed Iraq which now entrammels the Hyperpower.
The same mechanical myopia is now mendaciously claiming that nuclear power will stop capital cities being 3 metres deep in horse manure (as calculated, I think, by Darwin’s mate Huxley -?? could someone check that?)
A Modest Peoposal
Abolish ALL domestic taxation (I’m still mulling over export excise) and charge a realistic price, say $50 per litre, for petrol/diesel – and the molecular equivalent for CO2 from coal generated electricity, guesstimate roughly $200 per tonne, or $2,000 pt if the transmission lines and their concomitants were included.
Suddenly the more energy a product or service required the more expensive it would be. Think of what can be done with little or no non-endogenous energy. ie from beyond your back fence.
Anyone wanting to really chew this over, so as not to clog up this thread, try http://circus.waddayano.org.blog
sorry, Robert, call me irritating, but I don’t buy it.
I tried to think of some of the biggies: World Heritage, Protected Species, Endangered Species, National Parks, Environment Protection laws and regulations, prohibitions on lead particulates, sand minin, the damming of one river in Tassie, regulations about asbestos use, nuclear waste use and storage, and, for the life of me, I can’t think of one regulation that has given anything more than token or partial environmental protection.
Jinmaro: the Clean Air Acts? The elimination of lead from petrol?
Korean leaders to hold second-ever summit…
The leaders of North and South Korea, capitalizing on progress in shutting down the North’s nuclear …
asthma and pollution rates exponentially rising, cars and associated industries a killing field.
You’re easily satisfied, is all I can say.
Funnily enough 8.4c/L is almost exactly the same amount as the Queensland Fuel Subsidy Scheme which raises the hilarious prospect of the feds imposing a 8.4c/L tax which the Queensland government hands back to the motorist.
Even a price hike of just 8c/L will require uncommon bravery from a politician at a time of very high petrol prices. Frankly, I’d be happy if they just reintroduced Fuel Excise indexation, but of course that is extraordinarily unlikely.
Besides, if the purpose of a carbon tax is to change behaviour, drive conservation and innovation in low carbon alternatives, then I doubt 8c/L will do the trick. I live near the NSW/Queensland border and I don’t see much difference between the vehicles driven north and south of the border … and yes the petrol is definitely cheaper in Queensland.
Oh I missed this bit. I agree entirely. I’d love to see a big tax switch away from income and onto to carbon, with income tax cuts directed at the bottom end of the tax scale. In fact, I’d do away with the GST as well and roll it into the carbon tax. After all, we shouldn’t be paying GST on solar panels!
Jinmaro: I’m not easily satisfied. It pisses me off greatly that air pollution (other than greenhouse gases) doesn’t get the attention it deserves. But if you compare air pollution in industrialized countries now to what it was a few decades, or a century ago, I think you’ll find that the air is a lot cleaner.
tim, I hadn’t caught up with contraction and convergence as such but I’d always thought that a per capita allowance would have to be incorporated into national targets. If you start to look at what this actually means you can easily fall into Ken L’s despair and fatalism.
The two key figures are the absorption capacity of the planet and world population. One will reduce over time and the other will grow.
I don’t want to work the figures through here, but there is a fair chance that China is already over where it will eventually have to be, probably by multiples.
The problem is illustrated in this graph.
I think we are going to have to remove CO2 from the atmosphere as Robert suggested.
One point from a narrow Australian perspective, of course, is that contraction and convergence is going to hit us a lot harder than some of the less profilgate European nations.
Given that Australia’s negotiating clout will be minimal, the implications of such a model being adopted is something we should be thinking about real hard – though I’m not sure it’s understood by anybody in either of the major parties.
Robert, I have heard Turnbull say several times that we need a carbon-free economy by 2050, which is astonishing when you compare it with the official line of no targets and 60% will ruin us all.
Ultimately I’d like to see some allowance made for countries that do stuff on behalf of the world, like dig up iron and alumina and make steel and aluminium.
That wouldn’t help us all that much, but a bit maybe.
Yes, and MacFarlane has stated recently (on SBS Insight) that we need zero emissions power generation – then followed by a misleading and false statement that carbon captuire & storage will provide this – when basic physics tells us this cannot be.
This summit will be another talkfests and conga line of politicians pretending to do something about climate change.
Robert, I think you are spot on with your suggestion that this is just more delaying tactics while Australia’s coal burning and exporting industry continues at full throttle. Howard et al know that this won’t last – international pressure and commitment to climate change will see Australia cast as a pariah (more so that it already is) and the market for coal will inevitably decline.
We need to reduce carbon emissions drastically, and move to zero carbon emissions – not just talk about it.
Downer can’t handle the heat
“Alex Meekin from the ACT’s Narrabundah College suggested that the $100 million the Government was contributing to the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate was less than it was spending on political advertising to get re-elected.
“Mate, mate, I’m trying to answer a question and you are trying to make party political points,” Mr Downer said.
Alex insisted later that he had no political affiliation.”
There seem to be a few climate scientists from overseas tracking through Australia at present. Today it was IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, in Canberra to meet government officials who seemed to be saying things the Government was pleased to hear. But on APEC he said that Bush’s talk-fest
This is what he said about the Bush’s bash:
Increasingly, I think the Europeans will have difficulty in making quantitative targets part of the post-Kyoto UN agenda. I’ve just had another look at what Bush committed to at the G8. He only committed to ‘consider seriously’ reducing emissions to 50% of 1990 levels by 2050.
The membership of his meeting with only one representative from the EU seems designed to marginalise them, which he couldn’t do at the G8.
So to me it’s looking like a targetless vision and the developing countries doing whatever they feel like in the national interest.
In talking to the ABC Pachauri said the developing countries should:
Robert, my point is that you hit the nail on the head when you said that C&C will hit us harder than less profligate nations.
There you go. We are too profligate.
But a very large part of that profligacy is not in stuff about our standard of living – it’s in our massive inefficiencies.
Because our economy is so hugely carbon intensive – because we’re so inefficient in our energy use and our energy is so heavily coal-based – we’ve actually got a huge advantage over less profligate nations. Every unit of efficiency we achieve actually achieves greater emissions reductions than pretty much anyone else in the OECD.
I actually believe C&C would be quite beneficial for Australia.
To Brian’s point about China and where they’re up to. Yes, that’s what keeps me lying awake at night and wondering why I brought children into this world… Of course, they can achieve huge efficiency gains, too, and move to very large scale renewable generation. The question is, though, how fast???
Brian, I’m interested in your point about allowances for countries that “do stuff for the world”.
Why are you limiting it to heavy industry?
I’d say, if you’re going to do that, you’d want to take a serious look at balancing carbon miles for food exports, etc, as well, wouldn’t you? And what would you do about countries which rely heavily on tourism from far away?
It also opens the way for spurious arguments like Australia raised way back at Kyoto in 1997 – that we should have a lax target because our economy is so greenhouse intensive, when, in fact, logically the absolute reverse should be true.
I reckon it just opens up a can of worms and you have to just bite the bullet and say achieving deep cuts fast is going to radically shift the natural advantages of nations. We should have started planning for that a decade ago, but we didn’t. We’d better do it now.
The only possible coordinated approach to climate change must be coordinated by China and the US. Any Australian official who focuses on EU-sponsored solutions should be sacked for irrelevance.
JG, in case you didn’t notice, there are 27 countries in the EU, with 490 million people and an economy equivalent to that of the US. Ignoring them is daft.
tim, I wouldn’t limit “it” to heavy industry. I only used that as an example.
I don’t know what to do about tourism. My feeling is that is that flying around the world is going to be hit hard unless we can find a way of solving the problem of aviation fuel.
On food miles, my own arguments for localism in food production and consumption don’t rest on food miles as a big factor, but that is another big topic.
A rational division of labour across the world is easy to state as a principle or an ideal, but would be hard to put into effect, given that states will continue to adopt policies largely in their own national interest. In practice you are right, we need significant cuts ASAP.
Noting the comments on C&C . . . A DVD commissioned by the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change presenting Contraction and Convergence has been distributed to all UK MPs and Peers. It is endorsed by numerous eminent spokespersons who are interviewed at length on the DVD.
Copies of the DVD can be obtained by written request to GCI aubrey.meyer [at] btinternet.com
Alternatively, as a large file [overnight download] interview material is retrievable at this link: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/images/Contraction_and_Convergence_Challen_et_al.mpg
The DVD also includes a heuristic animation of Contraction and Convergence for a risk analysis of different rates of sink-failure endorsed by prominent industry persons. This is a large file [overnight download] and is retrievable at this link:
http://www.gci.org.uk/images/Contraction_and_Convergence_Risk_Analysis_Sink_Failure.mpg
A context animation the arguments, presented at the Royal Institute of British Architects [RIBA] international conference in Venice last October, is here: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/images/Final_presentation.exe or
http://www.gci.org.uk/images/CandC_model_context_animation.swf
[Note: - touch buttons to advances *within* scenes and touch logos to advance *between* scenes].
GCI’s definition statement for C&C is here: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/briefings/ICE.pdf
General referencing for the C&C provenance is here: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/links/detail.pdf
A concept/context map of C&C comparing three rates of change for
[a] Contraction and Concentrations
[b] Contraction and Convergence
[c] Benefits of Growth versus Damages from Climate
[d] Contraction and Conversion
is here: – http://www.gci.org.uk/images/Deepat_Bonn.pdf
Some promotional material is here: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/Movies/Contraction_and_Convergence_Promo.mpg