Jonathon Porritt
The fallout from the Copenhagen summit is still reverberating around the world. It isn’t just NGOs and academics who are up in arms—many governments, including Britain’s, have expressed dismay at the results. And most people agree that China is the principal bad guy.
It wasn’t meant to be like that. China’s leaders had made encouraging noises before the summit. In November 2009, China made a commitment to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by at least 40 per cent by 2020 (on 2005 levels). Though falling short of actual cuts in emissions, the move was welcomed since it still represents a huge challenge for the country. And it was expected that Premier Wen Jiabao would have more to offer at the climate change summit itself.
That turned out to be wrong. China only briefly referred to its carbon dioxide intensity commitment. Instead it fought furiously to block any global agreement on transparency in carbon reporting. It manipulated its role as a would-be champion of poor countries, and joined in the procedural chicanery and bullying with enthusiasm. It caused the accord—signed by China, India, the US, Brazil and South Africa—to be so watered down that the final conference plenary was only prepared to “note” its existence rather than endorse it. (In the idiosyncratic lexicon of the UN, “noting” comes at the bottom of the consensus hierarchy, with only “rejecting” below it.)
Perhaps most worrying was China’s refusal to allow mention of long-term targets in the accord—even those already agreed by the US and the EU. China, it was said, was moving to protect its future status as the world’s largest economy.
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Damian Kahya
China's leader arrived in Copenhagen less ready to wreck than we now think
With Christmas upon us, the dust has settled on Copenhagen. And as Prospect editor David Goodhart posted yesterday, the settled view is becoming: blame China. Mark Lynas wrote an especially coruscating piece about it in the Guardian yesterday—a piece with which their editor agreed so strongly that he used his twitter guise of @alanrushbridger to say yesterday “if you read one piece on Copenhagen, read this.”
But in all this we are losing track of what actually happened, in which impact of the Chinese was more muddled and complex than the deliberate attack now gaining popularity. So Lets go back to Copenhagen to try and get it right.
With the talks about to veer into complete breakdown the US president hurried towards Air Force One. Like a sulky husband rushing to leave his awkward in-laws he explained he would love to stay but couldn’t – the weather demanded he go now. The deal he left behind was a conjuring trick of such audacity that it threw the slow thinking delegates and their press counterparts into a state of befuddled confusion.
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David Goodhart
The misguided conventional copenhagen wisdom
Copenhagen is being called a failure, with various candidates blamed. Naomi Klein says it was Obama’s fault. Mark Lynas today is blaming the Chinese. But the conference wasn’t a failure. Or it was only so when measured against unrealistic expectations.
As Tony Brenton pointed out in the FT (letters, December 22nd, registration required), what matters here is power politics not consensus among all the world’s nations. There are about 20 nations that matter in climate change politics, and the core of the deal that was agreed came from five of them—the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. (And in what previous global deal could you have seen those five names lined up together?) The US and China have both committed themselves to a deal, indeed all the countries that matter have agreed, in public, that the rise in global temperature must be kept to under 2C. That in itself is a huge advance on just a couple of years ago.
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Oliver Morton
John Latham and Stephen Salter’s idea of spraying up sea salt is one of the proposed schemes that might cool the planet
If you want to know why many people take a dim view of geoengineering—a catch-all term for technological interventions to cool the climate system—look no further than Richard Branson. In October, Branson told the Wall Street Journal that “if we could come up with a geoengineering answer… then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.” But the idea that such schemes—for example, giant mirrors in space, artificially-brightened clouds or vast airborne Hoovers sucking up carbon dioxide—are a reasonable response to carbon emissions that can allow humanity to carry on polluting would strike most people as mad, bad or both. Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, even said in 2008 that many of these ideas were “outright dangerous.”
If so, Richard Branson isn’t the only dangerous man. In recent months climate fixes have become quite the buzzy topic. In September 2009 the Royal Society released the first major report on the subject by a national academy of science. Around the same time “sceptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg brought together five eminent economists to assess potential climate change solutions. The group concluded that research into geoengineering offered a better “cost-benefit ratio” than any other approach. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will discuss many aspects of the subject when the next of its hugely influential Assessment Reports appears in 2013, having given it only a few pages in its 2007 report. The IPCC’s chair, Rajendra Pachauri, has talked of carbon dioxide removal technologies probably being necessary in the long run. Less significantly, but with far higher visibility, economist Steven D Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner’s book Superfreakonomics served up various unconvincing and breathless claims on the topic with a side order of needless error, leading to epic levels of vituperation in the blogosphere, and many delightfully snarky reviews.
To understand why this debate excites such passion, start with Branson’s idea that geoengineering could permit people to keep on burning fossil fuels. Here environmentalists and scientists agree that no geoengineering scheme can simply cancel out the effects of rising emissions. Greenhouse warming has distinctive effects on the climate that cannot just be reversed by reducing incoming sunlight; removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while continuing to emit more of it cannot in the near term reduce concentrations. So the one all-but-universally agreed opinion on geoengineering is that while it may ameliorate some aspects of climate change, it is not an alternative to reducing emissions. A second round of objections runs that geoengineering would be used to delay tough action on emissions reduction today in favour of technological fixes tomorrow. So not only should we doubt airline-owners like Branson, but we should treat any scientific research on the topic as inherently dangerous. “It is naïve to think that politicians who have failed to deliver on mitigation targets will not jump at the opportunity for a ‘techno-fix,’” says Jim Thomas of Canadian environmental group ETC.
Yet you don’t have to be an expert in deconstruction or denial to sense that behind these geoengineering-is-not-an-alternative arguments lies the fear that, at some level, it really is one. The Royal Society’s report’s press release read: “Stop emitting CO2 or geoengineering could be our only hope.” Its authors thus framed the technology as an unsavoury “plan B” that merited study only to use as an “emergency response” to the imminent collapse of the Greenland ice sheet or similar catastrophe. But what is a Plan B if not an alternative, even if it is not an alternative that you want? To understand geoengineering better, concentrate not on what it isn’t, or what you don’t want it to be; look instead at what it is, and what it could become. Geoengineering is not an alternative, but it can be an addition. This neglected set of ways in which people can alter climate should be part of mainstream debate on climate change, studied and assessed as a part of the whole. And that is going to require a far greater level of research. Despite all the public discussion there are only a few dozen people in the world contributing to the scientific literature.
Much of the “otherness” of geoengineering stems from the fact that it seems too futuristic and unprecedented. Yet global warming is itself an increasingly deliberate activity. No one pumps oil from 5km below the seabed, refines it into gasoline and sells it through a retail network by accident. Selling—or buying—fossil fuels does not take place for the purpose of climate change, but that change can no longer be seen as an unintended consequence. What is more, other climate-changing processes already exist, and are under our explicit control. As a recent study chaired by David Lee of Manchester Metropolitan University confirmed, the world’s shipping industry provides fairly significant global cooling. Ships burn fuel high in sulphur, and so emit lots of sulphur dioxide. This forms tiny particles of sulphuric acid, that enrich the water-droplet content of low-lying clouds over the oceans. More droplets mean whiter clouds, and whiter clouds mean more sunlight reflected into space. The
shipping industry thus works, in Lee’s words, as a form of “inadvertent geoengineering.”
This example illustrates the complexity of climate change. Far from being a unitary problem to be solved, it is a range of causes, effects, meanings and implications. Along with carbon dioxide, there are the greenhouse gases methane, ozone, nitrous oxide and more. Then there are the problems of deforestation, irrigation, urbanisation, nitrogen deposition, nitrogen run-off, chemical smogs, and so on. These items interact in forbiddingly complex ways, not only with each other but also with the economy, and with people’s values and ideological stances. It makes much more sense to create a home for geoengineering within this complexity than to keep it out. “The climate is complicated,” says Tim Lenton, a professor of Earth systems science at the University of East Anglia who works in this field. “Why would we try to control it using just the one knob?”
***
Which knobs should we seek to twiddle? Pull back from the complexity, and imagine our climate to be a bathtub full of energy. The energy flows in from the sunshine tap in the form of visible light, and it flows down the cosmic plughole as infrared radiation—that is, waste heat. Normally the input will match the output, but greenhouse gases have partially blocked the drain. The level of energy in the bath is rising, so the climate is getting hotter. Present responses to climate change are adaptation (goggles and a snorkel) or mitigation (reducing the rate at which the drain gets further blocked). If mitigation succeeds in the way most people envisage—by reducing emissions to more or less zero over the course of this century—the energy will stop rising, but it would not fall back to its old level. The drain might not be becoming more clogged, but it would not be becoming unclogged either.
Geoengineering offers two ways to empty the bath. You can reach out a toe to turn the sunlight tap, or you can find a plunger and unclog the drain. “Tap” methods reflect sunlight away by putting aerosols into the stratosphere or brightening clouds, painting roofs white and so on. “Drain” methods almost all concentrate on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, either by chemical engineering or by planting trees and crops, which must be disposed of so that the carbon they store during photosynthesis does not get released again.
For almost as long as people have been worrying about global warming, they have been talking about these kinds of geo-engineering solutions. Back in the 1970s Mikhail Budyko, a Soviet climatologist, first suggested putting a veil of sulphate particles into the stratosphere by burning sulphur in jet planes, thus reproducing the cooling hazes known to follow volcanic eruptions. Around the same time, Freeman Dyson, a physicist given to futuristic speculation, worked out a plan to suck up carbon emissions with new forests while also developing alternative energy on the scale required to cut emissions to zero. By the early 1990s, more or less all the forms of geoengineering now under discussion—from the more exotic space mirrors to brightened grasslands and deserts, new forests, fertilising the oceans to create algae blooms and sucking the carbon dioxide out of the sky—had been looked at.
But the research did not take off. Many researchers shunned the topic fearing it a diversion from the real problem. There was a fear, too, of unexpected consequences—what, for example, might a stratospheric veil do to the ozone layer?—not to mention the hubris of it all. So from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, very few scientists worked on the problem and there was very little funding for it. And both those things remain largely true today. As a result, such interest as there has been has often come from outside traditional science. In 2007, Richard Branson launched his Virgin Earth Challenge, a $25m prize for the development of a successful carbon dioxide removal system. Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft, invented a scheme that pumped aerosols into the stratosphere using airship-supported hosepipes (see box p33), which also formed the basis for the controversial chapter in Dubner and Levitt’s Superfreakonomics.
That said, there has been rising academic interest in the past few years, which can be traced to a 2006 paper by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-prize winning chemist and perhaps the world’s most influential atmospheric scientist. In the early 1970s, Crutzen’s studies revealed the fragility of the ozone layer. In the 1980s he raised the possibility that a nuclear winter might result from the smoke and soot produced by a nuclear war. His suggestion in 2000 that human influence on climate is so great that the industrial revolution marked the start of a new geological era—the anthropocene—crystallised how many researchers felt. Crutzen’s scientific reputation gave geoengineering an imprimatur it had never possessed before.
While his paper did not add much substance to what had already been written in the previous ten years, its novelty lay in its suggestions of how recent events could give the idea more traction. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines pumped 10m tonnes of sulphur into the upper atmosphere. Climate monitoring after this event proved the theory of sulphate-aerosol cooling. Crutzen also cited research revealing that emissions acted to acidify the ocean, damaging ecosystems and potentially dooming coral reefs. This gave new weight to the argument that carbon dioxide emissions had to be controlled, regardless of geoengineering.
The greatest fillip for geoengineering research came from the fact that after more than a decade of political pressure for emissions reduction, little progress had been made. There was a real possibility that emissions control would not happen in time, so another solution was needed. All these points were repeated in the subsequent smattering of reports, journals and meetings that have raised the subject’s profile.
Crutzen’s most original contribution in that paper, though, is often overlooked. Humans, he pointed out, already produce sulphate aerosols that cool the world. Burning fossil fuels, on land or sea, releases tens of millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide. These form a haze of little particles that diffuse and reflect away sunlight, just as Pinatubo did. But this happens in the lower atmosphere, where the particles get into people’s lungs and damage their health. Rich countries started to scrub sulphur out of their emissions from the 1960s onwards, to reduce a death toll reckoned in the hundreds of thousands. Yet this process of atmospheric cleaning also lets in more sunlight, turning up warming. (Crutzen quoted a study arguing that worldwide air-quality controls could warm the planet by almost 1 degree Centrigrade.)
A choice between warming and deaths due to sulphate is a diabolical one. But, as Crutzen says, there is no need to choose. In the lower atmosphere rain washes the air clean in days; in the dry stratosphere, aerosols stay aloft for years, spreading worldwide. A comparatively small amount of sulphur in the stratosphere could thus preserve the cooling currently provided by a lot of sulphur lower down. Crutzen calculated that the cooling resulting from the 55m tonnes of sulphur emitted into the lower atmosphere every year could be provided instead by 1-2m tonnes of sulphur in the upper atmosphere. Health impacts would be vastly reduced while cooling would be preserved and spread more evenly.
This is not to say that such a “stratospheric veil” would not have implications. It would change the pattern of warmth in the climate, and the winds and ocean currents the Earth uses to move warmth around might behave differently in response. It would also change the water cycle: sunlight is what drives evaporation, and if it is turned down a little, the water cycle will slow down, with less evaporation and less rainfall. This effect is not necessarily dangerous, but it is worth watching—and the thicker the veil, the more problematic it would be. In a world with no emissions reductions and an ever thickening veil to balance an ever thickening greenhouse, this hydrological effect would become ever more extreme. That is one of the reasons why Ken Caldeira, a respected Stanford climate scientist who pioneered geoengineering modelling, insists that any such scheme happen only alongside emissions cuts.
But Crutzen did not imagine thickening the veil continuously. He didn’t even imagine making it thick enough to deal with all the warming associated with carbon dioxide, as most studies have done. He only imagined it thick enough to offset the cooling lost from other pollution reduction. Accepting that geoengineering can be worthwhile even with quite small effects is an important part of understanding its potential application. For example, choosing crops with lighter leaves is a minor geoengineering proposal that would have only a small effect at the global scale, and is therefore discounted by many people. But it should have an effect, and one felt most strongly in summers in the temperate north, where it could hedge against heat waves.
Turning down the sunshine tap is only half the geoengineering story. The other half, clearing the drain, can be done in numerous ways: trees, energy crops, blooms of algae, chemical engineering or hastening the natural reactions between rocks and carbon dioxide that go on in the slow reaches of geological time. Carbon dioxide could be stored in depleted oil fields, in aquifers, or in the ocean depths; biomass could be ploughed into soil in the form of charcoal, or chemically reclaimed carbon dioxide could be transformed into solid carbonate rocks. This range of techniques fits our moral intuitions; if you make a mess, you should clean it up. It also offers hope on ocean acidification. Because of this, such geoengineering by means of carbon dioxide removal is becoming positively mainstream, at least for long-term planning. It offers a way to reduce temperatures from whatever peak they might reach. Nasa climate scientist James Hansen along with other environmentalists (and an increasingly high-profile group called 350.org) argue that the long-term stability of the icecaps needs a lower carbon-dioxide level than today’s. If so, then this can only be guaranteed by the use of some sort of removal technology.
If humans already had the technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as fast as they put it in, a large part of the climate problem would be dealt with. But there is nothing like that capacity at present. Artificial ways of capturing carbon dioxide from the air are still in their infancy. Geological storage of carbon dioxide has yet to be demonstrated on large scales. Forestry schemes large enough to make a big dent require plantations the size of countries. In very rough terms, a removal system capable of dealing with the world’s emissions would be on a similar scale to the industries that mine, pump, refine and transport the fossil fuels responsible for those emissions, and would use similar amounts of energy. Mining, gas and oil are big industries.
While in the near term there is no way that carbon removal can take up more than a tiny fraction of emissions, in the long term such technology will get cheaper and more efficient. But believing that carbon dioxide emitted today can be mopped up later is potentially dangerous. All the time carbon is in the atmosphere it heats the world. So, just as you get a mismatch in the spatial pattern of warming if you heat the world with greenhouse gases while cooling it by turning down the sunshine tap, you can also get a mismatch in time if you heat the world with greenhouse gases and only later take them away by unblocking the drain. Emit a tonne of carbon dioxide today and mop it up in 50 years, and you still have the 50 years of warming to cope with.
Still, in the long term carbon dioxide removal is likely to play a significant role, if it gets cheap enough. Schemes to turn down the sunshine tap could make a difference sooner, as they would be relatively easy to deploy. But that does not make them a cheap solution. A stratospheric veil might cost the turnover of one large global company, rather than a whole industry—just the kind of reasonable price that endeared such schemes to the superfreakonomists, and Bjørn Lomborg’s five economists. But to look at the costs of the veil alone misses the bigger picture. If you accept that there is no merit in a world where the greenhouse effect gets stronger and the stratospheric veil gets thicker (and the climate anomalies caused by the mismatch between the two get worse) then the costs of geoengineering become additional to the costs of emissions reduction, not a substitute for them.
This is not to say that geoengineering could offer no economic advantages. Shortly after Paul Crutzen’s 2006 article, Tom Wigley, a respected climate scientist then at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, looked at ways of combining emissions reduction and sunlight reduction. Wigley suggested that sulphates might be squirted into the stratosphere in the near term as a way to slow the rate of warming and buy time for the massive and costly industrial shift to alternative energy. Wigley’s “buying time” approach has not enjoyed much enthusiasm from other researchers, who fear that it will reduce the sense of urgency needed to drive emissions elimination. The Royal Society report spoke for many in treating geoengineering techniques only as an insurance policy. But this is also inconsistent. Rejecting the Wigley scenario reflects a view that political decision-making cannot summon the nuanced, self-disciplined approach needed to geoengineer a little without losing your commitment to reducing emissions a lot. The “Plan B” scenario rests on a political process with characteristics just as unlikely: it requires schemes to be researched in depth but to stay unused until (but only until) some unspecified assessment commanding international political assent deems disaster imminent but not unavoidable. Good luck with that.
Whichever scenario you prefer, both require research into how to make the various schemes work and what their effects might be. Some of this can be done with models, but field trials will also be desirable, especially with schemes that aim to affect clouds. Here Britain may have something to offer. The number and size of the water droplets in a cloud depends on the number of tiny particles called “condensation nuclei” in the air. Other things being equal more droplets makes for a brighter, whiter, more reflective cloud. Over the oceans, where there is a dearth of condensation nuclei, clouds are less white. In 1990 a British cloud physicist (and poet), John Latham, suggested that adding condensation nuclei in the form of a fine mist of sea salt might brighten maritime clouds enough to cool the climate. No one paid much attention, but a decade or so later Stephen Salter, a wildly inventive marine engineer at Edinburgh University, got wind of the idea and talked to Latham about schemes whereby such particles might be made. He hit on the idea of a fleet of thousands of wacky-looking sailing ships, using electricity from underwater turbines to spray up the required mist of tiny particles.
Set against the alternative of pumping or lifting a million tonnes of sulphur into the stratosphere every year, the idea of simply spraying up sea salt seems eminently feasible. Add the amiable presence of elderly British academics and hardware that looks like something out of Thunderbirds, and the idea appears charming. Real questions remain as to whether it would work—not just questions about how such cooling, if applied to relatively small patches of the ocean, would affect the global climate, but also more basic questions about whether the particles would actually get into the clouds, and whether the clouds would get whiter. Yet a limited field trial could be carried out quickly, and with minimal if any environmental risk—albeit probably not without some objections.
Such trials look even more plausible if put in the context of another cooling process that is being reversed: that of sulphur emissions from shipping. As mentioned before, the global shipping industry burns sulphur-rich fuel, and the sulphate particles from that fuel produce much of their cooling effect by brightening clouds. The industry’s carbon emissions—roughly the same as Germany’s—are likely to be regulated before too long, but are nevertheless rising. Its sulphate emissions, meanwhile, came under new regulation in 2008, and will be pretty much phased out by 2020. So relatively obscure shipping regulations designed to protect public health near ports and shipping lanes will inadvertently commit the world to a significant extra warming. Looked at this way, the case for trialling systems that deliberately try to restore a similar cooling, with no damage to health, seems strong.
Crafting policy approaches to geoengineering that treat it neither as pariah nor panacea will be hard—perhaps, in the end, impossible. Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who works on geoengineering ideas in an adversarial but fair way, has put together an impressive list of “20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.” Some of these can be firmed up or crossed off the list by further research, and he has deleted three since the list was first published in 2008. But other problems on Robock’s list are more permanent and troubling—none more so than the question of who controls the process. To see geoengineering as just another form of climate change, as I think we should, is not to deny that it has distinct features. Stratospheric aerosol options, in particular, may be cheap and practical enough to be undertaken by a single country, like China, or even conceivably, a single rich individual, like Richard Branson. In short, climate change could be undertaken unilaterally.
This is a real risk, and one to take seriously. But it is perhaps not as unusual as it seems. Countries, especially large ones, already have powers beyond their borders. But a repertoire of tactics exists to restrain their use. An individual, or a small country, that tried to geoengineer could easily be forced to desist, militarily if need be. For bigger powers there is less that can be done. But there are already lots of tensions between large powers—over trade, economics, nuclear proliferation and indeed climate. Geoengineering might sharpen such questions, but climate issues are already effectively in the hands of China, America and Europe.
The lack of a system of governance for something as potentially powerful as geoengineering is alarming. But so is the lack of an effective system of governance for most of the rest of climate change. In trying to put together such a system, as at the Copenhagen summit, people and governments have accepted the idea that something can be done, that at least some of the responses of Earth’s system can be predicted, that the risks of climate change can, in some way, be governed, and that there are ways of choosing between better outcomes and worse ones. They are, in short, seeking to manage the risks of climate change. To research, judiciously, new technical means by which to do so is not to change the game, but simply to expand its possibilities. It is a natural outcome of taking climate change seriously—not as a single problem with a specific solution, but as the context in which the next century’s history is going to be made.
David King
The science of climate change is clear, despite those leaked UEA emails. The technology to tackle the problem either exists, or is on its way. Now we need to handle the finance. That’s why putting a price on carbon was the most important negotiating point at the Copenhagen summit. It’s also why the next government needs to consider a radical new step: parachuting climate scientists and energy technologists into the Bank of England.
Post-Copenhagen, the world must work towards a global cap-and-trade scheme, in which all carbon dioxide emitted comes with a paid-for permit. If a country doesn’t control its emissions, it will pay through penalties. But this global scheme must also be underpinned by new, innovative national measures. Gordon Brown did well in this regard in 1998 with his “renewables obligation,” requiring power companies to put a rising amount of renewable energy on the grid. With the proceeds he created both the Carbon Trust and the Energy Saving Trust, two independent
bodies that have already proved their mettle in the fight against climate change.
However, I have the sense—just as when I was the government’s chief scientist—that Alistair Darling’s treasury is now pulling in the wrong direction. The wasted opportunity of the current economic stimulus package was a case in point. Most of that money could have been directed into low-carbon projects, such as energy efficiency boosts for our ageing housing stock. This also would put unemployed construction workers back to work. South Korea committed 80 per cent of its stimulus money to low-carbon growth. Even China managed 50 per cent. How shaming and frustrating, then, that Britain limped in with barely 10 per cent.
Even without climate change, there is no economic case for the high-carbon status quo. The world spends $1.7 trillion a year on Gulf oil alone. Britain should instead invest its share of this in home-grown energy, boosting the economy and reducing unemployment—the treasury’s own economic goals.
We should welcome the shadow chancellor George Osborne’s declaration that he wants to put the treasury at the heart of the fight against climate change. Indeed, half a dozen Tory speeches outlined an impressive range of measures in late November, from a so-called “green investment bank” to a commitment to cut emissions from government itself more quickly.
But there is a deep-rooted problem that needs to be tackled first. Our economic mandarins are caught in a trap. At best, the treasury sees carbon reduction as a distraction from their primary focus: GDP growth, reducing unemployment, and raising productivity. At worst, they follow the Nigel Lawson school: that even if climate change is real, we should let pure markets operate to solve it. The same is often true for central bankers, who rarely even consider carbon as an important byproduct of a stable money supply and low inflation.
And yet climate change has shown how spectacularly impure markets can be. It is the granddaddy of market failure. The only effective response will be market collaboration, with a global carbon price. At the national level, it must also mean putting climate change right into our nation’s economic heart: the old lady of Threadneedle street herself.
The problem is that any big levers the government might support—carbon pricing, long-term rules forcing more renewables and nuclear energy into the grid, much higher road tax and congestion charges—could be partially undone by the Bank of England, if monetary policy is used to push for less sustainable patterns of growth. So what to do? The obvious option is simply to relocate the climate change committee—to the Bank itself. Established under the 2008 Climate Change Act, the committee is an arm’s length government body—just like the Bank—designed to keep tabs on government emissions. Every five years it holds them accountable for their carbon budget. When I was in government, I recommended bringing energy, climate change and the environment together under one roof: now the new department of energy and climate change (DECC) is well placed to resolve conflicts between the energy industry and the environmental lobby. Similarly, we need to make sure that the Bank of England’s management of the economy is always done with an eye on the carbon implications, and vice versa.
In the first instance, the chairman of the climate change committee should be on Mervyn King’s board of governors. Better still would be if the committee as a whole were run under the Bank’s auspices, so that their respective secretariats were constantly rubbing shoulders and comparing notes. In practice, the climate committee’s staff could also take part in the monthly behind-closed-doors debate at the Bank about the economy and interest rates—known internally as the “Pre-MPC” process—feeding in relevant data to help inform a sustainable monetary policy. A climate expert should be appointed to the Bank of England “court,” its advisory body. And most radically, why not have a climate scientist or an energy technologist on the monetary policy committee itself? Generally there is one labour market economist in the group to stop the monetarists riding roughshod over the jobless. Unemployment is not a price worth paying for low inflation. Climate change isn’t either.
Gregory Norminton
Perhaps I ought not to have accepted the invitation to debate climate change deniers. I’m a novelist and writer by trade. But I’m also passionate about the environment, so when the University of St Andrews invited me to speak for the motion “This House Believes Global Warming is a Global Crisis” earlier this year I accepted. I had never taken part in a university debate before—shouting at the radio was scarcely adequate training.
In the debate, Richard Courtney spoke first for the opposition. A lifelong “big coal” man, he appears to have modelled his public speaking on end-of-the-pier comedians. He was outdone, however, for bravura nuttiness by Nils-Axel Morner, a Swedish geologist who played up to his audience so outrageously that one almost wondered at the absence of balloon animals.
My fellow proponents of the motion were Ross Finnie MSP and Mike Robinson of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. They had given measured speeches within their allotted seven minutes, yet I could sense that mild-mannered reason might not prevail against pantomime.
I was speaking last for the motion and the most tenacious of our opponents would follow me. This was Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley: failed politician and Sudoku genius. He appears occasionally as an “expert” on such US television programmes as Fox News’ Glenn Beck Show, where he spouts pseudo-science with a ferocity that has earned him, one climate scientist friend tells me, the nickname Count Cuckoo.
“How do you deal with someone like that?” I had asked my friend before the debate. He replied: “Don’t ask me—I’d rather wrestle a pit bull.”
There is an inherent dilemma in tackling climate change deniers. Engage with them and you give them credibility; ignore them and they will claim to have you running scared. Richard Courtney has published his account of the debate online, and his post is pasted in full on blogs such as ilovecarbondioxide.com and Stop the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). As one might deduce, the names of these blogs are revealing. Climate change denial involves a weird cabal of conspiracy theorists, extreme libertarians and cold warriors in search of a new bogeyman. That this lefty conspiracy includes such well-known Marxist organisations as the Pentagon and the papacy is overlooked; but then denialists are expert at ignoring whatever displeases them.
The loud assertion of fake, untested or scientifically discredited claims is precisely the tactic they employ to overwhelm and bamboozle their audience. I should know: in the course of the debate, we found ourselves visiting a topsy-turvy world where Arctic sea ice is thickening even as it vanishes; where Greenland is called Greenland because a few hundred years ago it was positively leafy; where global warming is really global cooling and where the greenhouse effect—which doesn’t exist—is fortuitously keeping new glaciations at bay.
Having had to endure this stuff, I was quaking with indignation when I came to speak, almost shouting down attempts at intervention. “Sit down,” I said to Courtney, “you’ve made enough of a fool of yourself already.” I looked like the kind of bug-eyed fanatic I was actually opposing. They had got me: I may have brought passion and fiery rhetoric to our side of the debate, but exposure to nonsense had turned me into the Mad Hatter.
My worst mistake came when I pointed out that my opponents were not scientists. Monckton interrupted to claim that they were. “So was Dr Mengele,” I shot back. But this allowed Monckton to stand up and demand a point of order with all the indignation he could muster. He has a plentiful supply and it carried him through his own summing up: a wild denunciation that combined McCarthyite name-calling with pompous Latin.
In the end, our motion won 57 votes to 42 against, but there were sufficient abstentions to prevent it from being carried. I didn’t think this reflected well on the young minds at St Andrews. Then again, Monckton and Courtney had brought about a dozen friends with them to bolster their vote. They celebrated as if they had won the lottery.
We gathered afterwards in an Indian restaurant, where each side avoided sitting with the other. One of the students, a fogeyish buffer, told me cheerfully: “Of course they were talking nonsense but I voted for them all the same because—well, they were so entertaining that I thought I ought to encourage them.”
I can now offer the following hard-won tips for anyone considering debating climate change deniers:
- Don’t.
- If you must, consider ingesting some form of tranquiliser.
- Study the stagecraft of Bernard Manning.
- Be up-to-date: know your Aristotle!
- No matter the provocation, avoid Nazi analogies like the plague.
- Bring plenty of friends.
- Just don’t.
For more information on the climate change debate click here.
Various
“We are as incapable of saving the planet as a goat is of being a gardener”
James Lovelock, scientist
Copenhagen is not far from Munich. Let us not make a greater mistake than was made 71 years ago. We suspect that dangerous climate change may soon be due, but with no more confidence than we had in 1938 about the second world war. A few lone voices, like that of James Hansen, warn that CO2 is 390ppm and rising, which places the earth in unexplored territory, something that is unprecedented in over 2m years of history.
Copenhagen will be infested by ideologues and political and commercial lobbies aiming for short-term profit; it will be tempting to assume that a green yet profitable environmental business policy is all we need. This could not be more wrong: human survival itself is at risk.
There may be little that we can do but adapt to climate change; we are as incapable of “saving the planet” as a goat is of being a gardener. But, through our nascent intelligence and communication, we are a valued evolutionary step for the Earth; our emergence could be compared in significance with that of those tiny organisms who used sunlight to make oxygen. It has taken Gaia 3.5bn years to evolve humans. It would be sad for her to lose us through our own stupidity.
“We need to get serious about smarter technological solutions, not cuts”
Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”
Copenhagen does matter. Climate is a public good, and we all have a stake in a sensible outcome. Unfortunately, politicians are focusing on promising drastic carbon cuts. Kyoto showed that these promises will go unfulfilled because cutting carbon without a viable replacement is incredibly challenging. When it is feasible, it is a hugely expensive way of doing a tiny amount of good. Look at Germany, which pays €120bn (£110bn) in subsidies for solar panels that will postpone warming by one hour in 2100. We need to get serious about smarter solutions: researching into climate engineering (as a low-cost way of buying more time) and green energy (vital if we are going to shift away from fossil fuels sustainably). Unless policymakers make these central to Copenhagen, any deal will be a failure and our efforts will only have wasted another decade.
“Leaders need to focus on the international dimension”
Zac Goldsmith, environmentalist and politician
All rational people know that without a major shift, we are going to hit a wall, and yet, still, that terrifying truth has almost no bearing on actual policy decisions. Sooner or later, this is going to have to change and Copenhagen gives world leaders that chance.
I want to see tough targets for emissions reductions, mechanisms for helping poorer countries adapt and, crucially, a formula for putting real value on the services provided by forests so that they are worth more standing than destroyed.
Clearly it will be for individual countries to find their own ways of doing these things, and each may choose a different course. It will be for citizens and national campaign groups to maintain huge domestic pressure. But for now, we must focus on the international dimension. If leaders fail to do this, the effect will be crushing.
Zac Goldsmith’s book, “The Constant Economy,” is published by Atlantic
“What should an American climate deal look like?”
Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus, The Breakthrough Institute, Washington DC
The US senate will not pass climate legislation this year, maybe not even next. President Obama’s climate tsar, Carol Browne, has bleakly declared: “We will go to Copenhagen and manage with whatever we have.” This means moving away from unenforceable emissions targets towards shared investments in low-carbon technologies. The failure of some Kyoto-ratifying countries to cut their emissions gives the US a case for switching the focus from pollution regulation to technology investment.
China is already poised to massively out-spend and out-compete the US in everything from solar panels to nuclear reactors, and so a new treaty should include, rather than exclude, China and other large developing nations. Technology has the potential to bring nations together. After the second world war, the European Coal and Steel Community did just that: it was so successful that it is today simply the European Union. It’s the EU—not national air pollution laws—that should be the inspiration for a new agreement in Copenhagen.
“Obama won’t save us—it’s up to China”
Philip Ball, science writer and Prospect contributing editor
Copenhagen will provide another opportunity to gauge the political climate on global warming. That’s about as far as it goes. I’m pessimistic about the likely outcome, partly because not enough groundwork has been done in advance and partly because the current economic crisis will make it even harder for nations to commit funds for engineering change, or accept any slowdown in growth. But on past experience, we’d have no reason for optimism even if times were good. It’s just not clear any longer that international agreements on emissions targets are going to be the way forward. I anticipate what some have called a “greenwash”: pious acknowledgement of the problem, accompanied by the announcement of plans that nations have already decided anyway. Obama won’t save us here; in the end, it may be what China decides that really matters.
Philip Ball’s book “The Music Instinct” (Bodley Head) will be published in spring 2010
“Britain needs an ambitious new government to deliver change”
Greg Barker MP, shadow minister for climate change
It is vital that an equitable and effective global deal is reached at Copenhagen. That means making sure that the world’s poorest people are treated fairly. It means securing the protection of the world’s rainforests. But most of all, it means that any agreement on carbon pollution must be capable of limiting global warming to two degrees.
Despite the warnings of climate catastrophe, we must chart a positive course. Transforming to a global low-carbon economy is a chance to strengthen our economy, help guarantee energy security as well as protect our planet for future generations. There is a growing consensus on this type of approach in Britain, as the left realises that new markets and business innovation are as much a part of the answer as decisive action by governments; but sharing rhetoric is not enough. Britain must lead by example.
As yet, we don’t have sufficiently ambitious policies in place to even begin to build the dynamic low carbon economy, politicians are fond of evoking. We aren’t even on the starting blocks. Business can respond, trillions of dollars of investment can flow, new markets can grow and new technology can come forth if governments give a clear lead and set a firm, long-term policy framework. At Copenhagen we must help chart that course, then, here in Britain, we will need an ambitious new government to deliver that change.
“Copenhagen is a do-or-die mission”
Graciela Chichilnisky, Kyoto architect
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was the first of its kind: an agreement to limit global carbon emissions and, within these limits, a new market that I created, based on trading user rights to the global atmospheric commons. Kyoto is not perfect, but it contains the building blocks to a more sustainable future. Yet it expires in 2012. Copenhagen is our last chance to complete the process, a “do or die” mission to avert global warming.
To achieve this we must first diffuse the impasse on emissions between China and the US, reach a binding global agreement on emissions post 2012, and find a way to assist developing nations in achieving cleaner industrialisation. I propose a modest innovation of the carbon market and a modest expansion of existing law to incorporate “negative carbon” technologies and provide substantial funding for Africa, Latin America and small island states towards this goal.
We must bring the US into the Kyoto Protocol or its successor; a significant reduction of global emissions targets, and offering financial and technical assistance to developing nations so they can reduce emissions now and in the future.
Graciela Chichilnisky worked extensively for Kyoto, creating and designing the carbon market that became international law in 2005 and acted as a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. She is the author of Saving Kyoto (New Holland, £8.99).
“Not enough progress has been made for a proper agreement”
Henry Derwent, president of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)
Copenhagen ought to matter very much. The need to agree a new set of emissions reduction targets is urgent. And the need to seal that agreement in the global forum that only the UN bodies can provide is obvious. But for many reasons, not enough progress has been made to create the basis for a detailed agreement that fills in all the necessary numbers. Broad consensus and clear instructions from ministers to the negotiators is probably the most we can hope for. Even that will be hard without seriously addressing the needs and expectations of poorer countries for funding the de-carbonisation of their development and for adaptation. Fortunately, domestic action, including the use of cost-effective emissions trading, is now accelerating around the world. That is not dependent on a Copenhagen agreement, though it would move further and faster if there were one.
“Deforestation is costing the world’s economy €1.3 to 3.4 trillion every year”
Tristram Stuart, author of “Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal”
Deforestation creates roughly 20 percent of all global emissions, so it clearly has to be included in any meaningful attempt to curb climate change. But there are dangerous pitfalls to be avoided. It would be counterproductive merely to allow forested developing countries to accrue carbon credits for “avoiding” deforestation, and then sell those credits to rich countries eager to offset their own emissions. This would introduce such a flood of carbon credits that the price of carbon would be devalued, and disincentivise efforts to reduce fossil-fuel emissions through green technologies, for example.
The effectiveness of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) depends on the EU and other rich countries depositing money into a multilateral forest fund. It must be sufficiently well-endowed to make it more profitable for a developing world country to leave its forest intact rather than to replace it with palm oil plantations, fields of soya, or cattle ranches. The fund must also be created immediately after this year’s Copenhagen summit—not in 2013 by which time a further 40m hectares of forest will have been vaporised. Deforestation and forest degradation is costing the world’s economy €1.3 to 3.4 trillion every year. In October 2008, the European Commission estimated that halving tropical deforestation by 2020 would cost between €15 and €25bn. But halving is not enough. It must be stopped. We have a chance, and our political leaders must seize it, for our own good, the good of our children, for the indigenous peoples who depend on the forests, and for the good of all the other wonderful species we will otherwise wipe off the face of the earth.
“To fail in Copenhagen is to invite chaos into our lives as a permanent guest”
Tom Burke, founding director of sustainable development company E3G
History is punctuated by the names of places where order was restored after chaos prevailed: Westphalia, Versailles, San Francisco. What happens—or does not—in Copenhagen in December will do more to shape human destiny, for longer, than any of them. Terrible though the consequences of war and recession are, they pass. Climate change is forever. To fail in Copenhagen is to invite chaos into our lives as a permanent guest.
Our political leaders told us in July that a rise in temperature of more than two degrees celsius is dangerous. Our scientists tell us that greenhouse gas emissions must peak globally before 2020 to have any chance of staying below two degrees. If what is agreed in Copenhagen does not put us unequivocally on track for two degrees it will have failed. Ignore the spin. Count the commitments. It’s the numbers, stupid.
“Capitalism is the root cause of climate problems”
Paul Kingsnorth
Copenhagen will fail, either because no deal will be done or—more likely—because targets will be set lower than the science demands, and will not then be met in any case. I hope this failure will cause the environmental movement to re-evaluate its approach and its strategy. In future, rather than pressing heads of government to prevent a problem that is now beyond preventing, I hope the greens will focus more honestly on the root cause of both climate change and the world’s other environmental threats: capitalism.
At present, environmentalists are in denial about this, at least in public. But the leaders they petition to prevent emissions are the same people whose avowed public mission is to promote ceaseless growth. The circle cannot be squared as things stand. Copenhagen may prove to be the moment when the dam bursts.
Paul Kingsnorth is the author of “Real England” and co-founder of The Dark Mountain project
“We won’t get what we need in December—but Copenhagen could still be a huge success”
Chris Rapley, Science Museum
The need to peak human carbon emissions and shift to a “decarbonised” global economy has been apparent for a long time—certainly since the Rio conference in 1992. If we had taken effective action back then, the task would have been much easier: the necessary rate of reduction would have been significantly less (1 per cent per year relative to 3 per cent per year now, or 6 per cent per year if the peak occurs later than 2015).
I picture Copenhagen as if the 192 nations present were sitting around the remaining pile of 500 thousand million tons carbon equivalent of coal, oil and gas, deciding who gets what when and for what purpose. For the sake of world stability, part of the remaining fuel must be used to achieve greater equity worldwide, while part is essential for “keeping the wheels on society”—after all, we are all utterly dependent on our energy flow to survive. The rest must be invested in developing new technologies. It can still be done, but it gets harder every day, because we are burning carbon in ever greater quantities.
I am hoping for an historic step forward—but this may be elusive this December. Nevertheless, Copenhagen could still be a huge success if it resulted in a clear and legally binding process to arrive at such commitments, say, within a further year. Ulimately, history will decide whether it’s a success or a failure. I will be satisfied if there is a Science museum in South Kensington in 100 years time to explain how success was implemented.
David Goodhart
To whom do we owe obligations? With whom do we feel solidarity? These are two of the oldest questions in politics, but they are posed in a stark new way by the fallout from climate change. Most people in rich countries feel a vague sense of obligation and even empathy towards those struggling to get by in poor countries, but they practise a much stronger sense of “fellow citizen favouritism” towards the people in their own nations. And it is good that they do. Without such favouritism there would be no point to the nation state. This does not, however, mean that national solidarity must conflict with global solidarity—if anything it seems to be a condition of it. In recent years the British government has sharply increased both domestic social spending and global aid, and the rich countries most generous with aid have high levels of national solidarity too.
Yet will rich-country citizens really make big sacrifices to stop Bangladesh from disappearing in 25 years’ time? Is it even plausible to expect rich countries to accept the principle that the right to emit carbon should be equally shared across the world’s population? After all, as Vijay Joshi points out on p15 of our Copenhagen special, no one argues that natural resources like oil should be equally shared, and it is not clear that rich-country citizens should be forced to pay for having done something (using up the safe, carbon-absorbing capacity of the atmosphere) unwittingly. Yet the Copenhagen summit will commit rich countries to very large transfers of resources to poor ones, in order to limit their emissions without choking off growth. Understandably, legitimacy for this idea has been sought on grounds of self-interest, not global solidarity: rich-country politicians argue (see Ed Miliband, p21 of the Copenhagen special) that we too will suffer the floods or have to fend off the migrating masses if the climate turns nasty.
The problem is not that our politicians are being sneaky about the degree of altruism we are being asked to show; and the vast sums of money look more manageable when spread over decades. The real trouble is that, except in wartime, western democracies are not good at appealing to citizens’ “better selves” to make sacrifices for their own futures—it is distance in time more than place that makes it so hard to respond to climate change. Authoritarian China has shown that it can do economic growth as well as the democracies (at least in the early stages). And if climate pessimists are right and big lifestyle changes are required, authoritarianism may prove good at that too (see China’s one child policy). The fact that China seems likely to bring more to Copenhagen than the US could be a straw in the wind.
Sam Knight
So here we are. Copenhagen. Showtime. In the course of 11 days this December, the leaders of the world must agree on their self-appointed task of saving it. Seventeen years after they first convened at the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio and acknowledged the threat of global warming, the calamity has advanced on every front. The ice is melting, the waters are drying or rising, the birds and the beasts and the bees are dying. Yet humanity, perversely, flourishes—since that summit, the world’s population has grown by 1.5bn and it will grow again by 50 per cent by 2050 to a total of 9bn, just when our worst prophecies may be coming to a head. Nature’s breakdown will be society’s. And for this reason, climate change has joined our everyday thinking. We hear about it on the news. We see it even where it is not there: on balmy winter mornings and in the mottled outbreaks in the garden. Its invisible, enveloping nature has made it part of our human lament. We worry about putting out the recycling but we know this is not enough, because everything we do now—stay too long in the shower, eat a foreign vegetable, fly off on a foreign holiday—is making it worse. Our condition, our comfort, is killing the polar bears, and it is going to kill us too.
So what can 11 days in Copenhagen do about it? The aim is to conclude a new global political agreement on how to stop the damage. Whatever is agreed at Copenhagen will come into force on 1st January 2013, and supersede the last attempt to save the environment, the Kyoto protocol. Kyoto took aim at the emissions of six greenhouse gases (mostly CO2, methane and nitrous oxide) that have upset the preindustrial, prelapsarian blend of air in the earth’s atmosphere. Adopted on 11th December 1997, the treaty bound by law the world’s 37 richest countries (a group known as “Annex 1”) to cut their emissions by 5.2 per cent from 1990 levels by 2012. America pulled out of the negotiating process (and has increased its emissions by almost 20 per cent since 1990) but much of the rest of the rich world stuck with it and now, in 2009, it looks like we will make it. Some countries, like Spain, Italy and South Korea, will miss their targets, but as a group, we are on target—a corrective to the critics who dismiss Kyoto as a failure. True, the collapse of heavy industry in the Soviet Union has been the biggest single contributor to cutting global emissions since 1990, but other Kyoto-related policies have helped. In 2005, the EU launched the world’s largest carbon-trading market, covering 40 per cent of the bloc’s emissions, and in 2008, helped by the financial crisis, achieved a cut of nearly 3 per cent in a year.
Yet the countries that have, by hook and crook, met their Kyoto obligations now account for only about a quarter of the world’s emissions. The action has moved elsewhere. Now it is the major developing economies of India, China and Brazil, and the millions of people who are buying their first televisions, refrigerators and cars, that are inflicting their first meaningful injuries on the atmosphere. Per head, their emissions are paltry—ten Indians have the carbon footprints of a single European—but as a collective, heading fast down the same fossil-fuelled path that led to this predicament, they have the capacity to finish us off. Greenhouse gas emissions from the developing world account for around 46 per cent of the whole—less than its fair share, but more than enough.
So Copenhagen can, and must, do three things. It must take the cuts agreed by the 37 Annex 1 countries at Kyoto and make them much deeper. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that advises the UN’s climate negotiations, these new cuts must be in the range of 25 to 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. In the longer term, rich countries are under pressure to agree cuts of up to 80 per cent by 2050 (Britain has already signed up to this). Second, Copenhagen must bring the Americans on board. The US may have been surpassed by China as the world’s largest emitter, but the hegemon still produces 20 per cent of the planet’s carbon emissions and its people consume energy like no other. Even more important, Copenhagen needs America because without Washington, without Barack Obama, there is no chance of the talks’ highest and most necessary aim: the devising of the grand pact under which the world’s industrialising billions will agree not to follow the same riches-for-planetary-ruin path that the rest of us have done. The price of placing environmental constraints—“actions” rather than emissions targets—on the economic appetites of China, India, Latin America and Africa will mean tens of billions of dollars and the sharing of green technology. The institutions, the funding and the monitoring to make it work are what need to be resolved. If the deal can be done, Copenhagen could turn the apocalypse into a plan.
***
So who are the people who are going to engineer this covenant? Everyone agrees that Obama and President Hu Jintao of China must attend if there is the chance of something significant being agreed. But it is the figures in the background that I want to introduce, the faces you do not recognise, who have spent the past two years in hotel ballrooms, airport canteens and the offices of environment ministries, haggling and fiddling over paragraphs, phrases and words. These are the men and women of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), unknown delegates from every government on Earth. In the end they will duck out and let their ministers take the glory, or blame, in Copenhagen. But the slender text that is agreed in December is theirs, and the world of rules and rivalries, process and paranoia, in which that text was conceived is their world.
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Alex Renton
Rio das Pedras shantytown in Rio de Janeiro: population control is a vital but ignored part of cutting carbon emissions
Here is a proposition. The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year of their lives, and they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government’s target of an 80 per cent reduction in our emissions by 2050, we must start reversing our rising population growth immediately.
So why not start cutting population everywhere? Are condoms not the greenest technology of all? The world population is forecast to peak at 9.2bn by 2050; according to environmentalists, if 9.2bn people live as we do today, they’ll need the resources of a second Earth to sustain them. Compared to the pain and expense of the other carbon reduction ideas, population control looks like a winner. Doesn’t it?
A September report by the LSE for the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) suggests that if the world’s “unmet need” for contraception was tackled, there would be half a billion fewer human beings on the planet by 2050, preventing the emission of 34 gigatonnes of carbon. Providing the condoms, or other acceptable methods, would cost just $220m (£138m); the introduction of low-carbon technology to produce an equivalent saving would cost over $1 trillion.
The calculation is simplistic, as is any “fewer people = a greener planet” equation. And it doesn’t argue for population control in the developing world. Ninety-five per cent of the extra population in 2050 will be poor, and the poorer you are, the less carbon you emit. By today’s standards, a cull of Australians would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis.
Nonetheless, it seems obvious that population stabilisation should be intrinsic to any climate-change strategy. Many figures outside NGO-land advocate it, from David Attenborough to Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society. So does Anthony Giddens, who in his book The Politics of Climate Change (2009) writes about “the vital importance of a renewed drive on the part of the international agencies to help bring the [population growth] rate down.”
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