Climate Equity Observer: Issue number 8

PetroPolitics Global Warming Backgrounder
The events of the last few years - 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq come immediately to mind - should prod us all to admit that our situation is deadly grim. And nothing on the climate front offers evidence to the contrary. Forget the state of the Kyoto protocol. The emerging recognition that the Earth's climate sensitivity is likely to be quite high will generate a special breath of dread, at least in those few of us who follow such matters. 

Climate Equity Observer: Issue number 7

A Northern Call for Southern Leadership
The events of the last few years - 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq come immediately to mind - should prod us all to admit that our situation is deadly grim. And nothing on the climate front offers evidence to the contrary. Forget the state of the Kyoto protocol. The emerging recognition that the Earth's climate sensitivity is likely to be quite high will generate a special breath of dread, at least in those few of us who follow such matters.

First, the Bad News
Lots of our friends are talking about drawing the line at 2ºC of warming. Judging by some of the rumblings we hear from the scientists, though, 2ºC may be harder than we've been admitting. And it may even be too high...

The Writing on the Wall
Just about everyone in the climate community has drawn conclusions from the North/South standoff at the last climate conference. We've drawn some too, and they may surprise you. In any case, there's more than one kind of denial in the air. There's also political denial, and we have to stop it!

Adequacy and Equity: Three Focal Questions
Shortly before his death, the Tellus Institute's Steve Bernow, working with Sivan Kartha, wrote this lapidary little piece. It's his last essay, and it bears reading, and not just if you miss Steve.  

A CEO Interview: Michael Grubb
We did this interview just after COP8... Still, what's to say? We've been busy, and distracted. There was that war... Actually, Michael's comments are only the more interesting for the delay.

A CEO Book Review: The Party's Over, Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies
Richard Heinberg argues that the end of the cheap-oil era is in now sight. He is, moreover, skeptical, sophisticated, and thought provoking. And brave: he even draws conclusions! And he emphatically does not think that it's going to be easy.

Climate Equity Observer: Issue number 6

Calling All Realists
If climate protection became a drive for genuine sustainable development, then even self-interested Southern elites would develop a keen interest in it, and for the most practical of reasons: It would offer them tangible benefits in their areas of greatest concern, areas like trade and investment...

The Science of Drawing the Line
Our goal here is hardly comprehensive. We suffer no illusion that we can summarize climate science as a whole. But we do think that can distill out the part of the science that bears most immediately on the core problem of drawing the line.

Should the climate negotiations try to cap CO2 pollution in the atmosphere at 550 parts per million (ppm), 450 ppm, or some other (hopefully lower) figure? Or should we take an entirely different approach and try to cap temperature change itself, rather than CO2 pollution? And what must we know about the kinds of impacts and instabilities that can be expected at any given level?

We should care deeply about these questions, and about the calculations they inevitably involve, for behind them lie choices of life and death for millions of people, and survival or extinction for thousands of species. So bear with us as we discuss concentration caps, radiative forcing, climate sensitivity, and the problem of "business as usual." In the end, we'll try to show how "dry" science, by clarifying our real conditions of life, is the essential foundation of any just climate treaty.   

Climate Equity Observer: Issue number 5

The End of the End of History
G.W. Bush was appointed president by the Supreme Court. The stock market bubble burst. The Bonn Compromise marked the end of the beginning of the climate battle. And of course September 11th and all it portends. Seems to us that history is actually on the move.

After Marrakech
COP7 is over, and now there's The Marrakech Dilution of the Bonn Compromise to the Kyoto Protocol. What do we think? Only that round one is over. This is not a good deal, but there's no reason to believe that a better one was possible in the past, or will be possible in the future if this one is derailed. It's time to look forward.

Blowback
The battle, now, is for the soul of realism. The new political divide is between those willing to connect the dots and those who refuse. And the stakes are high. As John le Carré put it: "Suggesting there is a historical context for the recent atrocities is by implication to make excuses for them. Anyone who is with us doesn't do that. Anyone who does, is against us."

A War of Coalitions
So now we have the Climate Protection Coalition and the Anti-Terror Coalition, and they're on the same planet at the same time. Is this a problem? Absolutely. Do we know what's likely to happen? Absolutely not. We do have some ideas, however, and if you're wondering how climate is going to play into the larger "global justice" movement, you just may be interested.

Climate Equity Observer: Issue number 4

A Tale of Two Cities
This analysis of the linked destinies of the climate equity and global justice movements was written in August and then put aside to settle. After September 11, we decided to defer its publication, and since then our assessment has inevitably been overtaken by events. This, however, is true of most everything that’s been written about Bonn. And as these movements strike us as more important than ever, we have decided to go ahead and publish this, our analysis of the Bonn Compromise. It was updated a bit after 9/11, but not much.

Climate Equity Observer: Issue number 3

Raise a Glass to Kyoto
Kyoto was never more than a first step, but when the US overplayed its hand, what a first step it turned out to be! Whatever happens now, the battle over Kyoto has changed the politics of the post-Cold War world. And not a moment too soon.

The Pew Climate Equity Conference
Back in April, Pew hosted a Washington conference on Climate Equity. The air was ringing with Bush's rejection of Kyoto, but the topic was still equity, and if you paid attention and closed your eyes, you could almost see the shape of things to come.

Who Owns the Sky?
A new book, Who Owns the Sky? sets out to make a case for a US “Sky Trust” as a fair but realistic way of managing the transition away from carbon-based fuels. It’s an important proposal, and it helps to put the neglected issue of domestic equity on the agenda. And it actually makes sense.

The EcoEquity Interview: Wolfgang Sachs
Wolfgang Sachs, editor of The Development Dictionary, co-author of Greening the North, and recently a co-author of the first chapter of the Third Assessment Report’s Working Group 3 report on mitigation (which contains the TAR’s most explicit discussion of equity) gave us time for a long and often surprising interview.

Climate Equity Observer: Issue number 2

Europe at the Crossroads
It's hard for Americans, even progressive Americans, to imagine a future in which the U.S. is no longer the "indispensable country." This is as true when it comes to climate politics as it is in any other area, and for much the same reason-the U.S. looms so large that it simply cannot be ignored. We emit, in particular, such a high share of world's carbon that, in the end, any climate regime to which we do not immediately subscribe is doomed to failure.

Or so, at least, it seems ...

John Holdren: Per-Capita by 2015 or 2020
John Holdren is a pretty important guy. He's a professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard, where he directs the Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, and that's just for starters. He's also a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (or at least he was under Clinton, we haven't checked) and he chaired its panel on Energy R&D Strategy for the Climate Change Challenge.

All of which makes it significant that Holdren publicly advocates a phased transition to a climate regime based on per-capita carbon emissions allocations ...

The CEO Interview: Anil Argawal
February 23, 2001

CEO: We were surprised by depth of the equity discussion at COP6, and it seemed to us that it had come some distance from 1990, when you and Sunita published Global Warming in an Unequal World. Do you agree, and if so, how would you characterize the changes? ...

4P or not 4P
When the administration of Bush II decided that it wasn't going to regulate CO2 emissions in the electric utility sector, it also postponed an important debate over the form those regulations will ultimately take, a debate with key implications for climate equity ...

Insurance and the Politics of Equity
At first blush, it might seem that advocating "equity" in the climate negotiations would be a pretty straightforward business. It might also seem that the insurance industry, which despite all its fantastic wealth is uniquely vulnerable to economic ruin as the climate changes, would automatically be on the frontlines of the battle for a workable climate treaty.

Both assumptions would be dead wrong...

Reality Check in China
The US DOE Energy Information Agency recently published a rollup of 1990 to 1999 carbon emissions for most countries. As you can easily see from the tables collected on the ...

Climate Equity Observer: Issue number 1

HELLO WORLD!
This is the first issue of Climate Equity Observer.

Its purpose, since you asked, is to put a single idea onto the agenda. To wit: if we hope to make a soft landing in a tolerable future climate, we're going to have to shift from the initial Kyoto framework to a new "equity framework" based on equal per capita rights to the atmosphere. This idea is already on the table in most of the rest of the world. We want to put it on the agenda in the United States.

Is this a mad, impossible task? We shall see. In the meantime, we plan to approach it in as interesting a way as we can possibly manage. And we have lots of ideas on how to do just that. You might want to hang around for a few issues to see how we do

In CEO #1, we:

1) Introduce ourselves.

2) Offer a climate-equity report back from The Hague. (There's actually a lot to say about "climate equity" and/or "climate justice" at COP6, though you wouldn't know it from most of the coverage.)

3) Tell you about some future issues we will cover.