http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4014 Foreign Policy In Focus | The Inconvenient Truth, Part II
Tom Athanasiou | February 21, 2007 Editor: John Feffer, IRC Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org You've probably seen the movie; you've certainly heard about it. So you already know the first part of the inconvenient truth: we're in deep trouble. And one good thing about 2006 is that this ceased to be a public secret. We not only know that the drought is spreading, the ice melting, the waters beginning to rise, but we also know that we know. And this changes everything. The science is in; the "skeptics" aren't what they used to be. They're still around, of course, but their ranks have thinned, and their funders are feeling the heat. They've been reduced to a merely tactical danger. They're flaks, and everyone knows it. Still, this good news comes with bad-their job was to stall, and they did it well. And it's now late in the game. Don't just take my word for it. In 2006, scientists schooled in the art of careful and measured conclusion chose instead to speak frankly. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies and perhaps our single most respected climate scientist, spoke for many of his colleagues when he said that we're "near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet."1 It's time, past time really, for at least some of us to go beyond warning to planning, to start talking seriously about a global crash program to stabilize the climate. Gore knows this, but he's a politician and must move deliberately. He is moving, though, and has already passed beyond his film's gentle implication (most visible in the upbeat visual call to action that ran under the closing credits) that personal virtue will suffice. During a September 2006 speech at the New York University Law School (a speech one wag called "the lost reel") he made some necessary, and dangerous, connections: "In rising to meet this challenge, we too will find self-renewal and transcendence and a new capacity for vision to see other crises in our time that cry out for solutions: 20 million HIV/AIDS orphans in Africa alone, civil wars fought by children, genocides and famines, the rape and pillage of our oceans and forests, an extinction crisis that threatens the web of life, and tens of millions of our fellow humans dying every year from easily preventable diseases. And, by rising to meet the climate crisis, we will find the vision and moral authority to see them not as political problems but as moral imperatives." The situation, alas, is worse than either Gore's movie or his speech implies. So, this being a new year, let's move on a bit, into territories through which no politician can guide us. And let's be a bit more explicit about just what a real crash program to stabilize the climate would actually imply. Two Degrees of Separation What happens if the temperature-or, more precisely, the average global surface warming since pre-industrial times-rises past 2°C? Even though we're not yet at the edge of the 2°C line, the Earth's ice sheets are already becoming unstable. The Greenland ice sheet, in particular, appears to be at significant risk of collapse at a warming of less than 2°C, and this would eventually mean about seven meters of sea-level rise.2 Since only three meters would put virtually all coastal cities and their hundreds of millions of people at great hazard, and given that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is also at eventual risk, the ice situation is already, by any reasonable standard, "dangerous."3 With 2°C of warming, killer droughts will settle in to stay. There will be massive vegetation changes, agricultural disruptions, and extreme weather including superstorms. Many disease-bearing pests will have radically expanded ranges that put, for example, several hundred million more people at risk of malaria. Arctic species such as the polar bear will face extinction, along with 15-40% of other terrestrial creatures. There will be horrifying refugee crises. The key points, at least from the point of view of human suffering and social instability, are the ice-melt, the widespread agricultural disruption, and the refugees. Also crucial are the billions of people, many of them in the mega-cities of the South, threatened by permanent water stress. There will be more, and more terrible, water wars, many of which are essentially civil wars.4 Most terrifying of all, 2°C of warming, particularly if sustained or overshot, will likely trigger non-linear changes that would induce further warming, and further changes, and further warming-"positive feedbacks" in the jargon-until the nightmare scenario imagined by James Lovelock (whom I am very sorry to report is not a crank) finally comes to pass. And this would make us all, even the rich among us, very regretful indeed. Lovelock anticipates a warming of 5°C, and argues that humanity's coming challenge will be to organize a "sustainable retreat" from current lifestyles, a retreat that may well include a migration of survivors to the poles. Still, according to Lovelock, there's no need to panic. "We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out."5 Not that the 2°C line is given, stable, beyond dispute. We can't, in particular, say that a lesser warming would be safe. But the critical issue here is not scientific uncertainty. More to the point is that climate dangers depend greatly on both wealth and whereabouts. They can't be averaged across national populations, for these populations are themselves divided, most fundamentally by money. The rich, by and large, will be able to insulate themselves from the suffering and the sorrow, at least for a while. The poor, though largely innocent of responsibility for the warming, will bear the brunt of its impact. Holding the Line What will it take to hold the 2°C line? Given the slow progress to date, the only honest answer is "a heroic effort." To see just how heroic such an effort would have to be, consider the three progressively more ambitious emissions trajectories shown in the figure below. The 2ºC Crash Program, its Alternatives, and its Odds Emissions pathways and concentration pathways for three scenarios-a "2ºC Crash Program" and typical pathways for 450 ppm or 550 ppm CO2 stabilization-along with the risk of exceeding the 2ºC threshold (as calculated by Baer and Mastrandrea 2006). The most stringent of these trajectories, the "2°C Crash Program," is heroic indeed. It has emissions peaking in 2010 and then dropping at a resolute 5% per year, thus keeping atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations below 410 parts per million (ppm). Note, then, that even with this almost inconceivable effort, we'd still be exposed to an alarming 9-26% risk of exceeding 2ºC degrees.6 Note, too, what this analysis tells us about today's conception of political realism. The 450 ppm CO2 trajectory, which, until very recently, most large U.S. climate organizations cited as being both safe and achievable, is likely to far overshoot 2ºC. And the 550 ppm trajectory simply can't be taken seriously, at least not as a defensible mitigation target. It poses a 78-99% risk of exceeding 2ºC and a 28-71% risk of exceeding 3ºC, making it difficult to maintain that arguments in favor of 550 ppm are anything more than irresponsible invitations to catastrophe. Joe Romm, the author of the http://climateprogress.org/ blog and the fine new book Hell and High Water, even claims that "there is no '550 ppm' stabilization path because 550 would destroy the tundra, and take us to 700+ by 2100 and trigger yet more amplifying feedbacks that would spiral the system out of control. So we stabilize at or below 450, or ruin the planet for hundreds if not thousands of years."7 Unfortunately, "realistic" men and women are still advocating targets in this neighborhood of 550 ppm. Even the UK's much praised Stern Review of the economics of climate change does so, though in a manner so circumspect that its authors seem ashamed of their own fatalism.8 New Horizons It will take a heroic effort and almost unimaginable international cooperation to hold the 2°C line, but it's probably still physically possible to do so. Already-existing technologies, if developed and disseminated with true "global Manhattan Project" urgency, would support huge, rapid efficiency increases and emissions reductions,9 and buy us time to decarbonize our infrastructures, adopt lower-consumption lifestyles, and, of course, develop better technologies. Technology, for its part, can help us save ourselves, but it's definitely not going to do the job alone. How could it when the real problem is political, when we need William James' "Moral Equivalent of War" but suffer instead a slow incrementalism10 that lags far behind the quickening increase in the atmospheric carbon concentration? In the dominant narrative of American climate politics, the idea is to "build momentum" by pressing forward on every front, to seek small steps that open into larger ones, to eventually reach the "tipping point" where the impossible becomes possible, and even inevitable. It's a good plan too. But it's not an entire plan, and unfortunately it seems to be the only one that's widely known. Which would perhaps be fine, if our leaders were basically on the right track, if there was no need to seriously examine the actual structure of the climate problem, or to think hard and critically about the almost intractable problems that any viable framework will eventually have to solve. But something critical is missing from the consensus approach, and Al Gore, with his striking concept of "an inconvenient truth," has given it an ideal name. Let's pick it up, but with this stipulation: the "inconvenient truth" may well begin with Gore's warning that time is short, but it goes far further. In fact-and this moves us far beyond the traditional environmentalist frame-the global climate policy impasse has everything to do with economic inequality, how that inequality is increasing around the world, how our prosperity depends upon the suffering of others (e.g. dirt-cheap Chinese labor), and how the market, inevitable though it may be, repeatedly fails in crushing, irreversible ways. Further, the standoff between the rich and developing worlds will not yield to an assault composed entirely of incremental, "realistic," politically acceptable initiatives. Its logic is too strong, and too over-determined. At its core lies the implacable reality that we, the citizens of the rich world, have already consumed the bulk of the global carbon budget, and there's precious little left for the citizens of the South. As such, the only way forward quickly enough is for the rich, who became rich in an open world that no longer exists, to pay the entire costs of the necessary global crash program, whatever they may finally be. Inconvenient, yes. But it's fairly easy to show why this is the case. What's on the Table Consider the climate bills, still provisional, that we in the United States must now rally around: Henry's Waxman's Safe Climate Act, Senator Jefford's Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act (reintroduced by Senator Sanders), and, of course, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. All are remarkable, and all define domestic emissions reductions trajectories that are close to the needed scale. In all, the United States would be required to freeze its greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. Emissions would then be cut by roughly 2% per year, returning to 1990 emissions levels by 2020. After 2020, the rate of decrease would rise to the point where it averaged about 5% per year, so that, by 2050, U.S. emissions would be 80% lower than they were in 1990. The "Waxman-Jeffords Trajectory" The "Waxman-Jeffords" emissions reductions trajectory, plotted against historical U.S. emissions and the U.S. Energy Information Administration reference case projection of those emissions. It's quite amazing that such proposed reductions are actually on the U.S. political agenda. Indeed, the "Emissions Freeze" movement that Gore is now talking up would, essentially, be a movement designed to prepare the ground for this sort of reduction. So even if, in the short term, the Waxman-Jeffords trajectory doesn't have a snowball's chance of actually becoming law, its rising prominence is clearly a sign of the times. Such signs, alas, are of rather limited interest. What we need is to make this trajectory real. We need to restructure our economy to conform to this scenario, hold to it despite powerful and inevitable backlash, and establish it at the core of a new American dream. All of which would require unprecedented domestic change, and all of which will prove quite impossible if domestic change is alone on the agenda. Given that the United States no longer stands apart from the winds of globalization, and given the roiling and dislocation that Waxman-Jeffords would inevitably bring, it's hard to see how such domestic sacrifices could be successfully justified-politically, technologically, culturally, or economically-save against the background of a global crash program. Even if the Waxman-Jeffords bill were passed into law, it's hard to see how its goals could be achieved without an equally ambitious global climate program, if only because doing so would demand that there be a substantial price on carbon, a price that, politically and institutionally, could simply not be imposed in the United States alone. Such a global crash program would, inevitably, cost the United States more than domestic action alone. But here's an all-important difference: the expense-whether it be large or, as Amory Lovins would have it, surprisingly small-would be entirely legitimate. It would be the expense of a great nation accepting its proper burden. And it would not be futile. Indeed it just might be all-important. For before any kind of global crash program is possible, the United States will have to return to the global negotiations as a leader that can legitimately speak for a just and viable climate regime. After the Bush years, such legitimacy will not come easily. Indeed, it will require that the United States take meaningful steps toward meeting its international obligations. And this, for better or worse, requires more than just reducing U.S. emissions to 80% below their 1990 level by 2050. What about the Global South? Want another inconvenient truth? Take a look at this: The South's Lost Opportunity Available Southern emissions budget under the 2ºC Crash Program, plotted against the South's SRES B1 pathway emissions. Note that Northern emissions are assumed to magically drop to zero in 2020-the South's budget reflects the entire global emissions budget.11 This figure shows the global carbon emissions trajectory associated with a 2°C crash program plotted against the developing world's total emissions, as projected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "B1" scenario. The B1 scenario describes an upbeat and relatively equitable future in which emissions growth is actually quite modest when compared to any likely variant of business as usual. And yet, even so, the South's emissions alone take us hurtling far into the danger zone in only about 15 years! This comparison strikingly demonstrates that any truly precautionary global emissions trajectory is radically inconsistent with even this optimistic reference projection of Southern emissions. We'll have to do much better, and soon. If we're to avoid a terrifying future in which temperature change overshoots 2°C, then Southern emissions are going to have to be somehow curbed, even while the South and its people are still struggling out of poverty, while food security, safe-water, and basic health care are still routinely out of reach for billions of people. The developing world is well aware of this problem, which is why Southern negotiators have repeatedly insisted that they'll refuse any climate treaty that threatens to "lock in" global poverty and inequality. Nor is there any reason to think that this is an idle bluff or a mere bargaining position. Take it, rather, as a warning, and a prod to consider the challenge here-what kind of climate regime can possibly suffice? What kind of climate regime can square the circle of development, enabling rapid global emissions declines even while enabling the South to continue, and step up, its fight against poverty? The Ultimate Constraint There really are "limits to growth." These limits are not as simple as folks thought back when the phrase first came into currency, but they're real nonetheless. The "atmospheric space"12 really is about gone. We in the "industrialized world" really did use most of it up in the last couple of centuries. We can pump a few hundred more gigatons of carbon into the air and still hold the line at 2°C, but that's about it. And if we overshoot the line, we're going to have a devil of a time returning to it. Meanwhile, the suffering and the damage caused by the changing climate is going to get much worse as we approach 2°C. Which we're almost certainly going to do, if only because billions of people in the developing world are determined to improve their lives by any means necessary, and because, just now, this tends to mean carbon-based energy production. I can't read the future, but I can read graphs. It's clear that, if we're going to avoid a climate catastrophe, it's going to be by way of an overshoot-and-decline trajectory whereby we enter the hot zone as late as humanly possible and leave it before the temperature rises enough to set off irreversible positive feedbacks (like, say, a massive pulse of methane from the melting Arctic permafrost). Global emissions will therefore have to peak soon-yesterday wouldn't be too soon-and then go into a long, rapid, and sustained decline. Our common future, in other words, lies in low-emissions trajectories that economists in particular (though we can't blame everything on economists) find not only inconvenient but positively absurd. Achieving a low-emissions trajectory will require breaking the global impasse. And this is only going to happen within a climate regime that takes due account of the real logic of our bitterly divided civilization. Such a climate regime must improve the lives of the poor by widening the focus from decarbonization to ensure that, even under an extremely constraining low-emissions trajectory, the South is able to make real progress in its drive for development and that the vulnerable, in the floodplains of New Orleans and the deserts of Sudan, are protected from the now-inevitable inundations and droughts. This climate regime-whether embodied in the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change, in the Kyoto Protocol, in the "Kyoto Plus" agreement that our representatives are supposed, even at this moment, to be actively negotiating-must spare the South from making the impossible choice between climate protection on the one hand and "development" on the other. The real need here is what might be called a Global New Deal. Like the original, it would focus on stabilizing and improving the lives of the vulnerable, restless poor. But this time the institution-building and the politics would be global, and the background crisis-the threat that demands cooperation and, by so doing, animates the whole effort-would be as much social-ecological as it is socio-economic. But having said this, I should be clear. My point isn't to call for a climate regime as a global new deal, but to argue, along with many others, that such a new deal is desperately needed, and to add that any viable global climate regime must be a step in the same general direction. And if this implies that any viable global climate regime must make significant demands on the rich-and it does-this should not be taken as an invitation to despair, as if it pushed meaningful climate protection even further out of reach. Just the contrary. Rich-world tolerance for the suffering of the poor is a big part of the problem and could become fatally poisonous in the years ahead. To get our arms around the climate crisis, we will have to know ourselves to be "in this together." If we don't, we're not going to make it. This, moreover, is not merely my personal view. The elites, in the United States, as in Brussels and Brasilia and Beijing, can see it just as clearly as do I, and when they are moved to look, they do. Going Global During the last five or so years, the U.S. climate movement has generally held itself aloof from international matters. It hasn't just avoided linking the climate battle too closely to the related battles over globalization, trade, and international economic institutions. It has also turned away from the international climate battle itself-the one that's centered in the global climate talks and the nascent mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol-in favor of a strategy of local, state, and regional action. Not that this has not been a bad move. The Bush regime, after all, has spent this same time doing all it could to deadlock or destroy the global negotiations, so what, really, beyond rear-guard opposition, could the U.S. climate movement have hoped to contribute? And the U.S. movement's turn to the domestic has been a big success. Because local and state and regional climate regimes are proliferating, real climate regulation is finally on the national agenda. But success has its dangers. We may, in particular, ride this horse so long that, even as global deadlock emerges as the critical issue, American climate strategists simply maintain their almost exclusive focus on domestic campaigns designed to win national legislation. It's a real danger, and must be taken seriously, for such a U.S.-centric strategy would almost certainly fail. Consider the intensifying battle for meaningful U.S. climate legislation, where echoes can already be heard of 1997's battle of Kyoto, which the U.S. climate movement emphatically lost to a well-funded industry campaign designed to argue that the Kyoto Protocol was "unfair" and "would not work." And consider that, just like last time, we'll soon be taking lots of heat from politicians, including Democrats, who argue that overly ambitious strategies threaten, in the pungent words of House Energy and Commerce Committee chair John Dingell, to "destitute American industry." Facing such a mire, U.S. climate activists might be tempted to argue that if "we" take responsibility for "our" emissions, then the Chinese, along with the rest of the developing world, should also take responsibility for "theirs." It would be an easy way to go, for Chinese emissions are now projected to exceed U.S. emissions by 2009, a full decade earlier than previously expected. And with China now being routinely framed as a rising economic and even political threat-a new adversary for a new century-Washington could well come to tie U.S. emissions reductions to similar reductions by Beijing. Such a strategy, however, would be fraught with peril. Approached naively, it could both undermine U.S. credibility abroad and-an unwelcome bonus-thicken the fogs here at home. For though U.S. climate groups have done far too little to help the American people understand this simple fact, aggregate national emissions statistics-the ones by which China will soon surpass the United States-are often extremely misleading. When it comes to the politics of climate and, in particular, the politics of "international burden sharing," clarity begins instead with the more basic truth revealed by per-capita numbers. It is these numbers that lead us to zero in on the core divide at the center of the climate impasse, the one between the rich and the poor. Development, Capacity, and Need Even after four decades on the Waxman-Jeffords diet, the American people would still be emitting four times more than their share of the global emissions budget associated with a 2°C crash program-by the not-unreasonable calculations behind the graph below.13 It plots the Waxman-Jeffords trajectory against the emissions trajectory associated with a 2°C crash program, and shows both in per-capita terms: Waxman-Jeffords vs. the 2°C Crash Program, in Per-Capita Terms Per-capita emissions projections for both the Waxman-Jeffords trajectory and the 2°C crash program. The point here is not to say that Waxman-Jeffords isn't a strict U.S. emissions reduction trajectory, but only that domestic reductions can't possibly be the whole story, not in terms of U.S. obligations within a global climate regime that's fair enough to be viable. And per-capita metrics are only part of the story. There's also historical responsibility, another measure by which U.S. emissions are far, far higher than Chinese. There are more subtle considerations, peculiar to the globalized economy of manufacture. Every time a corporation imports an ingot or a TV or a toy from China, it imports as well the carbon that is "embodied" in it, carbon for which no one today, Chinese or American, takes one whit of responsibility. China's drive to become the world's manufacturing center has driven it far up the "value chain" to the point where it now, quite inescapably, competes on almost every front. Following the larger trajectory of the Chinese economy, China's power sector is booming at a sustained rate of over 30 gigawatts, and more recently by far over 50 gigawatts, per year.14 In fact, and despite the fact that rich-world politicians twist it into a justification for inaction, China's emissions really are rising to the point where they even threaten gains being made elsewhere.15 To understand this rise properly, we have to avoid the temptation to "blame" China for its burgeoning emissions and focus instead on the fundamental truth that, despite its aggressive commitment to export-led development and despite even its highly publicized enclaves of urban wealth, China remains a poor country. This is the real key to the Chinese climate challenge, but it only becomes clear when we turn away from gigawatts and emissions to focus instead on income (emissions, after all, are only a by-product of economic activity, not its goal). Consider these charts, which are designed to highlight the national capacities and needs that are so bitterly at issue in the climate debate. "Capacity/Need Distribution Chart" for the United States Capacity/Need Distribution Chart for the United States, calculated for 2005 income data and an indicative "Development Threshold" of $US 7,000 per person per year (PPP adjusted). "Capacity/Need Distribution Chart" for China Capacity/Need Distribution Chart for China, calculated for 2005 income data and an indicative "Development Threshold" of $US 7,000 per person per year (PPP adjusted). These "Capacity/Need Distribution Charts" show both a country's capacity and its development need distributed across income percentiles and relative to a development threshold that approximates a global middle-class standard of life. This development threshold is taken, for illustrative purposes, as $7,000 per person per year (adjusted for purchasing power parity). Thus, a country's capacity/need distribution is defined by the income required to "develop" its entire population (shown as a horizontal line that marks an aggregate income of $7,000 times the national population) and an intersecting curve that represents the national income distribution. The green area above the development threshold represents the nation's capacity and indicates its ability to pay for human development, adaptation, or climate mitigation. Below it, in red, you see the national development need, the amount that it would take, as Martin Luther King used to say, to "lift up" all the people, at least to the relatively minimal standard of life defined by the indicative $7,000 development threshold. These two graphs tell two very different stories. The obvious point is that China, as noted above, is still relatively poor. Its capacity is small when compared to its own development need, and very small when compared to the capacity of the United States, which is far higher in both absolute and per-capita terms. And China is hardly the extreme case. India, to give another critical example, has a capacity that's only about 1/100th the size of its development need. "Capacity/Need Distribution Chart" for India Capacity/Need Distribution Chart for India, calculated for 2005 income data and an indicative "Development Threshold" of $US 7,000 per person per year (PPP adjusted). The point? That despite all the many excellent criticisms of the export-led development model, the South's priority will remain development for some time. All else being equal, its emissions will continue to rise rapidly. Certainly India has its responsibilities and China should step up its (already real) pursuit of efficiency and mitigation. But it is unrealistic to expect either country to prioritize climate mitigation at the expense of economic growth. Even the threat of catastrophe-one that's real and distinctive in both China and India-will not change this dynamic. If we're to avoid a catastrophe, then the Chinese-and the Indians, and the South Africans, and the Brazilians, and the Mexicans, and the Indonesians, and all the rest of the people of the "big poor countries" at a minimum-are going to have to embark, in good and earnest faith, on a crash program of economic decarbonization. But this is only going to happen if the rich countries pay the costs of that crash program. A global climate regime must not only drive efficiency and clean technology, but also enable human development and poverty alleviation, and by so doing gain friends, and momentum, throughout the world. This means in practice that the South, which has lost the opportunity to develop along the fossil-intensive path pioneered by the North, must be guaranteed the right to develop in a new way, one that's consistent with the imperative of stabilizing the climate system. This claim, moreover, is not fundamentally ethical but realist. Something like this "greenhouse development right" is needed to break the global impasse over developmental equity in a climate-constrained world. And this is the real inconvenient truth. Justice as Realism Climate change is now manifestly an emergency, but the dramatic response is nowhere on the horizon. Instead, and despite a thickening flurry of efforts designed to find ways forward, the international drive for a viable global climate regime is settling into a terrible impasse. This impasse, moreover, will not be broken without active U.S. leadership. That, as any realist will gladly tell you, is still how the world works. Before the United States can hope to provide such leadership, however, it will have to accept its proper obligations within an international regime that takes due account of not only the scale and severity of the climate threat but also the realities of unequal development and the imperatives of poverty alleviation. For the United States is, above all else, rich. And if the rich world does not provide what the former head of the Chinese negotiating team Gao Feng once called "the ways and means" to reduce carbon emissions in the developing world, there isn't going to be a global regime at all. The focal issue is not actually the climate crisis, but rather the climate crisis as it comes to us on this bitterly divided planet, and the consequent need for the rich nations to fund and otherwise support mitigation efforts in the developing world. This challenge, moreover, is coming to be widely recognized. Even the UK's celebrated Stern Review, which worked hard to be realistic, argued that the rich world would have to pay for decarbonization in the developing world: "There is no single formula that captures all dimensions of equity, but calculations based on income, per capita emissions, and historic responsibility all point to developed countries taking responsibility for emissions reductions of at least 60% from 1990 levels by 2050." It's clear from the context, by the way, that this means taking responsibility for global emissions reductions.16 It has to. Because if the rich countries don't take such responsibility, then, frankly, their domestic clean-energy campaigns will prove largely futile, for the very simple reason that the bulk of new emissions will be coming from the developing world. It's a tough problem, not least because the climate crisis is only part of it. The larger part, as always, is the problem of economic justice. Still, the climate crisis will concentrate our efforts, and our minds, by demanding a new kind of realism, one that allows us to rise to the occasion. And this must be its first postulate: only global solidarity can offer a sufficient basis for the global cooperation we need. Without it, nothing will be possible. Without it, nothing will work. Will the American people accept, and even embrace, the new vision of America's role in the world that we so desperately need? The climate crisis can help us to do so. Neither peace nor sustainability is possible without justice. As Howard Dean put it, "Moral values are an important part of foreign policy." This claim, moreover, has a great deal to do with the climate crisis. The key will now be to articulate the moral challenges of the climate crisis and to link these to the other crises now all around us. To do so, we have to focus on the links that bind the climate crisis to that of rising economic inequality, for this, really, is the essential fact of modern political life. If we're to succeed, we have to recognize this, and stop trying to finesse the simple truth: only by attacking climate and inequality together can we hope to find a new solidarity for the 21st century, and thus a way forward. End Notes 1. James E. Hansen, Can We Still Avoid Dangerous Human-Made Climate Change?, a presentation given Feb. 10, 2006, at the New School University's Social Research Conference, New York. See http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1 for the PDF and accompanying slides. For a more formal analysis, see James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy, Ken Lo, David W. Lea, and Martin Medina-Elizade, "Global Temperature Change," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, contributed July 31, 2006 and published online on September 31, 2006. Open access download at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprintframed/0606291103v1?. 2. See for example, Hansen, et. al. op. cit: "If global warming is not limited to <1°C [from the present temperature] feedbacks may add to BAU emissions, making a "different planet," including eventual ice-free Arctic, almost inevitable." 3. For an authoritative review of the issues around sea-level rise, see Ice Sheets and Sea Level Rise: Model Failure is the Key Issue, by Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer. At www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/06/ice-sheets-and-sea-leve l-rise-model-failure-is-the-key-issue/#more-315 . 4. A recent study found that one of the most reliable predictors of civil war is lack of rain, so the threat here is particularly acute in Africa. Rainfall in the sub-Saharan region has declined 25% in the last 30 years, and the number of food emergencies in Africa each year has tripled since the mid-1980s. Says policy analyst Francis Kornegay in Johannesburg, South Africa: "You have climate change and reduced rainfall and shrinking areas of arable land; and then you add population growth and you have the elements of an explosion." Scott Baldauf, "Africans are already facing climate change," Christian Science Monitor, November 6, 2006. See also Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, "The Price of Climate Change," The New York Times Magazine, November 5, 2006. 5. The book is The Revenge of Gaia. This "sustainable retreat" rap is also in Andrew Revkin's "A Conversation With James E. Lovelock: Updating Prescriptions for Avoiding Worldwide Catastrophe," published in The New York Times on September 12, 2006. 6. These calculations are made with rigorous probabilistic techniques that require as an input subjective expert opinion about the uncertainty of various parameters. Because there is a range of reasonable assumptions that can be made about key parameters, the calculated risk must be reported as a range. 7. Personal communication (December 26, 2006). To follow it up, see Hell and High Water: Global Warming-the Solution and the Politics-and What We Should Do (William Morrow, 2006), pp. 68-75. The issue here is known by scientists as "carbon cycle feedbacks," as in "There appears to be a threshold beyond which it becomes more and more difficult for us to fight the feedbacks of the carbon cycle with strong energy policies that reduce fossil fuel emissions into the air," (p 73). 8. For much more on the Stern Review, see The Worth of an Ice Sheet by EcoEquity's Research Director Paul Baer, at www.ecoequity.org/docs/WorthOfAnIceSheet.pdf. Baer's argument, in a nutshell, is that Stern's treatment of "catastrophic damages" clearly fails to reflect any reasonable treatment of catastrophic risks like starting the irreversible melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, that he therefore has in no way established the "marginal benefits" of reductions to concentrations below 450 ppm CO2, and that his effective dismissal of the widely endorsed "2ºC limit" can therefore be rejected on his own cost-benefit terms. Note that this critique does not, in principle, invalidate Stern's chief claim-that the cost of the impacts of unmitigated warming would be far higher than the costs of mitigation-though it does make the story a bit more complicated. 9. Joe Romm is excellent on this point. See Hell and High Water, op cit. 10. Examples include a project-based "clean development mechanism" riddled with fatal baseline problems, emissions-trading systems designed to placate corporations and keep the price of carbon low, and, in truth, the Kyoto Protocol itself. The future threatens numerous weak domestic bills like Jeff Bingaman's and, globally, the likelihood that the post-Kyoto system will fail to even prefigure the regime needed in the developing world. 11. Many of the ideas in this essay were developed collectively within EcoEquity, the small activist think tank of which I am a principal. Note, in particular, that EcoEquity has been working for years to develop a policy framework adequate to the climate challenge, and that, together with England's Christian Aid, we're now in the process of rolling one out. We call it "Greenhouse Development Rights." For (much) more on this evolving story, see www.ecoequity.org/GDRs or, more particularly, the paper which we prepared for the recent Nairobi meeting of the climate negotiations: Greenhouse Development Rights: An approach to the global climate regime that takes climate protection seriously while also preserving the right to human development. It can be downloaded at www.ecoequity.org/GDRs/GDRs_Nairobi.pdf. 12. The term "atmospheric space" is a variant of "environmental space," a term introduced some years ago by analysts associated with Friends of the Earth International. See for example Michael Carley and Philippe Spapens, Sharing the World: Sustainable Living and Global Equity in the 21st Century, Earthscan, 1998. 13. The projection here was developed as part of the quantitative analysis supporting the Greenhouse Development Rights project. For more information, contact Paul Baer, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 14. Nor is this growth expected to abate soon. And China, unfortunately, has a great deal of cheap, dirty coal, and very little low-carbon energy. Natural gas is not in great supply, and even Three Gorges, China's highly contested foray into mega-hydro, will only produce about 21 gigawatts, less than half of one year's growth. Figures are from Jim William's "Developments in Asian Electricity: Reform, Politics, Environment," U.C. Berkeley, February 25, 2005. 15. A good source for the canonical data, as time goes by, is the U.S. Energy Information Administration. See www.eia.doe.gov/environment.html and click the "Total Emissions" link to get a current spreadsheet. 16. This quote is in the long version of the executive summary, and also chapter 22, " Creating a Global Price for Carbon." For the context, see especially page 460 in section 21.4: "Building and sustaining coordinated global action on climate change," which talks explicitly about developed country financing for emissions reductions in the developing world. Foreign Policy In Focus contributor Tom Athanasiou is the executive director of EcoEquity. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] The full report on which this essay is based is available at http://www.ecoequity.org/. _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
