Originally published by Yes! magazine

You don’t have to leave America to go to the Third World.  I, for example, live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and here, as in all northern megacities, crushing poverty surrounds the comfortable precincts.  I can’t call it “extreme” poverty, for of course it cannot compete with the despair endemic to, say, the north African drought zones.  But when an organization like Remote Area Medical feels compelled to bring its traveling free clinic to The Oakland Coliseum (now, officially, the Oracle Arena), and when thousands stand for long hours to receive basic care they could not hope to afford, the problem is nonetheless clear.  This last April, when the good folks at RAM pulled up stakes and left Oakland for their next stop, it was Haiti.  The America they were leaving was not the “exceptional” America of the official dream.

Obviously, there’s lots to say about this.  And much from which to avert our eyes.  But what else is new?  The apologists say that the poor will be with us always, so how is poverty in Oakland California in any way “news?”  Or poverty more generally, given the now routine brutalities of the new economy?  Or insecurity and suffering more generally still, given the precarious state of the whole global system?  And what, finally, has any of this got to do with climate?  The answer, simply put, is “everything.”  Which is to say that while most economic-justice activists don’t spend much time thinking about the climate crisis, it’s become ridiculously easy to argue that the deficit / budget / tax battle that’s now raging across the wealthy lands of America and Europe is going to have outsized impacts on climate politics both domestic and international.  That in fact it already has.

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Cancun was not a surprise.   Nor was it a failure.  This much is easy to say.

But was it a success?  This is a more difficult question.  I used to have an irritating friend.  Every time you made a strong, implausibly simple claim – something like “Cancun was a success” – he would reply “Compared to what?”  It was a pedantic device, but it worked well enough.  It made you think, which, I suppose, is why it was irritating.

Compared to what the science demands, Cancun was obviously a failure.  The Climate Tracker crew made that clear in an evaluation filed before most people even got home – if the pledges in the Cancun Agreements are delivered upon, but only just barely, the result would be at least 3.2C of warming, and possibly far more – the CO₂ concentration of the atmosphere would be about 650 ppm in 2100.

Why then wasn’t Cancun a failure?  Because, just maybe, it will put us onto a better road.  Because it was so closely managed that, even in the face of immense discord and multi-polarity, it managed to produce a weak – though substantive – agreement.  Because, though doubt is everywhere,  it could be the breakthrough that its partisans claim it is.  Because, in any case, we’ve lived to fight another day, and the UN-based multilateral climate negotiations have been relegitimized, at least for the moment.  Which is why most of the assembled NGOs, citing a pre-Cancun study by UK think tank E3G, decided that the Cancun outcome met the qualifications for the “Lifeline scenario”:

“Skillful diplomacy led by the Mexican Presidency provides just enough substance to move the process forward; and does not compromise environmental integrity of reaching a global deal in the future… This scenario provides sufficient movement on key issues and rolls the negotiation process forwards another year, but must contain a high degree of trust and confidence to prevent moving back into Zombie.”

The Zombie scenario, suffice it to say, would have been worse.

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The first thing to say about the climate negotiations – meeting soon in sunny Mexico – is that they’re teetering at the edge of what, back in the day, we used to call a “legitimation crisis.”  On every side, folks are eager to suggest that the negotiations have become a waste of time.  It’s gotten to the point that people are apologizing for going to Cancun, as if it were bad for their image to be seen at the climate talks.

Which, actually, is an odd turn of events.  Because if ever a moment was critical, it’s this one, midway through the cycle of negotiations (Copenhagen 2009, Cancun 2010, South Africa 2011) that will determine the shape and direction of the post-Kyoto climate regime.  What happens now matters, particularly because, all else being equal, the eventual end of the economic crisis will be accompanied by another rapid rise in global emissions.  The only way to avoid that rise, and many others, is to escape the logic of the business-as-usual world.  Despite the coming low-carbon energy revolution, we can’t expect to make that escape without systems of global cooperation, burden sharing and accountability to help us along, systems that can only be rooted in a fair multilateral accord.  Which is to say that the climate talks may not be fun, and may not even be the main event, but there’s no real hope without them.

Copenhagen, unfortunately, was a grave disappointment, and was quickly followed by a cascade of others: the “Climategate” fiasco, the failure of the beltway realists to deliver a US climate bill, an explosion of denialist populism on the American right, and, of course, the midterm American elections.  Even worse, from the point of view of the climate talks – the success of which depends, in the last instance, on international cost sharing – is the emergence, in Europe as well as the US, of an Austerity Panic Party that pretends, amidst unprecedented inequality and unprecedented wealth, that the North is bankrupt.  The point of the pretense?  To project a story of the future in which declining “foreign aid” is as inevitable as the decimation of domestic social services.

The discouraging pace of the international talks, in other words, is anything but unique.  Right now, nothing is working particularly well.  The US, in particular, is a model of dysfunction, and an eager player in the international “blame game,” which is now in full swing.  Nor is this a simple “climate problem.”  The truth is that the climate challenge is bound tightly to a larger political crisis, and that neither is likely to be resolved without the other.  So, to be clear – there is no “deadlock” in the global negotiations.  Nor is there a “North / South impasse.”  What we’re seeing, rather, is a political and governance disaster of the first order, and despite its many critical international dimensions, it’s a disaster that is centered in the wealthy world.

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The bad news is that the climate/energy push just crashed and burned in the Senate.  The good news is that, in the wake of that crash,  the US climate community is having a robust Big Think.  The last time we had such an exchange was back after what, for lack of a better term, I will call the Great Copenhagen Disappointment.  Which raises an interesting question – do we only debate, openly and seriously, after we lose?

If so, and judging by the situation in Bonn, where an inconclusive post-Copenhagen “intersessional” just shambled a bit closer to December’s rematch in Cancun, we’re up for another round of disputation soon.  Not, of course, that disappointment in Cancun is certain.  It’s still possible that the wealthy countries are going to actually come up with the “fast start finance” that they promised back in Copenhagen.  Maybe they’ll even go beyond fast-start finance, and actually start acting like they want to make a meaningful international deal.  Because, frankly, it’s their move.

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A few days ago, I got mail from a colleague at Climate Action Network International, a communications guy, asking for a comment on the US National Academy of Sciences recent climate reports, or rather on the US emissions budget that is recommended / affirmed in these reports. It turned out to be quite an interesting request.

First up, though, these reports only strengthen the scientific case. For example, the IPCCs 2007 Forth Assessment Report says that sea levels could rise by between 0.6 and 1.9 feet by 2100, but recent studies have suggested that this is far too optimistic. The NAS reports incorporate this newer research and concludes that sea levels could rise by as much as 6.5 feet in during this century.

Second, I was a bit surprised by the way the NAS approached the problem of calculating the US emissions budget. The standard methodology in the climate world is to estimate a remaining global budget (which is hard) and then to work out the share of this budget that properly belongs to each country (which is harder). And you have to admit this approach makes sense; after all, when the US or any country takes a budget, less is left for everyone else; which is why climate, fundamentally, is a sharing problem. Anyway, I expected to find some version of this approach in the NAS reports. How else could they calculate a recommended US budget?

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(Revised, Feb 19, 2010)

(For a snappier version of this analysis — without the charts! — see the Earth Island Journal)

First up, this is not another enumeration of confident judgments. I do not presume that Copenhagen was an unmitigated failure, or that this failure was Obama’s fault, or, as is the fashion, that China was the ugliest of them all. Nor do I suggest that the South’s negotiators made impossible demands. Or argue, with disingenuous resignation, that the UN process is obsolete. Or believe that, finally, only a US breakthrough really matters.

To be sure, Copenhagen was absolutely a failure, in the precise sense that it failed to catapult us into the fair and ambitious global mobilization that’s needed to prevent climate catastrophe. But this was never going to happen. What did happen, as the veteran Bangladeshi policy activist Saleem Huq put it, was a shaking of the traditional pieces of the global geo-political puzzle and their landing in a new and unfamiliar configuration. In this sense, the question of success and failure is moot. The real question is whether this new configuration offers us new ways forward, and if any of them lead beyond the “North / South impasse (a misleading formulation that implies an equal division of blame) to enable a meaningful global mobilization.

This question cannot be answered by the hard, uncompromising pragmatics of campaign logic. This is a time for reflection, not for pushing forward, one more meeting, one more demo, one more demand at a time. This time we need strategy as well as tactics, and we need it fast. 2010, which will culminate with another showdown in December in Mexico, is going to be another big year. As, for that matter, will 2011, and 2012, and all the other years in the brief period just ahead, the post-Copenhagen period in which we must, finally, begin to move.

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It’s been a long time since Copenhagen.

A few weeks after it ended, chatting to a friend about some stupid comments I’d overhead during that long last night, he said that “everyone gets a pass for anything they said during the first week.” The first week after Copenhagen is what he meant — a time of exhaustion and near despair in international climate circles.

I bring this up because some of the stupid things that were said during that first week are still with us. There were plenty of them, of course, but this post doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive. It’s just about China.

Copenhagen, of course, was not a success. But it did change the game, in particular by establishing a framework in which both northern and southern countries can step forward to “pledge” to mitigation actions of various kinds. As they do, scientists and institutes around the world are tabulating the pledges, normalizing them, calculating their implied aggregate impact on global temperature, and — inevitably — drawing conclusions about which countries are doing their “fair share” and which are free riding on the efforts of others. (more…)

The “comparability of effort” debate is hotting up, and there’s no cooling on the horizon.

This debate is fundamental to the “blame game.”  Recall, for example, the cold shower that was Copenhagen, and the storms of China-bashing that followed.  The blame for the debacle, you see, belonged to the “emerging economies,” who refused to carry their shares of the global stabilization burden.  Or so it was said by legions of disappointed, overly-certain pundits across the political spectrum.

Someday, it will be easier to make solid judgments about who’s doing their share, and who’s 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.  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.

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Cap & Dividend will return.  I can’t prove it of course, but I’m willing to predict it, and this despite (unattributable) rumors that top US environmental strategy makers are “doubling down” on their old political calculations.

Why do I think so?   Just a feeling, but an educated one.  For one thing, Maria Cantwell, one of the two authors of 2009′s CLEAR act (the last legislative vehicle for Cap and Dividend), recently gave this speech at the Brookings Institution, and according to Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, it was spun by one of her top aides as a “soft launch” for a re-introduction of CLEAR.   Nothing definite, but something.

The other reason is that Cap and Dividend makes ethical and political sense, and I’m betting that ethical and political sense comes back into fashion in the not too distant future.  Seriously.   On this front, see a sharp little piece called The Climate Justice Imperative.   It’s by good-guy economist Jim Boyce.

It’s been a long time coming, but a team led by Glen Peters, of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, has finally published a comprehensive “consumption-side” analysis of global greenhouse-gas emission, one that takes international trade fully into account.

Estimates of “outsourced emissions” or “embodied carbon” have been knocking around for a while now, but this one is different.  This time the study – Growth in emission transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008 — is comprehensive, and this time the publisher is the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, and that’s going to make the results, and their implications, harder to ignore.

What consumption-side carbon accounting means is that, if a widget is manufactured in, say, China and then shipped to, say, the US – where it is “consumed” – the carbon embodied in the widget goes not on China’s books, as per the usual practice, but on America’s.  The difference makes a difference.  In fact, since 1990 – the Kyoto Protocol’s baseline year – 75% of the growth in the North’s consumption-based emissions took place in China.

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The word “inequality” has, for far too long, been taken as code for “poverty.”   It’s time to take it as well as code for “wealth.”   And what is wealth?  When does a person or community qualify as part of the global economic elite?  What is a luxury, and who decides?  Lots of questions here, and they couldn’t be more topical.

Enter Hans Rosling, who has with his gapminder project emerged as one of our very best guides to the statistical complexity of this, our civilization at the edge.   You could easily, and productively, spend a day studying the ins and outs of his fabulous presentations, and learning how to do your own with gapminder desktop.   But of course you’re too busy, so why don’t you instead invest nine minutes watching this brilliant video, from a talk Hans recently gave at TED Women.

Serious.  Just do it.  Right now.

Here,  from the excellent Labor Network for Sustainability, is a rather inspired from-the-heart piece that looks straight into the abyss and finds, not despair, but rather the foundation of a true global climate-justice mobilization, one that might just be able to scale.   The pivotal paragraph of Fighting Doom: The New Politics of Climate Change says it very well indeed:

But my political alter ego is oddly less pessimistic. Rather than triggering gloom, the climate crisis has surprisingly stirred up more hope than I have felt in twenty years as a progressive activist. After decades of progressive retreat it is a strange feeling. But I am haunted by the suspicion that this coming crisis may be the first opportunity we have had in generations to radically re-shape the political landscape and build a more just and sustainable society.

Care to watch an excellent panel discussion on rising global food prices, one that puts climate change right at the center of the story — which is of course where it belongs — but also touches on the “right to food,” the crisis of agricultural over-pumping in the developing world, the need to provide contraceptive services to poor women, the role of commodities speculation, the democracy movement in North Africa and the threat of civilizational collapse?   Click here to go to Al Jazeera to see it.

By the way, I claim, with absolutely no evidence, that the “skeptics” movement has peaked.  That they will never again receive as large a portion of undeserved attention as they got during “climate gate.”

What’s this got to do with drought and desertification?   Quite a bit, actually.

Usually, we try to comment on the reports and articles we reference here.  But, in the face of this, what can we say?  Save that we know that, somehow, this must be linked to the global climate crisis.

A lot of us have wondered, for years, why efficiency doesn’t solve the problem.    Why, for example, Amory Lovins — though he sometimes makes so damn much much sense — is somehow, still, so wrong.    It’s something you can’t quite put your finger on.

The answer has a lot to do with “market failure,” of course, but there’s more to it as well.

Part of the problem seems to lie in an economic dynamic known as the “rebound effect.”   Which comes, basically, to the fact that when energy — or any other “good” — gets cheaper, we tend to use more of it.   As if we were implacable, insatiable, and ultimately doomed.    Which would be a pretty simple-minded view of the situation.

And, in truth, David Owen’s The Efficiency Dilemma, published in the December 20, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, seems to be just a wee bit simple minded.   Until the end, when Owen, having done the work necessary to justify a conclusion, plays out his hand in this fine passage:

“Decreasing reliance on fossil fuels is a pressing global need. The question is whether improving efficiency, rather than reducing total consumption, can possibly bring about the desired result. [U.S. Secretary of Energy] Steve Chu told me that one of the appealing features of the efficiency discussions at the Clean Energy Ministerial was that they were never contentious. ‘It was the opposite,’ he said. ‘No one was debating about who’s responsible, and there was no finger-pointing or trying to lay blame.’ This seems encouraging in one way but dismaying in another. Given the known level of global disagreement about energy and climate matters, shouldn’t there have been some angry table-banging? Advocating efficiency involves virtually no political risk — unlike measures that do call for sacrifice, such as capping emissions or putting a price on carbon or increasing energy taxes or investing heavily in utility-scale renewable-energy facilities or confronting the deeply divisive issue of global energy equity.  Improving efficiency is easy to endorse: we’ve been doing it, globally, for centuries.  It’s how we created the problems we’re now trying to solve.”

Too many people still think that “equity,” as it is called, is a luxury that we cannot afford.   They’re wrong, though I can’t prove it.   But this article is an oblique argument for the prosecution — for “confronting the deeply divisive issue of global energy equity” — that suggests that the matter could nevertheless become plain.

Cap and share, it must be said, can only work within countries.  But, that said, it’s a fine idea, and a useful one.   And this amusing video is a nice intro to it.

Well, not everything.  But you’ll find a good, almost definitive summary in The Emissions Gap Report: Are the Copenhagen Accord pledges sufficient to limit global warming to 2° C or 1.5° C? This report, organized by the UN Environment Program, basically consists of a meta-analysis of the various current studies of emissions pathways and their consequences.  It’s focused on the Copenhagen pledges (which are judged to be way too weak)  and is notable for taking proper account of 1.5ºC as well as 2ºC targets, for closely analyzing the loopholes by which the wealthy countries propose to avoid actually having to deliver on their nominal emission-reduction commitments, and for taking a good look at the need for “negative emissions” in the not too distant future.  This is not a notion that realists usually dwell on, but here it’s even defined.

The tone is a little clinical.   And there is a wee bit of soft-pedaling — for example, the range of 2020 emissions targets that is consistent with “likely” chance of holding the warming to 2ºC is judged to be 39-44 GtCO2 equivalent, which is not, actually, a range that can fairly be called “approximately 44.”  But put this aside.  The main point is that, after reading this report, you’ll know the key thing — if we’re going to squeak by, it’s going to be by way of a pathway that has no historical parallel.  The necessary rate of annual, global emissions decline alone makes this crystal clear.

This report doesn’t go into the ethical-political failings that have stalled international progress, but this is no real surprise.  These failings, though, cannot forever be set aside.  Inevitably, they will be the focus of another round of increasingly visible analysis.   They have to be.   One way or another, we’re heading into a new world.

Climate Interactive has done a nice video summary of the UNEP report.  It is here.

There is of course an ongoing, bitter debate about the Copenhagen Accord, about what it is and what, in the end, it will finally mean.  Briefly, it comes to this: Does the Accord’s “pledge and review” architecture open a new way forward, one that can succeed even given the sorry state of America’s climate politics and, for that matter, American democracy?   Or  does it  rather invite us into a future in which the rich and the responsible escape their proper obligations, and by so doing condemn the poor and the innocent, and eventually the rest of us as well, to the suffering and violence of extreme global warming?

The final resolution of this debate will take time, and, it seems, a great deal of acrimony.  But one matter, at least, is already clear.  The Accord’s “pledges” are entirely inadequate to the goal of avoiding “dangerous climate change.”  This is a matter of broad consensus among the analysts, who have published a variety of cogent commentaries on the Copenhagen pledges.  But a recent article in Nature, straightforwardly named Copenhagen Accord Pledges are Paltry, is the most notable of the quantitative analyses, and the one among them that’s actually required reading.

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