Dear Aubrey
Many thanks for your email.
I would be happy to have my name added to the list of supporters for the GCI Proposal to UNFCCC.
Best wishes as ever
Peter
Professor Peter Guthrie OBE
Professor of Engineering for Sustainable Development
Head of the Centre for Sustainable Development at the Department of Engineering
Multi-signature Letter to Chris Huhne
Minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change
here and below . . .
Dear Chris
UNFCCC-compliant Global Climate Change Framework
We all face an increasingly urgent situation with the threat of runaway rates of climate change occurring and the persistent failure to come to terms internationally to deal with this. COP-15 was another example of this and the odds for COP-16 appear no better as things stand.
So we write to you with the request to convene a high-level public meeting to focus on this predicament and the international need to establish a UNFCCC-compliant Global Climate Change Framework to redress this threat as soon as possible.
Contraction and Convergence is a prime example of this. It is a rational formulation for reconciliation of 'Climate Justice without Vengeance'. With the growing support for this approach internationally, we specifically note the positions taken in the UK context by: -
- The RCEP in 2000 that, "The government should press for a future global climate agreement based on the contraction and convergence approach [C&C], combined with international trading in emission permits. Together, these offer the best long-term prospect of securing equity, economy and international consensus."
- The UNFCCC Executive at COP-9 [2004] - achieving the objective of the UNFCCC,
"inevitably requires contraction and convergence".
- The Liberal Democrat party that, "an agreement must be based on reducing emissions overall, while equalising emissions between the developed and developing worlds – the principle of contraction and convergence."
- Yourself and what you called the "morally compelling logic" of C&C.
- The All Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change in the previous parliament.
- The UK Climate Act, which Adair Turner effectively characterised as C&C in evidence to the EAC and DECC select committees last year saying that converging to equal per capita entitlements globally is the only option that is, "doable and fair" for organising and sharing the full-term emissions-contraction-event to bring us to UNFCCC-compliance and that "if, for reasons of urgency the rate of global contraction has to be accelerated, for reasons of equity the rate of international convergence has to be accelerated relative to that."
Several ideas derived from C&C have surfaced since Kyoto with ideas that can be perhaps in various ways incorporated into C&C. However, there is an overwhelming need for an over-arching UNFCCC-compliant Framework that enables the globally competing interests of the over-consuming and the under-consuming to be reconciled with each other and with the objective of the UNFCCC in a non-random manner.
We feel that C&C is the veteran and indeed the apex example of this and urge you to consider our request. At Kyoto in December 1997 and shortly before they withdrew from these negotiations, the USA stated, “C&C contains elements for the next agreement that we may ultimately all seek to engage in.”
The adversarial reasons for their withdrawal then were in play again at COP-15: -
C&C answers this in a unifying and constitutional way and the need for this answer becomes increasingly critical.
With best wishes
Yours sincerely
Colin Challen
Former Chair UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change
Professor Sir Tom Blundell FRS, FMedSci,
Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge,
Former Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
Professor Peter Guthrie OBE
Professor in Engineering for Sustainable Development in the UK
Fellow of St Edmund's College Cambridge
Professor Martin Rees
Trinity College Cambridge
Sir John Houghton
President, John Ray Initiative
Professor Sir Roger Penrose, OM, FRS
Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics University of Oxford
Full signature list here