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  • A conference without compassion: a guarantee of Mutually assisted suicide

     

    A few rich individuals and great corporations have abrogated the right to do as they will with the air that we all breathe. They have usurped the commons!

    In the Copenhagen Accord there are no deadlines, no assurances, and talk of keeping below 2C makes no link between science and the reality of continued pollution. Nothing at Copenhagen gets even near what is needed if a meaningful attempt is to be made to avert runaway climate change. The IPCC states that this Accord guarantees that global temperature will in reality reach over 3 degrees.

    Even at 2 degrees the IPCC forecasts a 9m seal-level rise, and that could be in much less than the next 80 years. To get what this means I repeat what I wrote in the August FOOTPRINTS:

    Lets assume that rising temperature follows a regular trajectory, and lets assume that there is a one-to-one correlation between temperature rise and its consequences. Such a regular trajectory is unlikely as the combination of growing C02-e, carbon and ice-melt feedbacks, solar cycles and stronger El Niño may join with extreme weather events and global tipping points to aler the trajectory of this process.

    Though we don’t understand many of the complexities, the simplicity of this calculation has a lot to recommend it.

    With continued steady linear growth the earth will be heated to 1C by 2012, and to 2C by 2030.

    Paleoclimatic evidence shows that for every 1C rise we should expect a minimum 4-metre rise in sea levels. We have just calculated that by 2030 the conditions will be in place to guarantee a minimal 8-metre sea level rise. With the usual inertial delays of thirty years or so built into the earth’s system, and applying a regular trajectory for sea levels as we did with temperature, we could be looking at

    A sea-level rise of 500mm within a decade and a full metre during the next (ie. before 2030).

    During this time large areas of agricultural land will be gradually flooded, in Egypt, Bangladesh, northern China and the Philippines. Florida, Boston and London will be badly affected, as will Melbourne and much of our coastline. Food production will be lessened as the Himalayan glaciers melt, there will be a lot less to fish and land will be lost to drought and sea. In the same period global population will rise by one billion, most living in cities. We are fully aware of the refugee crisis that would follow such sea-level rise, and the likelihood that there would be war. This is a recipe for catastrophe if we dont prepare.

    However we vary the parameters, this process shows we have run out of time and should prepare now for what cannot be prevented if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on earth is adapted.

    But Copenhagen has side-stepped that. George Monbiot again: We have now lost 17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations we have characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved more urgent than either the natural world or human civilisation.

    Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other. Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.

    These governments raised many trillions to keep the stock exchanges open. They could do the same to buy the support of the great polluters, on any terms, to stop this crisis. They could, but wont. Governments could do it without recourse to any elected body. They (Obama, Rudd, Brown etc) just did it through the Federal Banks. Why not again?

    Do the frogs have to wait until the water is boiling?

    Bruno Sekoli of Lesotho, Chair of the Group of Least Developed Countries said on behalf of over a hundred countries “1.5 degrees is nonnegotiable – more than that means death to Africa. It will cause unmanageable consequences – it will leave millions of people suffering from hunger, diseases, floods and water shortages.’
 How can it be realistic to condemn half of humanity?”

    I paraphrase Andrew Glikson: The atmosphere is tracking into critical levels. An examination of the geological record indicates that, with the exception of major volcanic and asteroid impact events that triggered mass extinctions of species, never has atmospheric CO2 risen at a rate as fast as at present: 2 parts per million/year, the earlier highest record being about 0.4 ppm/year about 55 million years ago.

    Early humans survived a rise of +3C about 2.8 million years ago. Homo sapiens survived abrupt temperature rise of about +5C during the two last glacial terminations 130 thousand and 14–11 thousand years ago, in part through migration. The species will survive.

    It is less clear how civilization itself can survive a rise of over 2C, for the lives of 7 billion people are totally dependent on
    1) mountain snow-fed river systems for agriculture in deltas that are prone to sea level rise,
    2) on extensive cultivation of marginal desert regions such as in Australia and Africa that will turn into desert,
    3) on regular monsoons as in India and east Africa that will change course, and
    4) on coastal centres and port cities that are needed for the transport of food, and will be drowned under the sea. Little of our wealth and learning will survive such changes.

    According to James Hansen at 2C “Science reveals that climate is close to tipping points. It is a dead certainty that continued high emissions will create a chaotic dynamic situation for young people, with deteriorating climate conditions out of their control.”

    Enjoy your Christmas!

    John James

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  • What was agreed at Copenhagen- and what was left out

     

    Temperature

    “The increase in global temperature should be below two degrees.”

    This will disappoint the 100-plus nations who wanted a lower maximum of 1.5C, including many small island states who fear that even at this level their homes may be submerged.

    Peak date for carbon emissions

    “We should co-operate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible, recognising that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries …” This vague phrase is a disappointment to those who want nations to set a date for emissions to fall, but will please developing countries who want to put the economy first.

    Emissions cuts

    “Parties commit to implement individually or jointly the quantified economy-wide emissions targets for 2020 as listed in appendix 1 before 1 February 2010.”

    This phrase commits developed nations to start work almost immediately on reaching their mid-term targets. For the US, this is a weak 14-17% reduction on 2005 levels; for the EU, a still-to-be-determined goal of 20-30% on 1990 levels; for Japan, 25% and Russia 15-25% on 1990 levels. The accord makes no mention of 2050 targets, which dropped out of the text over the course of the day.

    Forests

    “Substantial finance to prevent deforestation; adaptation, technology development and transfer and capacity.”

    This is crucial because more than 15% of emissions are attributed to the clearing of forests. Conservation groups are concerned that this phrase lacks safeguards.

    Money

    “The collective commitment by developed countries is to provide new and additional resources amounting to $30bn for 2010-12 … Developed countries set a goal of mobilising jointly $100bn a year by 2020 to address needs of developing countries.”

    This is the cash that oils the deal. The first section is a quick financial injection from rich nations to support developing countries’ efforts. Longer term, a far larger sum of money will be committed to a Copenhagen Green Climate Fund. But the agreement leaves open the questions of where the money will come from, and how it will be used.

    Key elements of earlier drafts dropped during yesterday’s negotiations:

    An attempt to replace Kyoto

    “Affirming our firm resolve to adopt one or more legal instruments …”

    This preamble, killed off during the day, was the biggest obstacle for negotiators. It left open the question of whether to continue a twin-track process that maintains Kyoto, or whether to adopt a single agreement. Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada are desperate to move to a one-track approach, but developing nations refused to kill off the protocol.

    Deadline for a treaty

    “… as soon as possible and no later than COP16 …”

    This appeared in the morning draft and disappeared during the day; it set a December 2010 date for the conclusion of a legally binding treaty. The final text drops this date, but small print suggests it will still be next year.

  • HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL GENERATOR READERS

     I wish all readers a very Merry Xmas and a prosperous New Year.

    Giovanni asked if I would like to post the Generator early this year.
    I have been posting lists inside and outside the Greens for the last
    five years. 

    I began posting on the 21.4.09 and have made over 800 postings and
    have recerived well over 20.000 Hits. I have tried to cover all aspects
    of the issues we are facing.

    Should any of you require any further or more detailded info on any of these
    issues, please advise Giovanni, who will relay your comments to me.

    We are facing very turbulent times. I appreciate the facility of getting news
    and imfo out to the public arena via this medium.

    Regards.

    Neville Gillmore (Your Friendly List Poster)

  • Gutless,yes. But the planet’s future is no priority of ours.

     

    But it’s no use just blaming pusillanimous politicians. They should frighten their countries witless with the inconvenient truth – but there is a limit to how far ahead of their people any leader can go, elected or not. NGO protesters make much-needed noise, but they wouldn’t have to if most people were already with them.

    Consider the political problem here in the country we know – then multiply it by the world’s 193 sovereign states, all with their own internal rivalries and external foes. The question is whether governments have the power and consent to do the draconian things required. It is hard not to despair.

    Britain’s pollsters find people don’t list climate change among their top concerns. Many think the science is still in dispute. Why wouldn’t they when the maverick billionaires who control most of our press keep pumping out climate change denial day after day? The Mail, Express and Telegraph are unrelenting: “100 reasons why global warming is natural”; “EU and UN bosses have embraced environmentalism because it gives them the chance to undermine the nation state”. Ian Plimer, Richard Littlejohn, Lord Lawson and Christopher Booker churn out denial. This week the Taxpayers’ Alliance adds its own dose of Copenhagen poison, with tendentious allegations of green “rip-off” taxes costing £26bn. So how do you persuade only averagely interested voters that the mighty weight of scientific opinion believes calamity is almost certain?

    News editors yawned as Copenhagen failed: the good news that everyone can fly BA over the Christmas period knocked it off the lead. “Heavy snowfall causes disruption” took top slot above global warming talks yesterday on the BBC. So bored was the BBC with Copenhagen that an injunction not to give children watered-down wine knocked the talks off the top all Thursday.

    Walk around any supermarket noting the vegetables from Africa and South America. Feel the open fridges freeze you in the heat of the warm emporium, and it’s blindingly obvious that all this is not sustainable. Not the flying, not the city warmth billowing out so my geraniums no longer die in winter, nor the cars, nor the Christmas squandering and the sheer excess everywhere. Our grandchildren will not live like this – if they and their children survive. But cutting back looks beyond the power of politics.

    If politicians ask voters, “Do you sincerely want the planet to survive?” the answer is by no means obvious. Eat, drink, fly and be merry, hope for the best, cling to the comforting deniers. Imagining three generations ahead is a stretch. If voters cared about people drowning in Bangladesh, more aid would have been sent decades ago. If 20 million climate refugees arrive in boats, fend them off.

    Incoming Tory candidates when polled want less not more green action and less foreign aid. Hillary Clinton can promise £100bn a year by 2020 – but the OECD reckons that £23bn of the £50bn promised by rich to poorer countries at Gleneagles in 2005 will now never be paid. Cameron talks a bit green but with no sign of green taxes. Ed Miliband‘s seriousness has been admirable, saying openly that energy prices must rise. But Labour wasted most of its 12 years doing virtually nothing: neither Blair nor Brown as chancellor gave climate any priority.

    Look how hard it is to persuade our own country to change its ways. There are plentiful solutions. Energy prices should rise to make renewables profitable – but credits would have to go to half the population who couldn’t afford to heat their homes. Personal carbon trading was briefly promoted by David Miliband when in charge of environment, until slapped down by Chancellor Brown. That would be fair and transparent, giving every citizen a carbon quota to spend as they choose on heating, flying or driving.

     

    The well-off could buy unused carbon quota from the half of the population that never flies, so money passes from richer to poorer. The price would rise every year, as the quota shrank to limit emissions. Sensible, fair and redistributive, it would be easy to implement with plastic cards for energy and transport bills, compared with wartime rationing of everything all done on paper. But it would require a gigantic collective will to action and a will to redistribute to make it happen. No country as unequal as the UK, let alone the US, can have a collective will when citizens’ interests are diametrically opposed to one another. Inequality between and within nations may be the death of us.

    Fixing the climate is not a practical conundrum, it is a purely political problem. We could build the windmills, the solar, the nuclear and whatever it takes to be self-sustaining with clean energy for ever if we wanted to. But enough people have to want to change how they live and spend to make it happen. So far they don’t, not by a long chalk. What would it take? A tidal wave destroying New York maybe – New Orleans was the wrong people – with London, St Petersburg and Shanghai wiped out all at once. But cataclysms will come too late for action. Just pray for a scientific wonder or that Lord Stern is right and the market can fix it, as green technology becomes more profitable than oil and coal. As things stand, politics has not enough heft nor authority. It would take a political miracle to save us now.

  • Copenhagen negotiators bicker and filibuster while the biosphere burns.

     

    Watching this stupid summit via webcam (I wasn’t allowed in either), it struck me that the treaty-making system has scarcely changed in 130 years. There’s a wider range of faces, fewer handlebar moustaches, frock coats or pickelhaubes, but otherwise, when the world’s governments try to decide how to carve up the atmosphere, they might have been attending the conference of Berlin in 1884. It’s as if democratisation and the flowering of civil society, advocacy and self-determination had never happened. Governments, whether elected or not, without reference to their own citizens let alone those of other nations, assert their right to draw lines across the global commons and decide who gets what. This is a scramble for the atmosphere comparable in style and intent to the scramble for Africa.

    At no point has the injustice at the heart of multilateralism been addressed or even acknowledged: the interests of states and the interests of the world’s people are not the same. Often they are diametrically opposed. In this case, most rich and rapidly developing states have sought through these talks to seize as great a chunk of the atmosphere for themselves as they can – to grab bigger rights to pollute than their competitors. The process couldn’t have been better designed to produce the wrong results.

    I spent most of my time at the Klimaforum, the alternative conference set up by just four paid staff, which 50,000 people attended without a hitch. (I know which team I would put in charge of saving the planet.) There the barrister Polly Higgins laid out a different approach. Her declaration of planetary rights invests ecosystems with similar legal safeguards to those won by humans after the second world war. It changes the legal relationship between humans, the atmosphere and the biosphere from ownership to stewardship. It creates a global framework for negotiation which gives nation states less discretion to dispose of ecosystems and the people who depend on them.

    Even before the farce in Copenhagen began it was looking like it might be too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992. We have now lost 17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved more urgent considerations than either the natural world or human civilisation. Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other.

    Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.

  • Portion of the Final day Copenhagen addresses.

     

    12.31pm:
    More despair at Obama’s speech.

    ActionAid’s climate expert, Raman Mehta, said:

    Obama has said nothing to save the Copenhagen conference from failure.

    The US is the one major player yet to move. Developing countries have come here to negotiate in good faith but feel they have been cheated and it looks like they will leave empty handed.

    Greenpeace US’s executive director Phil Radford said:

    The world was waiting for the spirit of yes we can, but all we got was my way or the highway.

    He [Obama] crossed an ocean to tell the world he has nothing new to offer, then he said take it or leave it. By offering no movement on US global warming pollution cuts he showed his disregard for the science and the victims of climate change in the United States and abroad. He now risks being branded as the man who killed Copenhagen.

    He said all parties must move, but he offered no movement. He said the decades long split between the rich world and poor needs to end, but his vision of a deal here would give us a 3C temperature rise and devastate Africa and the small island states.

    12.21pm:
    Friends of the Earth is “deeply disappointed” by Obama’s speech.

    Andy Atkins, its executive director,

    The President is right that the endeavours in Copenhagen will go down in history – but unless we see a massive shift in the US position, it will be for all the wrong reasons.

    If the President’s idea of action is to cut US emissions by 4% on 1990 levels then we’re heading for climate catastrophe. Barack Obama should have taken the opportunity to up his proposed cuts to at least 40% by 2020 and ditch carbon offsetting.

    Obama has deeply disappointed not just those listening to his speech at the UN talks – he has disappointed the whole world.

    12.20pm:
    A British official at the talks said the prospects of securing agreement were “not great” but Gordon Brown was committed to staying until “the very last minute” to secure a deal, according to PA.

    12.06pm:
    You can now see that leaked UN analysis for yourself here. The three page document says countries ‘ought’ to limit global warming to 2C, but does not bind them to do so.