A warning on climate change

If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground; if we want an 80% chance, we have to leave 80% of those reserves untouched.

Richard David Hames contributed the introduction to an important message from Bill McKibben, and colleagues:

The time for scepticism is long past. The time for informed action, though, is also quickly passing us by. As the UN climate negotiations continue in Doha “people all over the world are watching as floods wash away their lives, fires consume their houses and droughts decimate food crops. Just last week, UNEP released a report warning that melting permafrost could release massive amounts of methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, bringing the planet ever closer to runaway climate change”.

Here’s a letter from three powerful advocates for a safe climate to the leaders and negotiators in Doha. The authors are Bill McKibben founder of 350.org; Nnimmo Bassey of Environmental Rights Action & Coordinator of Oilwatch International; and Pablo Solon, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, former Bolivian Ambassador to the UN and former chief negotiator for climate change.

“2012 saw the shocking melt of the Arctic, leading our greatest climatologist to declare a ‘planetary emergency’ and it saw weather patterns wreck harvests around the world, raising food prices by 40% and causing family emergencies in poor households throughout the world. That’s what happens with 0.8ºC of global warming.

If we are going to stop this situation from getting worse, an array of institutions have explained this year precisely what we need to do: leave most of the carbon we know about in the ground and stop looking for more. If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground; if we want an 80% chance, we have to leave 80% of those reserves untouched.

That’s not “environmentalist math” or some radical interpretation – that’s from the report of the International Energy Agency last month. It means that without dramatic global action to change our path the end of the climate story is already written. There is no room for doubt – absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and the temperature will climb creating a chain reaction of climate related natural disasters.

Negotiators should cease their face-saving, their endless bracketing and last minute cooking of texts and concentrate entirely on figuring out how to live within the carbon budget scientists set. We can’t emit more than 565 more gigatons of carbon before 2050, but at the current pace we’ll blow past that level in 15 years. If we want to have a chance to stick to this budget by 2020 we can’t send to the atmosphere more than 200 gigatons.

Rich countries who have poured most of the carbon into the atmosphere (especially the planet’s sole superpower) need to take the lead in emission reductions and the emerging economies have also to make commitments to reduce the exploitation of oil, coal and gas. The right to development should be understood as the obligation of states to guarantee the basic needs of the population to enjoy a fulfilled and happy life, and not as a free ticket for a consumer and extractivist society that doesn’t take into account the limits of the planet and the wellbeing of all humans.

There’s no longer time for diplomatic delays. Most of the negotiators in the Eighteenth Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) know that these are the facts. Now is the time to act for the future of humanity and Nature.

Good intentions and logic aside, this plea is bound to fall on deaf ears. Within the very general terms of its Charter, the UN has come to believe that it (and it alone) has carriage over global issues where a unity of response is required. In practice the UN has become a default mechanism for matters like climate change because of our collective inability to challenge such assumptions, or to create alternative bodies more capable of doing the job. Possibly relevant in the years immediately following the 2nd World War, the role of the UN has become increasingly ambiguous in an era of instant communication, smart technologies and overwhelming complexity.

So what if unity (of nations) is no longer required in this context? What if diversity is actually more relevant and should be valued as such? What if the struggle for consensus actually impedes impactful investment or hinders more effective cooperation? What if there are better, more rational, alternatives we could be pursuing to build momentum faster? What if even the most basic tools needed for systemic transformation are not available to the negotiators at Doha? What if they are unaware that such tools even exist?

As regular readers of The Hames Report know, I recently called for an end to the UN’s stewardship of the annual climate debate farce for purely practical reasons – see Any Advance on Doha? below.

A different institution is needed in order to initiate and engage in design thinking and constructive dialogue (i.e. transformational narrative) that can lead directly to informed action. This probably needs to be a limited-life “SWAT team” that is not politically motivated (nor bound by political expediency), that does not concern itself with easily-manipulated targets, and that is not populated with “experts” who have vested interests only in preserving the status quo.

This “SWAT team” should be a working community of possibly no more than 50 individuals – comprising systems thinkers, visionaries, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs and policy makers – people who are not trapped in the present but are capable of imagining, designing, rapidly prototyping and freely distributing a range of future alternatives – ethically compelling, socially desirable, economically feasible, systemically viable pathways, strategies and solutions for alleviation, attenuation and adaptation. In order for this to be remotely feasible three things would need to happen:

1. Somehow the UN must be persuaded to abdicate its current role – or at least step aside – not from a sense of failure but in a deeper awareness of enlightened responsibility. It should acknowledge (a) it is incapable of reaching a satisfactory outcome in these matters and (b) that nation states, geared up to compete rather than to collaborate, are possibly the least appropriate mechanism for reaching agreement on strategies for tackling climate change. Until this courageous step is taken no other body can step into the breach and the world will remain under the false illusion that a result must eventually emerge from the current process.

2. To remain relevant in this context the UN needs to demonstrate a more engaging and conscious form of leadership by stepping into a new epistemology. It can do this by openly declaring the human family to be facing a planetary emergency in which no single entity or sector has the solution – and asking for help. Following such a proclamation, the UN could then justify putting its weight behind new, even experimental, approaches – including the use of a “SWAT team” as envisaged here – and use its waning influence to persuade others, across all sectors of society, of the wisdom of such alternative approaches.

International NGOs from the Clinton Global Initiative to the World Economic Forum and the World Bank could also take it upon themselves to support such an endeavour in the spirit of radical empathy. This simple act would make it clear to people everywhere that we’re in this together and that we cannot rely on governments alone to sort out the problems for which we are all responsible.

3. As a consequence of #2 above the conventional wisdom, wherein nation state governments are expected to reach a legally-binding consensus on climate change, would be downgraded. Informed action, on the other hand, would be upgraded. It is clear that a universal agreement regarding how to go about reducing carbon dioxide and methane emissions in the atmosphere will probably not be forthcoming. Indeed it is probably wishful thinking. Setting targets is even more pointless. It is evident that new forms of collaborative action are necessary. Eveything that can be done must be done.

Most of the causes for our heating planet come from energy-related pressures on traditional industrialised methods of production and distribution, combined with the ever-increasing consumption demands from a population of seven billion people. The majority of these people are now located in the world’s major cities.

But cities also happen to be engines of innovation. On at least one level it makes far more sense for cities, individually and collectively, to implement real strategic solutions than for national governments to spend their time – Don Quixote-like – trying to agree on theoretical targets. Indeed there is no reason why cities should not “compete” against each other for the entrepreneurial talent and resources required to protect life-critical systems and natural amentities for their citizens. That would at least be putting their free market instincts to better use.

Nations, cities, corporations and individuals should all be able to choose the most appropriate strategies and mechanisms to deploy – given their particular circumstances. Because of international trade there will be obvious cooperative and commercial partnering opportunities. But in order for them to do this they have to be able to see a full range of viable pathways available to them and to find ways of matching these with compelling incentives to invest. Such a catalogue of possibilities does not currently exist in the public domain – not in a single accessible format at least. A SWAT team would provide that catalogue – not just in theory, but in practical, ready-to-implement, form.

One thing we do know. Business as usual can no longer be an option. Nor must inaction be given any form of legitimacy. There can be no exceptions. Time is running out, of that there can surely be no doubt? We do not need nations to reach consensus on targets. We need action to be taken by those best placed to take action – such as cities and corporations.

Actually all we need from nations – in terms of “unity” – is an undertaking that by 2015 every country will enact a suite of coherent and aligned actions that make sense for them, each according to their means. Debt should be forgiven and investment capital made available by richer nations so that poorer countries can comply with this undertaking. If that pledge is broken a universally agreed law of ecocide could be enacted. Indeed prosecuting such an act of law might be a more fitting role for the UN in the future, rather than a facilitator of negotiations that go round and round in circles and end up in frustrating limbo.”

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