Someday, it will be easier to make judgments about which nations are doing their share to face up to the demands of the climate crisis, and which are free riding. Before that fine day dawns, though, two things will have to happen. First, the national pledges of action that countries – northern and southern, large and small – have committed to deliver to the UN Secretariat, the pledges in which they lay out their emission-reduction action plans, have to get a whole lot easier to read and compare and interpret. Conditionalities have to be spelled out, and loopholes have to closed. Second, we have to reach at least a rough international consensus on what different countries, at different levels of development, should do, in the light of historically-informed and principle-based comparisons that take, say, wealth and responsibility into account.
In the meanwhile, we’re stuck with overly-simple approaches based on problematic metrics like, say, per-capita emissions, or rates of decrease in carbon intensity. Or we can just embrace simplicity and compare northern tons to southern tons. The surprising thing is that even such a simple-minded analysis as this produces interesting results. (more…)
A major new report, just released today by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Friends of the Earth Europe, shows that — despite an increasingly widespread sense that climate catastrophe can no longer be averted — radical action, on the necessary scale, is still a very much within the realm of possibility. (more…)
Click here to download a PDF of this paper.
The first phase of the 350 campaign has been a wild success. “350″ is now an international symbol of emergency climate stabilization. More importantly, the 350 target reflects a scientifically-grounded assessment of what global climate protection really means. But what would it actually take to bring the atmospheric carbon-dioxide (CO2) concentration back to 350 parts per million? This memo provides a quick, up-to-date overview of the issues here, which are significant to any plausible emergency emissions-reduction effort. It focuses on the extremely limited size of the global CO2 budget that would remain to us in a 350 ppm future, and on the shape of the emissions pathway that’s needed if we’re to keep within that budget. In particular, it specifies a representative emissions pathway consistent with a 350 ppm concentration target. By way of context, it then compares this 350 pathway to an emission pathway consistent with a 2°C temperature target, and to other, supposedly 2°C-compliant pathways that have significantly lower odds of actually satisfying their target. Finally, it offers a brief glimpse of the challenges that all true emergency climate-reduction targets raise in this North / South divided world.
(more…)
Earlier this year, in preparation for a pre-Copenhagen NGO policy summit, we prepared a framing and background paper called Principle-based Annex 1 Differentiation in the Copenhagen Accord. It’s quite interesting, we think, as a guide to thought and debate, but do note that it was written with an expert audience in mind.
The conference was, we think, quite a successful one. At least it was successful for us, for at it we realized that there was a clear need, one widely perceived within the NGO community, for a new kind of GDRs study, one designed to cast as much light as possible on the effort-sharing debate as we now know it. To move forward with that study, we prepared a detailed Terms of Reference for a study which we call Principle-based burden sharing in an MRV world.
We are now moving ahead on this study, and plan to have it completed prior to the Cancun summit.
We feature this, a pointer to Sharing global CO2 emission reductions among one billion high emitters, since it is in certain ways quite parallel to our own approach. More precisely, the recent proposal by Chakravarty et al., just published in the Proceedings of the [US] National Academy of Sciences, as Greenwire notes, “loosely builds on the idea of ‘greenhouse development rights,’” which is does by by way of analytical machinery quite similar to our own. There are of course differences, which we will note below, but above all we welcome this analysis as an important contribution to the debate.
(more…)
The second edition of the Greenhouse Development Rights book is now available.
Download the entire second edition here. Download a brief (6 pages) nicely laid-out version of the executive summary here. Download the longer (10 pages) version of the executive summary here.
The second edition of the Greenhouse Development Rights book is quite similar to the first, which was published in November of 2007. However, it contains a number of important changes. Many are localized matters of precision and style. But others are more significant:
(more…)
