Durban – Conference of Parties – An Ethical Problem:
Durban – Conference of Parties – An Ethical Problem:
This week is the start of the Conference of the Parties in Durban, South Africa. The Conference of the Parties' (COP) are the annual meetings that are part of the governing body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Two years ago, November 2009, I was planning a trip to the Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen. Before Copenhagen there was great energy, with some notion that the Copenhagen meeting would lead to a breakthrough on international climate change agreements. Of course, that did not happen and while there was spin that the meeting was a success, most people that I know were not enthusiastic about the outcome. (The Copenhagen Accord) My take of the outcome was that there was symbolic political recognition that global warming needed to be addressed, but no substantive steps were taken to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. Plus, the political, economic and technological realities are that we will not see international agreement on reducing emissions anytime soon. It will be much longer before there is any real reduction of emissions.
In 2010 the COP was in Cancun, Mexico. What were the results of that meeting? In my opinion, we continue to meet and that is good. There was continued recognition that we needed to curb our carbon dioxide emissions and there were voluntary commitments to do that. (Here is an All Things Considered interview with Todd Stern) The voluntary targets focused on keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, which is both an ambiguous and impossible goal. My dedicated readers might recall that last year in my climate change class I decided it is disingenuous to continue to talk about limiting warming to 2 degrees, and I started my students reading the papers that look at the 4 degree warmer world (see this entry).
What do I expect at the start of the COP-17? There is no doubt that the chronic economic turmoil since 2008 has deflated interest in climate change. We want economic stability, and in a growing population economic stability means economic growth. And for the most part economic growth, still, means burning more fossil fuels. With this, the Durban meeting is welcomed with record high growth of carbon dioxide concentrations – we can say that we are ahead of the curve (in Washington Post, and World Meteorological Organization Greenhouse Gas Bulletin).
Ahead of the curve is where I expect we will stay for a while. It is interesting to think about where we would be without the Kyoto Protocol and the countries which made some effort. We would likely be way ahead of the historic emissions curve. We simply do not have the alternatives in place, yet, that allow us to wean ourselves from fossil fuels.
There are, in fact, substantial resources going in the installation of renewable energy resources. According the Bloomberg New Energy Finance there are now more initial investments in renewable energy than in fossil fuel energy (Press Release and Report). Europe is the leading market for money spent on these projects, and China will take over the lead in a couple of years. With this seeming shift in our energy infrastructure, in 20 years the amount of energy produced from renewable energy will be 15.7 % of the total.
One of the reasons for the rapid increase in renewable energy is because solar panels are becoming cheap. There is a large manufacturing base, much of it in China, and this is rapidly reducing the cost of solar energy. This has set off much consternation in U.S. solar industry (interesting story on Talk of the Nation). Also as people really start to think about solar energy and move away from the naïve arguments that have driven the discussion for a decade, it becomes clear that solar can fit into the existing energy infrastructure. Solar can be placed on houses, and it can scale to large solar fields that can address peak energy capacity in Texas.
Growth – this growth in renewable energy use is hopeful, ultimately, for the climate change problem. Alternative energy takes care of part of our required economic growth. But it does not take all of the growth, and it does not displace the existing capacity for decades. Again, for the present time we, at best, aim to not get too far ahead of the historical emissions curve.
For now long trains of coal lumber along the rails from Colorado and Wyoming to Texas and the Gulf ports. Growth – we require growth for economic stability. We require growth to have an economy for growing populations. Growth – we require growth to support our investment strategies and credit-based businesses.
But back to Durban and the Conference of the Parties: There is a big issue for Durban. Back in 2009 for the meeting in Copenhagen, the big ticket item was supposed to be what would follow the Kyoto Protocol? Effectively the Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012, and for the countries that have made the attempt to reduce CO2, there would be interest in having some standards, some policy that follows. It would provide order, stability, continuity. It is unlikely that anything global will come from Durban. The way the U.N. works, I think that it is more likely that the Conference of Parties will cease to be in their current form than there will be any sort of global policy – even as a guideline.
More and more climate change moves to an issue of ethics and opportunity. In my course ethics is always a tough issue. In the climate change problem ethics often arise in the sense that the Island Nations which are being flooded are not the ones responsible for the rising seas. More generally, the rich CO2 emitting nations are not the ones that suffer the consequences most severely.
Ethical issues, however, are far broader that this simple rich-poor tension. One of the roles of environmental policy is to represent the ethical values of society. Ultimately, climate change, the control of emissions represents the importance that we give to consumption. This became even more clear to me in a recent article on the decline of the birthrate in Brazil in National Geographic. Brazil is an example of what is practically a truism, which is that economic development is associated with the reduction of birth rates. This is part of the mantra of those who advocate economic development as a precondition for addressing climate change (for example, The Skeptical Environmentalist by Lomborg). In that National Geographic article it is stated, however, that reduction of the growth of population is to allow more consumption, more use of energy, by a smaller number of people. (Note that Bjorn Lomborg is reportedly changing his evaluation of the climate change problem in a forthcoming book - article in Guardian.)
This consumption of much by a few is, of course, consistent with our history. While we point to growing population and growing CO2 emissions, the historical increase in CO2 emissions is only associated with a relatively small part of the population. And when we think about displaced consumption, meaning that much of the manufacturing in China and the developing world is to support consumption (cheap consumption) in the developed world, there is no reason to believe that economic development leads in any direct path to addressing the climate change problem. We can rest assured that we will pursue economic development more aggressively and directly than we will pursue mitigation to climate change.
In this framing, therefore, climate change is first and foremost a problem of ethics; that is, it is a problem of consumption, equitable consumption, excess consumption. If we have an imperative to consume, and I believe that as a whole we do, then we must have renewable energy; we must have resources whose use does not deplete and degrade the world.
This frames, strongly, both our history and our future. We will have to manage the climate. We are averse to geo-engineering, but we engineer a warmer and warmer climate every day. At the forefront we need to think about how to manage our waste, because there is little evidence that we are going to stop making our waste. Therefore, we must know how to remove carbon dioxide from the air and safely place it back into to the Earth. Likewise, at the forefront is the development of adaptation strategies that, globally, include less land, more extreme weather, and displaced people. All of these things are possible, and those with the foresight and the acumen to take advantage of opportunity will benefit. The benefactors will be those who look at the knowledge and are smart about using it – not the ones that look at the knowledge and deny its existence.
r
Prior to the Durban meeting the WMO issued its Provisional Statement of the Climate.
Here is the sub-title of the document
2011: World’s 10th warmest year, warmest year with La Niña on record, second-lowest Arctic sea ice extent. (and the link)
Figure 1: From WMO Provisional Statement. Temperature difference (anomaly) calculated for 1961-1990 average. La Niña years are marked. La Niña years should be cooler that average based on natural variability. 2010 was the warmest La Niña year on record, and the 10th warmest year on record.
Reader Comments
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Vostok data seems to match ch4 with temp, not co2.
What else is new from occupier Hansen, not much except arrest record in Keystone debacle.
Source: data from the Vostok ice core, according to Petit, Fisher and many more
delta Ts (corr) is the corrected temperature, according to Jouzel ea.
Zero temperature is current average global temperature.
d18Oatm (measured in N2O) is inversely correlated with ice sheet formation (here already inverted, to show ice sheet growth and decline).
The garph is interesting, as it indicates that temperature and methane (CH4) levels were already near minimum and ice sheets were near maximum,
at around 113 kyr BP, before CO2 levels starts to decline. This points to a low influence of CO2 on temperature.
hee hee, you're an idiot. cling to your hopes of world fascism dictated by the oil boys. maybe they will even let you have a token job so you can struggle to pay for the problems your kids have growing up in a polluted environment.
But the language proved too soft for the Europeans, and Nkoana-Mashabane was drafting a new formula.
Both China and the U.S. have said publicly they would be amenable to the EU proposal to negotiate a post-2020 agreement, but each attached tough conditions.
The United States is concerned about conceding any competitive business advantage to China. Beijing is resisting any suggestion to change its status as a developing country, saying it still has hundreds of millions of impoverished people.
India, which lags behind China in development even though its economy also is expanding rapidly, was taking 'a relatively tough stand here,' Hedegaard said.
Negotiators said India and the U.S. softened their positions during the day, but that China has refused to affirm its future commitments will be regulated under the foreseen international regime.
The U.S., where climate change is a delicate issue for the administration of President Barack Obama, says it does not want to agree that it will accept binding commitments as part of a deal that has not yet been negotiated.
The content of the deal is more important than its legal standing, U.S. envoy Todd Stern has told reporters. Under Kyoto, rich countries are legally bound to reduce carbon emissions while developing countries take voluntary actions.
Hedegaard said the EU's proposal was intended to dismantle the 20th century division of the world into camps of rich and poor, and to make adjustments that reflect the realities of the 21st century balance of economic power — and emissions.
Three Kyoto countries — Japan, Canada and Russia — already have announced that they will not extend their reduction commitments for another period because of Kyoto's imbalances.
Hmmm in BOLD.
Whatever happened to that vision?
Link
Long time lurker. Decided to sign up a few days ago. Do don't get my sign-up date confused with all the rest of the trolls that are infesting the site. You guys seem like a passionate bunch. About a passionate subject!!
Neapolitan. First off. I love you posts and things you bring to the table. Rock on dude. Though I am not on your side of the battleline, I respect what you say. But your last post makes no sense. I remember cat5hurricane, Rusty whoever his name, and dbagjohn and their arguments. For years you put up with those quacks. While they put up quite a fight against you and won many of their fair share of arguments , I sure hope this calling a wounded duck out when he's down and clearly banned is not retaliation.
I like your posts, but don't want you to get banned or nothing either.
As to the rest of you guys, I hope to be part of the discussion as I take in more of this intriguing topic! A topic affecting us now and for the future.
Jimbo
Action: Quote | Ignore User
Member Since: December 5, 2011 Posts: 0 Comments: 0
".... the rest of the trolls ...."?
Interesting misspeaking on your part.
I suppose length of membership and agreement with you qualifies anything?
Seriously?!?!?! "The Earth is cooling"?! "The ice will surge past the mean"?! "It's going to happen very quickly."?! Oh, dear lord, stop the presses!!!!! Martinitony alone has found the truth that has escaped so many others!!!! Martinitony, you simply must share your findings and your data sources with the tens of thousands of earth scientists who obviously have access only to false information!!!!! All they have are millions of data points that indicate fast heating, rapid melting of polar and glacial ice, quick sea level rise, increasing ocean acidification!!! Those idiots!!!!! Please, for the good of the world, produce those data!!!! Of course, doing so will thwart the socialist plot that for some reason tens of thousands of scientists are all in on, but it'll be worth it!!!! You'll win the Nobel Prize for sure!!!!! The world will forever be grateful!!!!
BTW, this whole series is on Netflix.
Part 3, since there is really nothing to participate in here :>
One more Carl Sagan video,
Sadly Carl didn't know of this Link back then as I thought of the idea a few years before he died. This would have been his number one choice to stop the GHG blanket!
Enjoy your Monday.
There is truth in each and everyone of your very limited thoughts,this includes mine as well.
Now, THINK for a moment about your claims, pro and con as to climate change or global warming or whatever you want to call it. To you skeptics are you really serious when you say that we humans are not effecting the climate, come on use your noodle instead of the other end to think, of course we are effecting change, its impossible not to. As for all you out there who are saying that if we continue on the path we are on the earth as we know it will be distroyed ,dah, how many times has that happened in earths history and what are you personally doing to stop it except bitching about it.
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