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A low-carbon future is the one we must all fight for

UN negotiations in Doha are just a sideshow. The real climate change battle is being staged elsewhere
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Michael Jacobs

The Guardian, Sunday 2 December 2012 17.30 GMT

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A wind farm near Dessau in Germany, a country that is leading the drive towards decarbonisation. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/REUTERS

An innocent observer could be forgiven for thinking that the United Nations climate talks, now hotting up in the Qatar capital of Doha, would be the focus of the international fight to combat global warming. But the innocent observer would be wrong. There is indeed a battle going on, one that will determine the planet’s future, but it is not between the negotiators finding new ways to disagree over the implementation of decisions they have already made.

The battle is being waged in energy and finance ministries around the world, and in the boardrooms of energy companies and their bankers. It is the battle between a high-carbon and a low-carbon energy future. And the outcome is unclear.

On the one hand, global investment in renewable technologies, particularly wind and solar, has been racing ahead: for the past three years it has exceeded investment in generation from fossil fuels. Last year, fully 70% of all European power investment was in renewables.

Leading Europe’s drive towards decarbonisation is Germany, whose national “energy transition” will reduce emissions by 40% by 2020 and by 80% by 2050 without use of nuclear power – using renewables and energy efficiency alone. Meanwhile, China has become the world’s largest producer of both wind and solar power. In California, South Korea and Australia new emissions-trading schemes have recently put a price on carbon.

Yet at the same time the world is also going in the opposite direction. More coal – the dirtiest fossil fuel – was used to produce electricity last year than for 40 years. As the International Energy Agency warned this month, this is driving up global carbon emissions, which rose by an alarming 3% in 2011. Coal burning now represents almost a third of all power generation; it is rising even in Europe, as the economic slump slashes the carbon price. And there is more to come: the World Resources Institute reports that globally no fewer than 1,200 new coal plants are currently proposed, two-thirds of them in India and China. Meanwhile, Canada leads the countries exploiting highly carbon-polluting tar sands, and the oil majors eye up the Arctic for new oil.

The environmental movement has tried hard to explain climate change in terms of emission trends, targets and international treaties. But as the British thinktank Carbon Tracker has pointed out, it’s really just simple maths. If the world is to limit global warming to 2C, it must keep greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to under 450 parts per million. We are currently at 392, and rising fast. To have a good (80%) chance of staying within the 2C limit, that means the world can emit only another 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. But global fossil fuel reserves are much bigger than that, equivalent to 2,795 gigatonnes, or five times the safe amount.

In other words, we can only avoid devastating climate change if we keep most of the world’s fossil fuels, including almost all of its coal, in the ground.

Is that possible? Can we deliberately forgo using our most precious resource – the fuels that have powered 200 years of industrialisation – for the sake of future generations?

It is absolutely possible. The stone age did not end because we ran out of stone. We know how to produce energy without carbon emissions – through renewables, geothermal and nuclear power and much greater energy efficiency. The variable supply of renewables needs to be overcome through interconnected smart grids that ensure that electricity can flow from wherever it is being generated to wherever it is needed, with demand adjusted to supply. Gas (the least emitting fossil fuel) can provide baseload capacity, as long as it is located where carbon capture and storage technology can in due course be applied.

Creating a decarbonised energy system of this kind will not be cheap. But there is no energy future that is cheap. Over the past few years the US has experienced a glut of shale gas that has reduced its price dramatically – and by displacing coal, cut US emissions. But in Europe it is unlikely that shale gas can be extracted cheaply; fierce competition as global demand rises will force its price up. As the Confederation of British Industry warned when George Osborne suggested that the UK should embark on a new “dash for gas”, a fossil-dependent future would leave the economy highly vulnerable to volatile energy prices. The huge advantage of renewables is that, once built, they provide free energy not subject to geopolitical insecurities.

So the war that has been raging within the British cabinet over energy policy in recent weeks is not just some local political spat. It is an expression of a much larger global battle. The EU must choose whether to bolster its carbon price and commit to a 2030 renewables target, or see its green technology industries beaten in global markets. President Barack Obama can fulfil the promises he made on entering office to set America on a clean energy course, or give in to the powerful fossil fuel lobbies. Most of all, China – now the world’s biggest carbon emitter – must decide whether to shift towards gas or to maintain its dependence on imported coal.

There are business forces lined up on both sides of this global battle. Counterposed to the fossil fuel industries are the environmental sectors that benefit from climate policy – now a $4tn industry that is sustaining a large number of jobs and growth. The CBI has come out in favour of a 2030 decarbonisation target, and this is a sure sign of shifting economic power.

For the UN negotiators in Qatar, this year’s talks are just the skirmishes before the key date of 2015, when a new global agreement must be achieved. Between now and then we will know if the world’s governments are committing to a low carbon future of tolerable safety, or condemning us to a high-carbon one, and to the catastrophic climate change it will bring.

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World ‘on collision course with nature’, OECD green growth report warns

OECD says not curbing greenhouse gases will have disastrous impact on quality of life, particularly for people in poor countries
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Mark Tran

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 December 2012 14.18 GMT

A Masaai herdsman looks after his cattle near turbines in Kenya. The OECD is calling for ‘radical change’ in the global economy. Photograph: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

Green growth is the only way forward for rich and poor countries alike to achieve sustainable development because of tremendous economic and livelihood losses from severe climate change and the depletion of natural resources, a thinktank said on Tuesday.

The Development Co-operation report 2012 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) calls for radical changes to an economic model in which rapid growth has come at a price for the environment and many of the world’s poorest people.

“We are on a collision course with nature,” Angel Gurría, the OECD secretary general, said at the launch of the report on Tuesday in the ornate surroundings of Marlborough House in London, as he urged developing countries not to adopt the “develop first, clean up later” approach.

“It is time for a radical change. If we fail to transform our policies and behaviour now, the picture is more than grim,” wrote Gurría in the report’s foreword. “Our current demographic and economic trends, if left unchecked, will have alarming effects in four key areas of global concern – climate change, biodiversity, water and health. The costs and consequences of inaction would be colossal, both in economic and human terms.”

A previous OECD report said that by 2050, without immediate action, the world will see a 50% increase in greenhouse gas emissions with a disastrous impact on quality of life; a doubling of premature deaths from exposure to air pollution; and a further 10% decline in terrestrial biodiversity.

The impact will be felt most severely in poor countries, where populations face serious threats from pollution, poor water quality, diseases associated with a changing climate and from energy, food and water insecurity.

Aid can play a role in accelerating the transition to green growth in developing countries, said the report, which called for a refocusing of official development assistance (ODA) to support the green economy and growth in developing countries.

According to the OECD, green growth means fostering economic growth and development while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environment on which people’s well-being relies. The Green Economy report by the UN Environment Programme (Unep) said investing an additional 2% of global GDP in key economic sectors could create decent employment, inclusive economic growth and greater environmental sustainability.

Several developing countries, including China, Kenya and Ethiopia, have adopted green growth strategies. China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has set out an ambitious green development plan. It foresees at least 5.3m green jobs over two to three years from investments in energy savings, pollutant emissions reduction and adjustment of industrial structure.

In addition, China sees green jobs through planting new forests, reforestation and forest management. Although mostly temporary, these 20m jobs from 2005 to 2020 are seen as a way of helping socially vulnerable groups and reducing poverty in under-developed regions.

South Korea has also set its eyes on green growth. It aims to be 100% energy independent by 2050, by quadrupling its renewable energy supply by 2030. The government is committed to investing 2% of its annual GDP between 2009 and 2013 – a total of $90bn – to encourage private investment in green sectors.

Yet as Brian Atwood, chair of the OECD’s development assistance committee (DAC) – the group of donor countries – admits, people in poor countries will give first priority to their ability to feed and shelter themselves and their families. “Unless they are an island or coastal state, their governments are more likely to argue that growth is more important than reducing carbon emissions or protecting the environment … Protection of the global environment cannot threaten local livelihoods – solutions must be found where the two can co-exist,” wrote Atwood in the OECD report.

Such tensions have been evident at the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar, now in their second week, where the US and Europe are strongly resisting the idea that they should compensate for losses in poor countries, fearing that it would lead to potentially endless financial claims. Apart from the issue of compensation, rich countries in 2009 agreed to give $100bn by 2020 to help poor countries adapt to climate change. So far, they have yet to provide the $30bn they promised as a down payment.

ODA for climate adaptation or mitigation in poor countries can be expected to remain contentious at a time when aid is declining. In 2011, DAC countries provided $133bn in aid, a 2.7% drop from the previous year, taking inflation into account. Gurría said many rich countries are using the economic crisis to relax their aid commitments, but praised the UK for not cutting aid. Atwood suggests that aid should act as a catalyst for other flows, such as private-sector finance and investment, “as long as we understand the private sector’s need for a balance between investment risks and returns”.

The report also highlights the perverse incentives at work from subsidies. “Today there over $1 trillion in subsidies for areas ranging from fisheries to fertilisers and fossil fuels,” wrote Achim Steiner, executive director of Unep, in a chapter of the report. “Much of this money is actually fuelling environmental decay, such as climate change; engendering collapse of fish stocks and damage to coastal systems; and aggravating social and economic challenges. Removing these distorting, environmentally harmful and socially under-performing subsidies would completely change the incentive structure, promoting sustainable consumption and production and freeing up to 1-2% of global GDP every year.”

Growth slows in NSW regional cities

AAPDecember 4, 2012, 8:19 pm

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NSW’s regional cities are growing at a rate well below the national average.

The State of Australian Cities 2012 report shows Newcastle has an annual growth rate of 0.9 per cent, Wollongong’s is 0.7 per cent and Albury-Wodonga’s is 0.8 per cent, less than the average of 1.5 per cent.

As a result, Newcastle has been overtaken by the Gold Coast as the country’s sixth largest city.

From a social perspective, residents of Newcastle and Wollongong were not positive.

The Steel City it may be, but many Newcastle residents reckon the aesthetic appeal of the city isn’t very strong.

According to the report, 45 per cent of Newcastle locals feel the city lacks quality urban design and recreational and cultural opportunities, the lowest rate of the 18 cities surveyed.

In Wollongong, only 39 per cent of people feel the city is safe for people and their property and provides good economic opportunities and quality of life.

Labour forces in Newcastle and Wollongong are also below the national average of 65.1 per cent, standing at 61.3 per cent and 57.2 per cent respectively.

Participation by Wollongong’s young men declined notably between 2008 and 2012, with participation of 15 to 24-year-olds dropping from 68.4 per cent to 56.5 per cent.
Despite Newcastle’s lagging labour force, the participation rate of 45 to 65-year-old males increased 10 per cent to 77.6 per cent from 2000 to 2012.

AAPDecember 4, 2012, 8:19 pm

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NSW’s regional cities are growing at a rate well below the national average.

The State of Australian Cities 2012 report shows Newcastle has an annual growth rate of 0.9 per cent, Wollongong’s is 0.7 per cent and Albury-Wodonga’s is 0.8 per cent, less than the average of 1.5 per cent.

As a result, Newcastle has been overtaken by the Gold Coast as the country’s sixth largest city.

From a social perspective, residents of Newcastle and Wollongong were not positive.

The Steel City it may be, but many Newcastle residents reckon the aesthetic appeal of the city isn’t very strong.

According to the report, 45 per cent of Newcastle locals feel the city lacks quality urban design and recreational and cultural opportunities, the lowest rate of the 18 cities surveyed.

In Wollongong, only 39 per cent of people feel the city is safe for people and their property and provides good economic opportunities and quality of life.

Labour forces in Newcastle and Wollongong are also below the national average of 65.1 per cent, standing at 61.3 per cent and 57.2 per cent respectively.

Participation by Wollongong’s young men declined notably between 2008 and 2012, with participation of 15 to 24-year-olds dropping from 68.4 per cent to 56.5 per cent.
Despite Newcastle’s lagging labour force, the participation rate of 45 to 65-year-old males increased 10 per cent to 77.6 per cent from 2000 to 2012.

Monbiot.com

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Forbidden Planet

Posted: 03 Dec 2012 08:45 AM PST

We cannot restrain climate change without a political fight against plutocracy.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th December 2012

Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that manmade climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine, whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it.

Neoliberalism, also known as market fundamentalism or laissez-faire economics, purports to liberate the market from political interference. The state, it asserts, should do little but defend the realm, protect private property and remove barriers to business. In practice it looks nothing like this. What neoliberal theorists call shrinking the state looks more like shrinking democracy: reducing the means by which citizens can restrain the power of the elite. What they call “the market” looks more like the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich(1). Neoliberalism appears to be little more than a justification for plutocracy.

The doctrine was first applied in Chile in 1973, as former students of the University of Chicago, schooled in Milton Friedman’s extreme prescriptions and funded by the CIA, worked alongside General Pinochet to impose a programme that would have been impossible in a democratic state. The result was an economic catastrophe, but one in which the rich – who took over Chile’s privatised industries and unprotected natural resources – prospered exceedingly(2).

The creed was taken up by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It was forced upon the poor world by the IMF and the World Bank. By the time James Hansen presented the first detailed attempt to model future temperature rises to the US Senate in 1988(3), the doctrine was being implanted everywhere.

As we saw in 2007 and 2008 (when neoliberal governments were forced to abandon their principles to bail out the banks), there could scarcely be a worse set of circumstances for addressing a crisis of any kind. Until it has no choice, the self-hating state will not intervene, however acute the crisis or grave the consequences. Neoliberalism protects the interests of the elite against all comers.

Preventing climate breakdown – the four, five or six degrees of warming now predicted for this century by green extremists like, er, the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and PriceWaterhouseCoopers(4,5,6) – means confronting the oil, gas and coal industry. It means forcing that industry to abandon the four-fifths or more of fossil fuel reserves that we cannot afford to burn(7). It means cancelling the prospecting and development of new reserves – what’s the point if we can’t use current stocks? – and reversing the expansion of any infrastructure (such as airports) that cannot be run without them.

But the self-hating state cannot act. Captured by interests that democracy is supposed to restrain, it can only sit on the road, ears pricked and whiskers twitching, as the truck thunders towards it. Confrontation is forbidden, action is a mortal sin. You may, perhaps, disperse some money for new energy; you may not legislate against the old.

So Barack Obama pursues what he calls an “all of the above” policy: promoting wind, solar, oil and gas(8). Ed Davey, the British climate change secretary, launched an energy bill in the Commons last week whose purpose was to decarbonise the energy supply. In the same debate he promised that he would “maximise the potential” of oil and gas production in the North Sea and other offshore fields(9).

Lord Stern described climate change as “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen”(10). The useless Earth Summit in June; the feeble measures now being debated in Doha; the energy bill(11) and electricity demand reduction paper(12) launched in Britain last week (better than they might have been but unmatched to the scale of the problem) expose the greatest and widest ranging failure of market fundamentalism: its incapacity to address our existential crisis.

The 1000-year legacy of current carbon emissions is long enough to smash anything resembling human civilisation into splinters(13). Complex societies have sometimes survived the rise and fall of empires, plagues, wars and famines. They won’t survive six degrees of climate change, sustained for a millennium(14). In return for 150 years of explosive consumption, much of which does nothing to advance human welfare, we are atomising the natural world and the human systems that depend on it.

The climate summit (or foothill) in Doha and the sound and fury of the British government’s new measures probe the current limits of political action. Go further and you break your covenant with power, a covenant both disguised and validated by the neoliberal creed.

Neoliberalism is not the root of the problem: it is the ideology used, often retrospectively, to justify a global grab of power, public assets and natural resources by an unrestrained elite. But the problem cannot be addressed until the doctrine is challenged by effective political alternatives.

In other words, the struggle against climate change – and all the crises which now beset both human beings and the natural world – cannot be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilisation against plutocracy. I believe this should start with an effort to reform campaign finance: the means by which corporations and the very rich buy policies and politicians. Some of us will be launching a petition in the UK in the next few weeks, and I hope you will sign it.

But this is scarcely a beginning. We must start to articulate a new politics: one that sees intervention as legitimate, that contains a higher purpose than corporate emancipation disguised as market freedom, that puts the survival of people and the living world above the survival of a few favoured industries. In other words, a politics that belongs to us, not just the super-rich.

References:

1. See Colin Crouch, 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Polity Press, Cambridge.

2. Naomi Klein, 2007. The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. Allen Lane, London.

3. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html

4. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics, November 2012. Turn Down the Heat: why a 4C warmer World Must be Avoided. Report for the World Bank. http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/Turn_Down_the_heat_Why_a_4_degree_centrigrade_warmer_world_must_be_avoided.pdf

5. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/11/09/364895/iea-global-warming-delaying-action-is-a-false-economy/

6. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, November 2012. Too late for two degrees? Low carbon economy index 2012. http://www.pwc.co.uk/sustainability-climate-change/publications/low-carbon-economy-index-overview.jhtml

7. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/07/19/an-underground-national-park/

8. http://www.barackobama.com/energy-info/

9. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm121129/debtext/121129-0002.htm

10. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2012-2013/0100/130100.pdf

11. Nicholas Stern, 2006. The Economics of Climate Change.

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/Executive_Summary.pdf

12. http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/11/consultation/electricity-demand-reduction/7075-electricity-demand-reduction-consultation-on-optio.pdf

13. Susan Solomon, Gian-Kasper Plattner, Reto Knutti, and Pierre Friedlingstein, 10th February 2009. Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. PNAS, vol. 106, no. 6, pp1704–1709. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0812721106. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/28/0812721106.full.pdf+html

14. I’m speaking loosely here, as Solomon et al propose that not 100% but around 40% of the CO2 produced this century will remain in the atmosphere until at least the year 3000. On the other hand, unrestrained emissions and global warming will not stop of their own accord in 2100: temperatures could rise well beyond 6C in the following century: without sharp mitigation now, we’re setting up 1,000 years of utter chaos.