29 June 2012 - KIEV - Great Wall directs Great Gate in La France - UnRavel that!
29 June 2012 - "For reasons of equity there's much support for C&C". Fitzroy & Papyrakis
For reasons of equity, there is much support for a 'contraction and convergence' scheme, which would provide allowances for carbon emissions to all countries in proportion to their population. This also requires agreement among the main emitters that global emissions shuold be capped, by issuing a total number of permits which represents less than current global emissions. Thc cap should then decresse over time (so that we can ideally reduce our global emissions by 80-90 percent by 2050 or earlier. Developed countries would receive fewer permits than their current emissions, and would thus have to buy excess allowances from poor states that emit less than their allocated permits. This would generate a flow of aid from rich to poor countries, declining inequality and convergence of per capita income levels, though without any implication that actual equality would be reached in the foreseeable future An Introduction to Climate Change Economics and Policy
Felix FitzRoy, Elissaios Papyrakis
29 June 2012 - "I am happy to sign up" to this C&C proposal to the UNFCCC. Professor Judith Stephenson UCL
Dear Aubrey,
I'm happy to sign up.
Thanks
Judith
Professor Judith Stephenson
Contraction and Convergence
Climate change is driven, and its impacts are experienced, to different extents by different populations across the globe. Equity should therefore be a maintained as a guiding principle around which climate policy is developed. The model of contraction and convergence seeks to develop a framework in which the finite biospherical capacity is equitably shared amongst all of the earth’s inhabitants. Contraction and convergence describes a process whereby the high emitters of green house gases contract the rates at which they consume fossil fuel energy and eventually converge at a sustainable level with those who need to increase their consumption above what they currently consume in order to achieve satisfaction of necessary material and social needs. It has the advantage of explicitly recognizing the developing world’s right to develop, and the likelihood that their per capita emissions will grow as a result of this process, and of identifying a globally equitable way of managing this within the context of a global need to reduce carbon emissions. There is an important distinction to draw between the “luxury” and “survival” emissions produced between different populations and the patent and urgent need to address gross inequalities and widespread poverty experienced in many parts of the world. Addressing human development through stimulating economic activity and other means of improving human welfare will inevitably lead to increases in GHG emissions; there is hence an allowance for an increase in emissions from poor populations in the contraction and convergence model. The budget at which emissions should contract to is estimated to start at 450 CO2 ppm (at the time that Kyoto was created), which may have to be revised downwards towards 350 ppm, this however doesn’t account for any feedbacks triggered in the climate system which might mean that the budget would have to be set even more conservatively. The convergence date sets 2100 as an approximation to reach a globally equitable distribution of energy consumption, though efforts should be focused on the earliest date possible, as we move past the point of equity for equity’s sake towards the pursuit of equity for survival. Since this model is based on equilibrium between per capita and total rates of emissions, population is a critical factor influencing its achievability. Population projections are central for the subject of negotiation, and increasingly so if the medium UN 2050 projections, upon which the contraction allowance was crafted are jeopardized as a result of a crumbling base of global family planning services resulting in stalling rates of fertility decline in many countries. Population is the major denominator of this model, largely determining how hard it will be to achieve a globally feasible and equitable per capita emission figure; at the global level, a larger world population means a lower, more difficult to achieve, number. Similarly it could prove counter-intuitive if it became in the interest of nations to stimulate population growth in order to increase their share of the global emissions budget in an absolute sense. Population Dynamics and Climate Change
Study for DFID December 2009
Susannah Mahew, Karen Newman, Judith Stephenson
28 June 2010 - "Count me in. How about investors?" Raj Thamotheram President Network Sustainable Markets
Dear Aubrey
Count me in.
How about a page for 'investors'?
All the best
Raj
Raj Thamotheram
President Network for Sustainable Financial Markets
Organisational Affiliations shown for identification purposes only.
Budget for zero carbon - From national climate change policy to local zero carbon refurbishment strategies, all levels of government can play a part in decarbonising their economies. All nations should adopt carbon budgets similar to the UK, with annual targets that correspond with the latest science from the IPCC according to the principles of contraction and convergence. Local governments can develop zero carbon strategies for their local area, integrating plans for new buildings with zero carbon refurbishment of existing homes, offices, factories and more. The One Planet initiative adopts the principle of Contraction and Convergence which means that countries with high per capita emissions will have to reduce their emissions much more rapidly than countries that currently have low per capita emissions. The end result being that per capita emissions from each country will converge at a more equitable level and the global total of emissions will contract. BioRegional will work with partners to agree community specific trajectories. For example, for communities in developing countries a suitable trajectory will have to take into account whether the development is targeted at residents with high impact lifestyles or very low income residents with very low carbon emissions. What you can do as Government
BioRegional
The UK Climate Change Act target of an 80% reduction in CO2 by 2050 and the London Climate Change Action Plan target of a 60% cut by 2025 are both based on a ‘contraction and convergence’ model in which by 2050 everyone in the world would be entitled to an equal share of emissions with the aim of
atmospheric CO2 concentrations not exceeding 450ppm. This entitlement is roughly equivalent to two tonnes of CO2 per person each year. As UK and London emissions are currently much higher than this (whether calculated on a production or consumption basis), the targets are based on the reductions needed to achieve an equitable level by 2050. Capital Consumption - Bioregional the transition to sustainable consumption and production in London
1. Roadmaps with Action Plans at a global, national and civil society level. We support existing proposals for flexible and simple Roadmaps, Action Plans and Sustainable Development Goals as a main operational outcome of Rio+20. It is proposed that Action Plans or Roadmaps include:
A Vision ‐ in line with the Objective of the Conference ‐ to enable citizens to achieve one planet living and a green economy and live happy, healthy lives within the natural limits of the planet, wherever we live in the world, and leave sufficient space for wildlife and wilderness.
Principles drawn from existing international agreements, see Principles for a Green Economy
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Indicators. Based on Sustainable Consumption and Production, what citizens need and contraction and convergence of resource use to one planet living. SDGs could include: sustainable energy; sustainable transport; zero waste to landfill through circular economies; sustainable materials; food security – sustainable and humane agriculture and fisheries; sustainable water; biodiversity and land use; culture & community; Green Economy – equity, fair trade and the local economy; and health & happiness.
Process to develop them in partnership with civil society.
e) Education and training based on Vision & SDGs. One Planet training will be launched at Rio+20.
Support of “Intergovernmental Panel(s) on Resources” to provide scientific evidence of resource availability, resource consumption and safe planetary boundaries and a “Solutions Bank” of peer reviewed solutions for sustainability.
28 June 2012 - "I support C&C & reg grouping w accel. convergence." Andrew Dlugolecki, Former Director AVIVA
Dear Aubrey,
I fully support the logic of the GCI proposal.
It is fair and transparent, and should be the prime mechanism for achieving a stable and safe climate.
I like the additional twist in its application, whereby the convergence date can be different from the contraction date.
I also like the suggestion that for simplicity, regions could group together, as the EU has done, to achieve a faster negotiation.
Using $100 per tonne as an example - this figure needs to be qualified heavily, and will be of course a product of the marketplace over years.
There is also the issue of historical responsibility differing between countries, which could be dealt with intra-regionally of course.
Finally, my own twist, which is that this in fact the Second Anthropogenic Global Warming: - the first was due to farming, and so implicates many developing countries , and means that the Industrial (Second) Warming took off from a higher platform. One could argue that responsibility should be shared between both.
Dr Andrew Dlugolecki
co- Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (under IPCC)
former director of the Carbon Disclosure Project
former director of General Insurance development, Aviva Group
Some examples of articulation of C&C by Andrew Dlugolecki
“An agreement on global policies to tackle climate change is urgently needed for many reasons. In the first place, evidence is accumulating that the climate system may be more sensitive than we believed even in the recent IPCC report. At the same time, there has not been much progress in putting a systematic halt to emissions, so the problem will get worse. The agreement needs to include credible, strong, phased targets for emissions leading to a global reduction of 50 per cent by 2050; otherwise the price of carbon will be too low to incentivise a change in mindset. The fairest way to share these is the Contraction and Convergence model, which leads to equal emissions percapita in every country." The industry expert’s view
Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki, FCII, Research Fellow, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia.
Author and editor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
"Many scientists believe that an atmospheric level of 450 ppmv (parts per million by volume) of carbon dioxide should be the initial target for prudence; already we are at 380. For long-term allocation, the “Contraction and Convergence” model (C&C) seems appropriate. The name C&C reflects the facts that the annual emissions contract to a safe level, and the per capita shares converge to become equal. C&C has the advantages of simplicity and fairness, gives long-term confidence in emissions reduction and in the short-term can accommodate a variety of ‘fixes’ as well as facilitating the flow of funds to developing countries." "Coping with Climate Change"
CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF INSURERS - Dlugolecki on C&C
Contraction & convergence
The most realistic way to bring about the required reduction in ghg emissions (which will have the combined effect of reducing the damage imposed on the insurance industry and encouraging the transition to renewable energy) is that proposed in the concept of Contraction and Convergence (C&C). This concept was created by the Global Commons Institute (GCI) and is incredibly simple in its detail. Essentially, everyone has the right to emit an equal amount of pollution (in this case CO2) to the Global Commons (atmosphere). At present society emits six billion tonnes of carbon a year (6Gtc) to the atmosphere. Coincidentally there are six billion people alive today—hence everyone should be entitled an equal right to emit 1 tonne/yr. To achieve the required global reduction in ghg emissions an agreed target of say 2Gtc by 2040 could be set and the system allowed to contract to that global budget by converging on an agreed per capita allowance. Those states that need to emit more than their share will have to buy emission entitlements from those that have an excess. This would operate in much the same way as the envisaged emissions trading scheme to be set up within the Kyoto Protocol.
Figure 10.9 - The red line shows Business as usual CO2 emissions (BAU). The solid segments show ‘Contraction, Convergence, Allocation and Trade’ to manage emissions down by at least 60% within a given time frame and ‘contraction budget’. The renewables opportunity is worth trillions of dollars—the biggest market in history. Annex One is the developed World. Gtc: trillions of tonnes of carbon equivalent.
Figure 10.9 illustrates this process, showing that by the year 2100 emissions will have fallen to well below today’s levels, and will emanate from what are, today, developing countries. Since economic progress is dependent on energy, the shortfall from ‘Business as usual’ energy consumption will need to be met from two directions: efficiency gains, and a rapid growth in renewable energy sources. It is clear from this that emissions trading can only be an intermediate stage, since the total volume of emissions must fall. The only blockage to this simple system is the absence of political will to ‘step outside the box’ instead of conducting a tortuous round of negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol. One way to unblock this impasse is to amass a large enough consensus of stakeholders behind the concept of contraction and convergence, persuading governments to supersede the Kyoto Protocol. The insurance industry is an obvious place to start such a campaign as it has so much to lose and so much to gain. If society continues down the fossil/Kyoto route, future economic losses are likely to become unsustainable: the current rate of increase in damage from natural hazards is 12% pa and the rate is accelerating. Given that the global sum of such losses was $100bn in 1999 (Munich Re, 2000), it would outstrip global GDP (growing at 3% pa) by 2065, if the trends persist. If the insurance industry rallies behind C&C, it not only reduces that risk, but it is well placed to invest in the future renewables market. In fact one could argue that as the insurance companies own the oil companies (through equity ownership), insurers form the only industry that has the collateral and the need to adopt the C&C logic. The desired sequence of events is shown in Figure 10.10.
This DVD was produced on behalf of the UK House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group of MPs (APPCCG) by GCI and Tangent Films. It was distributed to all sitting UK MPs in 2007. It points to the disciplined approach we need to address climate change. Not an approach based on wishful thinking, but a rational framework which leads to the solution foreshadowed in the original 1990 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and subsequently much ignored.
The UNFCCC called on all countries to recognise their equal but differentiated responsibilities to cut carbon emissions, and to recognise that the eventual equitable distribution of carbon rights had to be achieved. Over 180 countries signed up to the UNFCCC's aims, but have so far failed to deliver the action necessary to achieve them. Time is now running desperately short. We need to implement the framework known as Contraction & Convergence (C&C), as proposed by the Global Commons Institute (GCI), in order to prevent further delay or sub-standard measures which might fool us into believing that we're dealing with climate change, when we're not.
This DVD gives an explanation of C&C. Experts also explain why they support C&C and Aubrey Meyer, whose work in developing C&C has been recognised in awards from the Schumacher Society and the City of London. He presents a risk analysis to show how C&C can react to stabilise the amount of C02 in the atmosphere as natural carbon sinks begin to fail. For more information, please follow these links
Thanks to our contributors: Sir Crispin Tickell, Grace Akumu, Alex Evans, Prof. Bill McGuire, Chris Motters-head, Jon Snow, Prof. Michael Mainelli, Prof Paul Jowitt, Dr. Julian Salt, Mark Lynas, Jack Pringle, David Wasdel, Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki, Dr. Robin Stott, Angela Mawle, Lorna Walker, Jeffrey Newman, Fred Pearce, Dr. Joshua Wairoto.
COLIN CHALLEN MP, Chair APPCCG Contraction and Convergence - An Incontestable Truth [1] The Irreducible Response to Climate Change [2] Transition Worcester
For the long term, the agreement of an international policy based on the principles of precaution, equity and economic efficiency is critical if we are to reduce the risk and engage all parties in the endeavour. A number of approaches have been proposed, including the ‘historical’ method, under which a nation’s future emissions goals would be determined by its past GHG output; the carbon-intensity approach, in which future emissions goals would be indexed to GDP; and “Contraction and Convergence” which would aim to achieve equal per capita emissions for all nations by an agreed date. Up to now, however, most of the work under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been directed at finalising and ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.
[For more information on C&C refer to the website of the Global Commons Institute] UNEPFI CEO Briefing
Beyond Kyoto – contraction and convergence
It is important to recognise that any agreement can be only the first step in what will be a major journey. It is clear that even if the Kyoto targets are met, global emissions will continue to rise because of rapidly rising emissions in the developing world. Substantial further steps will have to be taken to curb emissions globally. Such cuts will inevitably begin to involve poor countries and at the same time rich countries are likely to have to commit to much more serious emission reductions themselves. As a result further emission reduction agreements are likely covering the period 2012-20 and beyond. Climate change: a risk management challenge for institutional investors Indeed, the IPCC in its first assessment reports in 1990 recommended emissions cuts of at least 60% to stabilise CO2 concentrations at 1990 levels and thereby be likely to avoid serious climate disruption. Its subsequent reports have not altered this position. In the longer term, ‘Contraction and Convergence’ (C&C) is likely to become increasingly supported as a policy option. C&C was initially advocated by a small UK think tank, the Global Commons Institute39, but has since gained widespread and authoritative support, including that of some poor country governments and also the recent Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report40 which recommended that ‘the government should press for a future global climate agreement based on the contraction and convergence approach’. Under C&C, the right to emit greenhouse gases would be apportioned on a per capita basis from a given date. The total amount of emissions would be constrained and would fall steeply until it reached a level considered safe. Since the majority of the world’s population lives in the developing world, while per capita emissions are much higher in the industrialised world, rich countries would need to find ways to reduce their emissions – contraction – by finding efficiencies or renewable energy sources in the next few decades, or pay handsomely for the privilege of continuing to use fossil fuels. In this way they could approach equal per capita emissions to those in other countries – convergence. Ironically, while C&C offers a more robust framework than that outlined by Kyoto, and addresses the issue of equity, it also meets the fundamental objection of the US in that it also requires commitments from the developing world. As a global operational framework it also avoids many of the technical problems of Kyoto (such as defining baselines for emissions trading in countries not subject to an overall target, or the extent of international emissions trading that is permissible). However, much will depend on the detail. Done well, C&C could provide a framework for a genuine, equitable, long term solution to climate change, which reduces political risks and provides businesses and investors with the sort of predictable framework they prefer. But if agreement is hard to reach, C&C might serve to highlight injustices and end up exacerbating tensions. For example, some campaigners have argued for a third ‘C’: ‘compensation’ from the rich world for using up the climate’s absorptive capacity. Whilst this claim is understandable, such a development could well become an emotive issue that could make agreement far harder to reach. Climate Change - A Risk Management Challenge for Institutional Investors
Mark Mansely and Andrew Dlugolecki
Gerhard Berz (Ph.D. in meteorology and geophysics, University of Cologne) is director of Munich Re’s Geoscience Research Unit, described in Chapter 5. The Unit has played a key role in keeping the world informed of the trend in economic and insurance losses due to extreme events. The Unit is staffed by scientists and represents an unusual commitment of resources within the insurance industry. Dr. Berz and his team have published widely and made public the results of their research (Berz 1988, 1993, 1996, 1999; Berz and Conrad 1994; Berz and Loster 2001). The task that Dr. Berz and his team face is to interpret the loss trends and estimate where we might be in the near future, without sounding alarmist. In doing so they have been able to help people at least imagine where we might be heading. In a presentation at the second meeting of COP 6 in Bonn (July 2001), Dr. Berz and his colleague from Munich Re, Thomas Loster, said: -
If the most probable greenhouse predictions come true, the present problems will be magnified dramatically. Changes in many atmospheric processes will significantly increase the frequency and severity of heat waves, droughts, bush fires, hailstorms, floods and maybe also tropical and extra-tropical cyclones as well as storm surges in many parts of the world. . . . It also stands to reason that the particularly destructive tropical cyclones will advance into regions where they have not appeared in the past because of the temperatures prevailing there. Likewise the extra-tropical storms, the so-called winter storms, will penetrate far into the continents more frequently because the lack of snow will reduce the blocking effect of the cold high-pressure system over eastern Europe. (Berz and Loster 2001, 1) From all of this they draw a simple conclusion: “We simply cannot be responsible for leaving future generations on this planet with a climate that is out of balance” (Berz and Loster 2001, 2).
Another important figure in the insurance industry who has worked to bring the evolving scientific knowledge of climate change into the public forum is Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki, retired director of General Insurance Development at CGNU in the United Kingdom. Concern about climate change was first brought home to the U.K. insurance industry by the winter storm of 1987, which, with hurricane-force winds, inflicted £1 billion of insured losses in 24 hours, the first event ever to do so. As one of the few business members of the United Kingdom Climate Change Impacts Review Group (most being from the university or government), he was responsible for the financial sector of the Group’s report, The Potential Effects of climate Change in the United Kingdom, to the government (Parry et al. 1991). He went on to develop the financial sector of the IPCC’s Working Group II on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Watson et al. 1996). He brought the issues back to the U.K. financial services sector in reports on The Impacts of Changing Weather Patterns on Property Insurance (Dlugolecki 1994), the Government Review of the Potential Effects of Climate Change in the United Kingdom (Dlugolecki 1996b), and Climate Change and Insurance (Dlugolecki et al. 2001). At COP 6 at the Hague he warned the conference that an exponential rise in natural disaster losses could bankrupt the global economy, and that the aims of the Kyoto Protocol were merely “tactical” (Dlugolecki 2000). He advocates the adoption of “Contraction and Convergence” as the best long-term framework to control climate change, and has underlined the key role that investors can play in the move toward a sustainable energy economy (Mansley and Dlugolecki 2001).
In an earlier report he explained how the insurance system might be seriously damaged by climate change:
The real threat is probably from a cluster-in-time of extreme events which might exhaust the reinsurance protection and channel back the bulk of later events to the primary insurance market. (Dlugolecki 1996b) Dr. Dlugolecki recently retired from CGNU and became a Visiting Fellow in Climate Change and Insurance at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. He is also director of the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Tyndall Research Centre for Climate Change. Environmental Finance Sonia Labatt Rodney White
28 June 2012 - Royal Insitute of British Architects. "RIBA - the first professional body to adopt C&C."
In December 2006 the RIBA Council agreed a Climate Change Policy, setting out a programme of work, and supporting the Contraction and Convergence model of responding to global warming. The RIBA has adopted Contraction and Convergence as the overarching policy to guide its targets for the reduction of green house gas emissions associated with the use of energy in buildings.
Climate Change Policy - Contraction and Convergence
The RIBA was the first professional body to sign up in support of the model of understanding climate change and the actions necessary to tackle it, known as 'Contraction and Convergence'. The model is a science-based, global climate policy framework, proposed to the United Nations since 1990 by the Global Commons Institute. It is supported by many climate change scientists and an increasing range of policy makers and professional bodies.
It involves emissions from industrialised nations reducing (contracting) and emissions from all nations converging to an overall target consistent with stabilising green house gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Over time, emissions would contract and converge to an equal share per person. To achieve this equitable distribution, each of us in the UK would need to reduce our average annual carbon dioxide emissions from 10 tonnes to two tonnes.
Torino Declaration
In July 2008, the International Union of Architects (UIA) also signed a declaration supporting Contraction and Convergence with a view to lobbying for a stronger international agreement in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009.
28 June 2012 - Interesting Report 'China 2030' China & World Bank "Modern, Harmonious, Creative, High Income."
"China must play a central role in engaging with its partners in multilateral settings to shape the global governance agenda and address pressing global economic issues such as climate change, global financial stability, and a more effective international aid architecture that serves the cause of development in poor nations less fortunate than China."
"Not only will green development improve the quality of life in China, it will contribute to global efforts at mitigating climate change. As the second-largest economy with the largest population in the world, China is bound to shoulder increasing global responsibilities and play an important role in delivering global public goods. To do this, it will need to align its national interests to global concerns and build its capacity to participate actively in global affairs and to design global rules instead of merely accepting them."
“Instead of considering environmental protection and climate change mitigation as burdens that hurt competitiveness and slow growth, this report stresses that green development could potentially become a significant new growth opportunity. Much will depend on how effectively government policies make firms internalize negative externalities and motivate firms to innovate and seek technological breakthroughs. China does not want to replicate the experience of advanced countries that became rich first and cleaned up later. Instead, China intends to grow green by following a pattern of economic growth that boosts environmental protection and technological progress, a strategy that could become an example to other developing countries and perhaps even advanced economies.”
“China’s green development strategy will make a significant contribution to tackling global climate change. China is now the largest energy user in the world and the largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions, although its cumulative emissions remain significantly below that of the United States (Baumert, Herzog, and Pershing 2005). Its annual per capita emissions have already exceeded the world average and are still rising rapidly. Furthermore, China is one of many countries that are likely to be most seriously affected by climate change. Vigorous implementation of a green development strategy will not only benefit China but also contribute toward global efforts to reduce emissions and mitigate climate change.”
27 June 2012 - The Dawkins Delusion "The Dead Paw of Plato"
Environmentalists are attacked for making "Green the New Religion". This is analysed and rebutted by James Murray of Business Green in a Guardian article here where he notes that: -
'Religion can mean a "pursuit or interest followed with great devotion" – a definition which could just about allow environmentalism to be classified as a "religion".'
It is worth a read.
However, its also worth noting that with the ferocity of the Inquisition, atheist/secularist Richard Dawkins has sustained a campaign for many years against religion, with great devotion.
However, the surprise is that his 'source-villain' is finally revealed and it is not in fact 'religion at all.
In extremis the source-villain is revealed as 'the dead hand of Plato'.
God help us. There are certainly problems with 'belief systems', but 'belief in Plato'? Green as a religion, is not really a serious attack but Richard Dawkin's switching his atheist attack from religion to Plato takes the biscuit. It is like waking up in 12th Night and the Gulling of Malvolio without Sir Toby Belch and crew - in other words he's gulled himself.
Barnum and Bailey here we come . . . Crispin Tickell has noted drily that Dawkins argues so effectively for the removal of God, he's created a vacancy that he alone can fill . . . and now he's done it, yellow socks and all.
However, beware of the new straw-man . . . flying essentialist rabbits . . . the God in the way of evolutionism has floppy ears, fur and a dead paw.
Behold 'The Dawkins Delusion' - Darwin would have cringed.
Here is an excerpt . . . .
Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling into that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp that the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier – or indeed Archimedes two millennia earlier? Many answers have been suggested. Perhaps minds were cowed by the sheer time it must take for great change to occur - by the mismatch between what we now call geological deep time and the lifespan and comprehension of the of person trying to understand it. Perhaps it was religious indoctrination that held us back. Or perhaps it was the daunting complexity of a living organ such as an eye, freighted as it is with the beguiling illusion of a design by a master engineer. Probably all those played a role. But Ernst Mayr, grand old man of neo-Darwin synthesis who died in 2005 at the age of 100, repeatedly voiced a different suspicion. For Mayr the culprit was the ancient philosophical doctrine - to give it its modern name – essentialism. The discovery of evolution was held back by the dead hand of Plato.
each person on the planet is granted an equal right to emit carbon by virtue of their equal right to use the benefits provided by a shared atmosphere. This principle is treated as intrinsic to the architecture of the approach and not a longer-term aspiration as in the case of Kyoto Plus.
a ‘global ceiling ‘ for greenhouse emissions is set based on a calculation of the amount the global environment can withstand without dangerous climate change taking place.
each country is allocated a yearly ‘carbon emissions budget ‘ consistent with the global ceiling not being exceeded, and calculated according to each country’s population size relative to an agreed base year. The name of the approach comes from the notion that over time, it aims to bring about a stabilisation, and later a contraction, in global greenhouse emissions so that they stay below a safe level; and that, in the longer term, developed and developing countries will converge on a roughly equal level of per capita emissions.
Within this overall approach, a country that wants to emit more than its yearly quota must buy credits from countries that have spare capacity. The country selling the credits is then free to invest the receipts in activities enabling it to develop sustainably. An emissions mechanism is a key feature of all of the proposed successors to Kyoto, but in this version the trading zone covers the whole planet from the outset. The consequence is that Contraction and Convergence offers a unique mixture of equity and flexibility which does not seek a literal convergence in greenhouse emissions, but rather a convergence in the rights of all countries to make use of the atmospheric commons. Unlike a number of competing approaches, Contraction and Convergence, if fully implemented and complied with, could be expected to reduce the risks of dangerous climate change substantially, although it will not prevent many adverse impacts in the short to medium-term. It also has the merit that it adopts emissions targets based on scientific criteria for protecting inequalities between developing and developed countries, and between generations, relative to its rivals. It will also tend to improve, relative to rival approaches, the position of the worst off since research suggests strongly that very many of the worst off will be members of developing countries in a future world blighted by climate change. Finally, it will be attractive to those who wish to bring as many people as possible to the point where they have enough since the measures it will introduce will benefit many millions of people in developed and developing countries who lead, or will lead, lives lacking in what is needed for a decent life without bringing more than a very limited number of people below the sufficiency level." "Contraction and Convergence - the Global Solution to Climate Change" -
Aubrey Meyer Green Books.
C&C
was pioneered by the Global Commons Institute Climate Change, Justice and Future Generations
Edward Page
26 June 2012 - "I support C&C - Arguably the fairest way to proceed." Prof Dennis O'Hara MUSE Project
For the C&C approach to become operational, the signatories to the UNFCCC must agree on a safe concentration of atmospheric GHGs, the proportional allocation of this limited capacity based on national populations, the fair assessment of current levels of emissions, targets for contraction of those national emissions that exceed allocations4 and the concurrent temporary increase in emissions for those countries which have not utilized their full allocation – an enormous undertaking that has thus far been elusive.
Nevertheless, the proponents of the C&C approach argue that it can provide an equitable and just response to the climate change challenge that can win the support of the developing world since it both protects their ability to develop and obligates the developed world to reduce its excess emissions (Global Commons Institute 2008).
They further argue that the date of convergence should be realized as soon as possible since the most vulnerable and least responsible for climate change are currently bearing a disproportionate and unjust burden created by those who have utilized more than their fair share of the atmospheric commons, and justice demands that this be resolved as soon as possible. Ethical Response to Climate Change
Dennis Patrick O’Hara and Alan Abelsohn
Dear Aubrey,
I am very happy to support the Global Commons Institute’s Contraction and Convergence Proposal to the UNFCCC.
The causes of climate change are varied and complex, and successful responses will probably be equally varied and complex. Contraction and Convergence is, as you note, “an enormous undertaking,” but I believe that it offers arguably the most fair way to proceed.
Without fairness, there will be no lasting solutions. Therefore, I happily support the C&C Proposal and the work of the GCI.
Best regards,
Dennis
Dennis Patrick O'Hara, DC, ND, BA, MDiv, PhD
Associate Professor, Ethics and Eco-theology
Director, Elliott Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology
University of St. Michael's College
Associate Member, Graduate Faculty
Centre for Environment, University of Toronto
25 June 2012 - "I Strongly support C&C & Submission to UNFCCC." Chris Rose Director Campaign Strategy
Yes Aubrey
I strongly support the C&C approach and the submission to the UNFCCC.
Chris Rose
Director Campaign Strategy Ltd
12 Jolly Sailor Yard, wells next the Sea, Norfolk, UK, NR23 1LA
According to Chris who is also the ex Campaigns Director for Greenpeace,
10 factors have made it hard to campaign effectively ‘on climate’.
1. Scientists defined the issue; 2. Governments ran off with it; 3. NGOs adopted secondary roles;
4. The issue had no public; 5. The media were left to define the issue in visual terms;
6. Governments soft pedalled on the issue; 7. Scientists led calls for education of the public;
8. Many NGOs tried to make the UNFCCC ‘work’; 9. Others tried to connect it with “bigger issues”;
10. There was no common proposition.
Having reviewed the trends in the use of natural resources and accompanying undesirable environ-mental impacts in the first section of Chapter 2, the last section of that chapter considers possible future implications by presenting three brief scenarios: (1) business as usual (leading to a tripling of global annual resource extraction by 2050); (2) moderate contraction and convergence (requiring industrialized countries to reduce their per capita resource consumption by half the rate for the year 2000); and (3) tough contraction and convergence (aimed at keeping global resource extraction at its current levels). None of these scenarios will lead to actual global reductions in resource use, but all indicate that substantial reductions in the resource requirements of economic activities will be necessary if the growing world population can expect to live under conditions of sustainable resource management. The key message of the tough scenario is that despite population growth to roughly 9 billion people, the pressure on the environment would remain roughly the same as it is now. The emissions correspond approximately to the lowest range of scenario B1 of the IPCC SRES, but are still 20% above the roughly 5.5 GtC/yr advocated by the Global Commons Institute for contraction and convergence in emissions (GCI, 2003). UNEP - Decoupling Natural Resource Use and
Environmental Impacts from Economic Growth - 2011
Dr. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Dr. Ashok Khosla,
Co-Chairs, International Resource Panel (IRP)
23 June 2012 - "Ethical but pragmatic; I strongly support C&C proposal." Prof David Coley Bath University
Hi Aubrey
Just to say I strongly support GCI's C&C Proposal to the UNFCCC.
David
Professor David
Coley
University of Bath
CHAPTER 18 POLITICS IN THE GREENHOUSE: CONTRACTING AND CONVERGING
Together, these steps represent an approach called Contraction and Convergence (C&C). Although it does have an ethical basis, C&C is essentially a pragmatic approach. Given the need to create a worldwide solution, because of growing emissions from the developing world and the reluctance of the USA to contemplate an approach which is not worldwide, C&C resolves this problem. Contraction and Convergence Green Books 2000 Meyer.
A personal account of the subject and of the climate negotiations. Energy and Climate Change: Creating a Sustainable Future
David Coley
23 June 2012 - "C&C - Perhaps the most significant challenge to conventional thinking." Dr Sandra Carlisle
Dear Aubrey
I'm more than happy to support this!
Regards,
Sandra
Professor Sandra Carlisle
University of Glasgow School of Medicine
Wolfson Medical School Building, University Avenue, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland
More recently, awareness of the threat of global ecological hazards to human health has seen the emergence of ‘ecological’ forms of public health. A number of different approaches to this topic can be discerned within our discipline (Hanlon and Carlisle 2010). Some, for example, have applied a very traditional scientific model to particular issues that will arise from a given rise in global temperature. Consider, for example, the challenge of ‘contraction and convergence’ (Meyer 2000). This is a concept that has been developed in response to global warming and other environmental threats. The idea is simple. The world needs a contraction in output of carbon dioxide but for all to buy into such an agreement it must be transparently just: hence the need for convergence. Less developed nations must be allowed to develop, which may mean increased carbon utilization, whilst industrialized and post industrial nations must make substantial reductions. However, an ethical framework which ensures global justice and equity while safeguarding the rights of individuals has yet to emerge. This will be a key challenge if the world is not to face runaway climate change and collapse. In Search of Transformational Change.
The Future Public Health: An Integrative Framework
Prof Phil Hanlon, Dr Andrew Lyon, Dr Margaret Hannah,
Dr David Reilly, Dr Sandra Carlisle
There are also other ideas and models that can help us think differently and challenge conventional thinking. Perhaps one of the most significant is the concept of "contraction and convergence‟ developed by Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Institute, in response to the threat of runaway climate change (Meyer 2000). Meyer notes that the whole world needs a contraction in the production of carbon dioxide - an output of increased industrialisation and economic growth. Rich and poor nations must eventually converge in their carbon production, to avoid catastrophe. Less developed nations must be allowed to develop – so their carbon use goes up - whilst industrialized and post industrial nations must make substantial reductions. OXFAM Briefing - Well-being in consumer culture and the New Poor Sandra Carlisle and Philip Hanlon
"The potential impact of climate change is immense and it is now widely accepted that time in which to address the problem is running out. Aubrey Meyer and David Crichton look at contraction and convergence as a possible solution."
The authors of the UK Chartered Insurance Institute report on climate change were in no doubt of this when they said in 2001: "The most realistic way to bring about the required reduction in greenhouse gases emissions ... is that proposed in the concept of contraction and convergence."
Far-sighted insurance companies would be well advised to become familiar with this concept, which could have a major impact on their businesses over the next 20 years.
Contraction and convergence is the only solution that is consistent with the principle that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which states that everybody is born equal. If you carry this through to its logical conclusion, it means everybody in the world should have equal rights to enjoy the benefits of modern technology. It also means generations still to be born should have equal rights to those living today.
The underlying principle of contraction and convergence is that developing countries should be allowed to grow their emissions while developed countries contract theirs until the figures converge at some agreed per capita level.
This may seem a bit radical to some, but recently, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said contract and convergence "appears utopian only if we refuse to contemplate the alternatives honestly".
"Many scientists believe that an atmospheric level of 450 ppmv (parts per million by volume) of carbon dioxide should be the initial target for prudence; already we are at 380. For long-term allocation, the “Contraction and Convergence” model (C&C) seems appropriate. The name C&C reflects the facts that the annual emissions contract to a safe level, and the per capita shares converge to become equal. C&C has the advantages of simplicity and fairness, gives long-term confidence in emissions reduction and in the short-term can accommodate a variety of ‘fixes’ as well as facilitating the flow of funds to developing countries." "Coping with Climate Change"
CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF INSURERS
The considered the views of some insurance industry experts: - “Even if we do not know the speed or severity of feedback effects, we must consider the probabilities of disastrous acceleration in climate change within very short time-scales. Risk assessment is the core activity of the insurance industry, the biggest industry in the world. Assessment of risk must fully include feedback effects. Insurers are the leading experts in risk and risk modelling. C&C demonstrates how this can be done. C&C already has a high profile with insurers. Governments need to listen to the insurance industry and make C&C central to government policy around the world. From a risk management point of view, C&C produces an important assessment of the risks we face from human-induced runaway climate change and how to frame a response at the policy level.” Prof David Crichton- Benfield Hazard Centre UCL
“There is a way of cutting global greenhouse gas emissions that is equitable, sensible and workable. It is called Contraction & Convergence, or simply C&C, and it is the brainchild of the South African musician Aubrey Meyer, founder of the London-based Global Commons Institute. Meyer is one of the most extraordinary characters on the climate change activist ‘scene’, who grasped the urgency of finding a viable solution to climate change earlier than most of us realised that there was a problem. Almost two decades ago he gave up a professional music career that included playing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and writing for the Royal Ballet, to focus on the issue. The C&C concept has been forced onto the world stage by Meyer’s unstinting enthusiasm and incredible work rate. So successful has the lobbying process been that C&C is now a serious contender in terms of forming the basis of the post-Kyoto climate agreement that will, fingers crossed, be signed at Copenhagen in 2009. C&C already has many supporters in government and industry circles around the world. In the months left however, it is imperative that the mechanism is promulgated as widely as possible as the only option available to bring the climate change beast to heel. To help accomplish this, I urge you as strongly as I possibly can to support Aubrey and the GCT, for all our sakes and those of our children and grand children.”
This animation of C&C and risk is brilliant. The Kyoto Protocol is having negligible effect. If successful, Kyoto will result in a slowdown in the rise of global temperatures by 0.02C to 0.28C. That isn’t going to help a great deal and we must decide what comes after Kyoto. It has to have the US, India and China on board. The best hope is a system called contraction and convergence, which works on the premise that everyone on the planet has the right to produce the same amount of greenhouse gas. A level is set for the planet and it is divided by the number of people, so that each country knows how much it can emit per head of population. The overall level is then brought down by agreement.” Prof Bill McGuire Geophysical & Climate Hazards Director, Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre
“C&C is so open and transparent. Within the insurance sector it is recognised by CEOs who know they need a long-term global framework within which they can assess their risk. Without C&C they’re stuck with a guesswork approach. A stable insurance industry is essential for a stable economy and a stable financial sector. Insurance needs a long term global framework so it can plan for the future. C&C will help bring this about. It needs to be adopted at the highest level, from the UN down through every business sector.”
“Aubrey Meyer is the most courageous and brilliant climate researcher I have ever met. He is willing to say what other’s merely think. He is quite fearless of any audience and the most eloquent of speaker’s because he knows that ultimately the concept of Contraction and Convergence [C&C] is indestruct-ible and will in the fullness of time be adopted in some form by the UNFCCC. He has developed his arguments over twenty years with a minimum of fund-ing and has refused to compromise his position in any way for financial gain or glory. He is tireless in his research and quest to understand every nu-ance of the climate debate. It has been an honour for me to have known and worked with such a brilliant mind and such an honest person as Aubrey.He has much support from very well placed and respectable people and deserves global recognition for his work. He is quite simply a modern-day genius who will one day be respected for his vision and beliefs. He should be considered for the Nobel Peace prize as his efforts ultimately will save the planet from the ravages of man-induced climate change.” Dr JULIAN SALT - Director of Climate Solutions
“Aubrey Meyer’s insight into the problem of mitigation of climate change bears the true hallmark of genius: it is simple and robust. His “Contraction & Convergence” model provides a transparent framework that incorporates the clear objective of a safe global level of greenhouse gases, and allocates the responsibility for achieving this internationally with the irresist ible logic of equal shares. At the same time, the model recognises the practical need for an adjustment period to permit nations to conform to the new logic and prepare for a climate-friendly economy. It is no doctrinaire solution, but a brilliantly pragmatic and elegant solution.” Dr Andrew Dlugolecki - Advisory Board Director, Carbon Disclosure Project
Adviser on Climate Change to UNEP Finance Sector Initiative
“An agreement on global policies to tackle climate change is urgently needed for many reasons. In the first place, evidence is accumulating that the climate system may be more sensitive than we believed even in the recent IPCC report. At the same time, there has not been much progress in putting a systematic halt to emissions, so the problem will get worse. The agreement needs to include credible, strong, phased targets for emissions leading to a global reduction of 50 per cent by 2050; otherwise the price of carbon will be too low to incentivise a change in mindset. The fairest way to share these is the Contraction & Convergence model, which leads to equal emissions percapita in every country." The industry expert’s view
Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki, FCII, Research Fellow, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia.
Author and editor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Contraction & convergence
The most realistic way to bring about the required reduction in ghg emissions (which will have the
combined effect of reducing the damage imposed on the insurance industry and encouraging the transition to renewable energy) is that proposed in the concept of Contraction and Convergence (C&C). This concept was created by the Global Commons Institute (GCI) and is incredibly simple in its detail. Essentially, everyone has the right to emit an equal amount of pollution (in this case CO2) to the Global Commons (atmosphere). At present society emits six billion tonnes of carbon a year (6Gtc) to the atmosphere. Coincidentally there are six billion people alive today—hence everyone should be entitled an equal right to emit 1 tonne/yr. To achieve the required global reduction in ghg emissions an agreed target of say 2Gtc by 2040 could be set and the system allowed to contract to that global budget by converging on an agreed per capita allowance. Those states that need to emit more than their share will have to buy emission entitlements from those that have an excess. This would operate in much the same way as the envisaged emissions trading scheme to be set up within the Kyoto Protocol.
Figure 10.9 - The red line shows Business as usual CO2 emissions (BAU). The solid segments show ‘Contraction, Convergence, Allocation and Trade’ to manage emissions down by at least 60% within a given time frame and ‘contraction budget’. The renewables opportunity is worth trillions of dollars—the biggest market in history. Annex One is the developed World. Gtc: trillions of tonnes of carbon equivalent.
Figure 10.9 illustrates this process, showing that by the year 2100 emissions will have fallen to well below today’s levels, and will emanate from what are, today, developing countries. Since economic progress is dependent on energy, the shortfall from ‘Business as usual’ energy consumption will need to be met from two directions: efficiency gains, and a rapid growth in renewable energy sources. It is clear from this that emissions trading can only be an intermediate stage, since the total volume of emissions must fall. The only blockage to this simple system is the absence of political will to ‘step outside the box’ instead of conducting a tortuous round of negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol. One way to unblock this impasse is to amass a large enough consensus of stakeholders behind the concept of contraction and convergence, persuading governments to supersede the Kyoto Protocol. The insurance industry is an obvious place to start such a campaign as it has so much to lose and so much to gain. If society continues down the fossil/Kyoto route, future economic losses are likely to become unsustainable: the current rate of increase in damage from natural hazards is 12% pa and the rate is accelerating. Given that the global sum of such losses was $100bn in 1999 (Munich Re, 2000), it would outstrip global GDP (growing at 3% pa) by 2065, if the trends persist. If the insurance industry rallies behind C&C, it not only reduces that risk, but it is well placed to invest in the future renewables market. In fact one could argue that as the insurance companies own the oil companies (through equity ownership), insurers form the only industry that has the collateral and the need to adopt the C&C logic. The desired sequence of events is shown in Figure 10.10.
Beyond Kyoto – contraction and convergence
It is important to recognise that any agreement can be only the first step in what will be a major journey. It is clear that even if the Kyoto targets are met, global emissions will continue to rise because of rapidly rising emissions in the developing world. Substantial further steps will have to be taken to curb emissions globally. Such cuts will inevitably begin to involve poor countries and at the same time rich countries are likely to have to commit to much more serious emission reductions themselves. As a result further emission reduction agreements are likely covering the period 2012-20 and beyond. Climate change: a risk management challenge for institutional investors Indeed, the IPCC in its first assessment reports in 1990 recommended emissions cuts of at least 60% to stabilise CO2 concentrations at 1990 levels and thereby be likely to avoid serious climate disruption. Its subsequent reports have not altered this position. In the longer term, ‘Contraction and Convergence’ (C&C) is likely to become increasingly supported as a policy option. C&C was initially advocated by a small UK think tank, the Global Commons Institute39, but has since gained widespread and authoritative support, including that of some poor country governments and also the recent Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report40 which recommended that ‘the government should press for a future global climate agreement based on the contraction and convergence approach’. Under C&C, the right to emit greenhouse gases would be apportioned on a per capita basis from a given date. The total amount of emissions would be constrained and would fall steeply until it reached a level considered safe. Since the majority of the world’s population lives in the developing world, while per capita emissions are much higher in the industrialised world, rich countries would need to find ways to reduce their emissions – contraction – by finding efficiencies or renewable energy sources in the next few decades, or pay handsomely for the privilege of continuing to use fossil fuels. In this way they could approach equal per capita emissions to those in other countries – convergence. Ironically, while C&C offers a more robust framework than that outlined by Kyoto, and addresses the issue of equity, it also meets the fundamental objection of the US in that it also requires commitments from the developing world. As a global operational framework it also avoids many of the technical problems of Kyoto (such as defining baselines for emissions trading in countries not subject to an overall target, or the extent of international emissions trading that is permissible). However, much will depend on the detail. Done well, C&C could provide a framework for a genuine, equitable, long term solution to climate change, which reduces political risks and provides businesses and investors with the sort of predictable framework they prefer. But if agreement is hard to reach, C&C might serve to highlight injustices and end up exacerbating tensions. For example, some campaigners have argued for a third ‘C’: ‘compensation’ from the rich world for using up the climate’s absorptive capacity. Whilst this claim is understandable, such a development could well become an emotive issue that could make agreement far harder to reach. Climate Change - A Risk Management Challenge for Insitutional Investors
Mark Manwely and Andrew Dlugolecki
For the long term, the agreement of an international policy based on the principles of precaution,
equity and economic efficiency is critical if we are to reduce the risk and engage all parties in the
endeavour. A number of approaches have been proposed, including the ‘historical’ method, under
which a nation’s future emissions goals would be determined by its past GHG output; the carbon-intensity
approach, in which future emissions goals would be indexed to GDP; and “Contraction and Convergence” which would aim to achieve equal per capita emissions for all nations by an agreed date. Up to now, however, most of the work under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been directed at finalising and ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.
[For more information on C&C refer to the website of the Global Commons Institute] UNEPFI CEO Briefing
23 June 2012 - "I support the clear focus & better sense of responsibility of C&C." Prof Martin Manning NZ CRU
Dear Aubrey
Thank you for sending me the links to your submission to UNFCCC and I certainly do support this clear focus on the global convergence that is necessary to deal with climate change by developing a better sense of collective responsibilities for our future.
After being a climate scientist for more than 30 years one realises that the main issue is not about the levels of confidence in the science, but whether or not the human race can actually operate with a sense of collective responsibility. The main barriers to acceptance of such an approach come from the fossil fuel industry and its influence on governance systems in the western world. For example, in New Zealand we have the best source of tidal power in the world, called the Cook Strait, and, despite some people trying to develop this natural resource, our government is subsidising development of very deep sea drilling for oil and gas north of NZ in an area that is close to a continental plate boundary and so very susceptible to earthquakes.
During my involvement in the IPCC process, I knew the chair Bob Watson very well but could only watch in disbelief when Exxon wrote to President George Bush telling him to prevent Watson from being re-elected in 2002. And that happened. So there is a battle going on and much of it is being driven by some industries. A more positive move on pushing the UNFCCC process forward has come from the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), that has a collective approach to the management of global investments of about $20 trillion, and this could be linked to developing broader acceptance of the need for convergence.
Do you have any contact with IIGCC?
Regards
Prof Martin Manning
Climate Change Research Institute
School of Geography Environment and Earth Studies
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
23 June 2012 - "No more effective proposal than C&C." Professors Roaf & Jowitt of Heriot Watt University.
Dear Aubrey
I would like to add my name to those strongly supporting GCI's current C&C Proposal to the UNFCCC.
There has been no more effective proposal put forward for the metrics of negotiated accounting to emission reduction targets than C&C and I believe it is vital that C&C is adopted within future frameworks for carbon planning for the future.
Good luck with making that happen.
Sue Roaf
Professor of Architectural Engineering
Heriot Watt University
Chair of ICARB (the Initiative for Carbon Accounting);
A Director of theEdinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation,
A Workstrand Leader for the Edinburgh Climate Exchange and
Board Member of the International Solar Cities Initiative.
I am very happy to support the GCI C&C approach to achieving climate stability and reducing global CO2 emissions in a fair and equitable way.
Regards
Paul Jowitt
Professor of Civil Engineering Systems,
Heriot Watt University
Executive Director,
The Scottish Institute of Sustainable Technology
“Atmospheric CO2 levels are reaching critical levels and there must be a strategy to stabilise concentrations to a (relatively) safe level, and with the Kyoto process in limbo, some other process or protocol will be required to arrest the asymmetric pattern of ‘Expansion and Divergence’ and which leads to a more equitable and less self-destructive use of the earth’s resources.
The “Contraction and Convergence” (C&C) Strategy proposed by the Global Commons Institute offers such a process, drawing widespread interest and support, for example from the Indian Government, the Africa Group of Nations40 and the USA41. In December 1997 at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Kyoto and shortly before they withdrew from the Kyoto negotiations the USA stated: “Contraction and convergence contains elements for the next agreement that we may ultimately all seek to engage in.”
“The fundamental attraction of Contraction & Convergence to me is that it’s logically based. It’s not based on essentially market issues and arbitrary decisions about how many tons of CO2 permits are going to be allowed. It also doesn’t have the risk in my view of one of the real issues with trading that some of the poorer nations and poorer peoples of the world will mortgage their future on a futures market of trading permits.” Prof Paul Jowitt - President ICE
The Global Commons Institute (GCI), founded in 1990 by musician Aubrey Meyer after the Second World Climate Conference, is an independent group concerned with the protection of the “Global Commons”. GCI has contributed to the work of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
22 June 2012 - "C&C is needed to gain trust." Energy security in the Era of Climate Change Anceschi & Symons
One key conclusion is that since reducing the rate of emissions of GHGs is ultimately a global problem – although one whose resolution requires dispersed responses - quite a lot will almost certainly need to be done by the richer countries and richer communities to gain the collaboration of other countries and communities in addressing that challenge. A second conclusion is that rich countries will need to give up more of actual use, whilst the poorer communities and countries will need to surrender more potential growth. The conclusion of the Gamaut Report, which examines the resulting dilemma in some detail, is that to gain such collaboration there must at least be an agreed ultimate objective of moving emissions per capita to a common target - the position proposed is referred to as 'contraction and convergence'.
After canvassing a range of widely debated principles for allocation of emissions caps and reductions across the world, the Report (Garnaut, 2008, p. 202) concludes: -
"While all of these approaches have strengths and weaknesses, the approach that seems to have the most potential to combine the desired levels of acceptability, perceived fairness and practicality is one based on gradual movement towards entitlements to equal per capita emissions. An approach that gives increasing weight over time to population in determining national allocations both acknowledges high emitters' positions in starting from the status quo and recognises developing countries' claims to equitable allocation of rights to the atmosphere."
Energy security bought at the cost of an increasingly chaotic climate may buy neither economic nor social stability. The two major studies of the costs of mitigation versus the costs of adaptation conclude that adaptation is much more expensive than the costs of averting the need to adapt through mitigation (Stern, 2006; Garnaut, 2008). From this point of view, energy security requires sufficient allocative justice to create the basis for a global consensus sufficient for the purpose of meeting the challenge of climate mitigation. Energy Security in the Era of Climate Change: The Asia-Pacific Experience
Eedited by Luca Anceschi, Jonathan Symons
"A precise version of the per capita approach, often referred to as ‘contraction and convergence’ (GCI 2000), has figured in the international debate for some time. It has been promoted by India and has been discussed favourably in Germany and the United Kingdom (German Advisory Council on Global Change 2003; UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution 2000). Recent reports have shown increasing support for variations on this general approach, see for example, Stern (2008) and the Commission on Growth and Development (2008).
22 June 2012 - Rob Hopkins, inspirational initiator of Transition Movement, supporting C&C proposals.
Rob said one of the really interesting things he’s seen is the idea that resilience is something that needs to happen everywhere, not just here [in the developed world].
He went on to say,
“We’ve creamed the fat off the developing world for the last 400 years, and the idea that we would put up the fence and say ‘we’ll not sort this out for ourselves’ is irresponsible. We need to have two processes that run in parallel–re-localization here, understanding that total re-localization is impossible, but maybe working toward an 80-percent/20-percent mix of local and imported goods. There’s the process of contraction and convergence, with the developed world scaling down and the developing world scaling up. Helping to create food security in the developing world is really necessary.”
Global policy is likely to resemble the Contraction and Convergence (“C&C”) Framework from the Global Commons Institute (GCI). It applies a principle of equity for all, ie, we all have the same right to produce CO2. So we can plot lines for our nations current per-capita footprint to the sustainable equity footprint at some future point and that will represent the rate at which we HAVE to cut emissions. We would have to cut CO2 emissions by 90% by 2030. (Alternatively, to meet the 400ppm deadline in 2016, we have to aim to cut GHG emissions by 60% within ten years.) As a country our Government has committed us to cut CO2 emissions 12.5% below 1990 levels before 2012 (under the Kyoto Protocol) and by 60% by 2050. The figures are only different because of the level of risk our leaders POLITICALLY are willing to face. However the choice is clear. We have to make enormous cuts and quickly. There is nothing to stop Local Councils adopting a Target-Based Contraction Framework based upon any of these figures.
Contraction and Convergence (C&C) is a proposed global framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change. Conceived by the Global Commons Institute in the early 1990's, the Contraction and Convergence strategy consists of reducing overall emissions of greenhouse gases to a safe level (Contraction) where the global emissions are reduced because every country brings emissions per capita to a level which is equal for all countries (Convergence). The Global Commons Institute was founded in the United Kingdom in 1990 by Aubrey Meyer and others to campaign for a fair way to tackle climate change.Contraction and Convergence is intended to form the basis of an international agreement which will reduce carbon emissions to avoid climate change. It is expressed as a simple mathematical formula. This formula can be used as a way for the world to stabilize carbon levels at any level. The supporters of Contraction and Convergence anticipate that future negotiations would focus solely on what that final level should be.
Climate Change -
An Incontestable Truth Many Eminent Contributors "The UK All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group has sets out a disciplined approach to address climate change through a framework of “contraction and convergence”.
This DVD was produced on behalf of the UK House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group of MPs (APPCCG) by GCI and Tangent Films. It was distributed to all sitting UK MPs in 2007. It points to the disciplined approach we need to address climate change. Not an approach based on wishful thinking, but a rational framework which leads to the solution foreshadowed in the original 1990 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and subsequently much ignored.
The UNFCCC called on all countries to recognise their equal but differentiated responsibilities to cut carbon emissions, and to recognise that the eventual equitable distribution of carbon rights had to be achieved. Over 180 countries signed up to the UNFCCC's aims, but have so far failed to deliver the action necessary to achieve them. Time is now running desperately short. We need to implement the framework known as Contraction & Convergence (C&C), as proposed by the Global Commons Institute (GCI), in order to prevent further delay or sub-standard measures which might fool us into believing that we're dealing with climate change, when we're not.
This DVD gives an explanation of C&C. Experts also explain why they support C&C and Aubrey Meyer, whose work in developing C&C has been recognised in awards from the Schumacher Society and the City of London. He presents a risk analysis to show how C&C can react to stabilise the amount of C02 in the atmosphere as natural carbon sinks begin to fail. For more information, please follow these links
Thanks to our contributors: Sir Crispin Tickell, Grace Akumu, Alex Evans, Prof. Bill McGuire, Chris Motters-head, Jon Snow, Prof. Michael Mainelli, Prof Paul Jowitt, Dr. Julian Salt, Mark Lynas, Jack Pringle, David Wasdel, Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki, Dr. Robin Stott, Angela Mawle, Lorna Walker, Jeffrey Newman, Fred Pearce, Dr. Joshua Wairoto.
COLIN CHALLEN MP, Chair APPCCG Contraction and Convergence - An Incontestable Truth [1] The Irreducible Response to Climate Change [2]
Strong international climate change protocols, Contraction & Convergence, a moratorium on biodiesal production, Oil Depletion Protocol. rethinking economic growth, biodiversity prtoection, a realistically high price on carbon.
Strong climate change legislation, Tradable Energy Quotas,
a national food security strategy, devolution of of powers to local communities, support for the relocalisation of industry.
Transition initiatives, Energy Descent Plans, Climate Friendly Communities, Community Supported Agriculture, land trusts, credits unions, locally owned energy supply companies.
The first speaker was Dr. Robin Stott, a GP and Chairman of the UK Medical Peace and Environment Group. His talk looked at the implications of climate change on our approach to healthcare. Climate change, he argued, is the most siugnificant public health problem of this century. The other challenge that sits alongside it is that of global inequity and the lack of social equity. Climate change, initially at least, will affect the poorer people in the world most gravely. Our responses need to include informing people and organisations, affirming that we need to both put our own houses in order and advocate for global solutions, and identifying frameworks for global agreement. The model Stott put forward, which will not be new to regular readers of Transition Culture, is Contraction and Convergence. C&C promotes an equitable global agreement, which would reign in the emissions of more affluent nations while also allowing sustainable development of poorer nations. It transfers money to poorer nations and creates a policy virtuous cycle which enables economic and social progress within environmental limits. If brought into operation, he argued, it would unleash a boom in low carbon technologies, and would do much to avert the potential public health catastrophe the potential for which is inherent within the climate change crisis.
The first evening was a talk by Aubrey Meyer, originator of the Contraction and Convergence approach. As well as being an extraordinary climate change activist, he is also a concert violinist, and his talk featured some virtuouso playing as well as a passionate setting out of the case for Contraction and Convergence as a response to climate change. You can read a part of the interview I did with him earlier that day exploring the relationship between peak oil and climate change [here].
The Third Great Transition: A contraction-and-convergence approach in which the rich nations cut back voluntarily on consumption, and share equitably with poor countries, while everyone works to reduce human population in the long run to two to three billion people, and ecosystem protection becomes a top international priority. This requires not a technological revolution, but rather a spiritual one, in which we enter into a partnership with nature to maintain the Earth's living systems. Like scenario number two, this would be wonderful, but also seems unlikely: in this case we face deep-set cultural and perhaps even biological behavior patterns that would make it extremely difficult for people to change from attitudes of personal and tribal selfishness to a primary concern for humanity and the Earth as a whole.
Transition,
Managed politically led
UN programmes
Contraction and Convergence
Political programmes,
Bottom up approach,
Transition Towns
Local economies, alternative currencies,
Education
As the currently over-consuming nations of the world proceed to “power down” their energy use, and to reduce material throughputs, while lowering personal consumption levels, overall global impacts can eventually be optimized well below the maximum sustainable capacities of the planet. However, we must remain cognizant of enormous disparities among nations as to present levels of use. Many nations and peoples of the world already live at very low consumption levels; in fact far below levels that can sustain personal, family and/or community well-being. Such disparities among and within nations are often the result of prior or present colonial periods of exploitation. It is unarguable that many countries of the industrial north have achieved their excessive natural resource use by depriving southern countries of theirs, a process that continues in many places today. Recognizing this, we believe that each person and community, whether in the industrial North, or the global South, has fundamental rights to “sufficient” food, shelter, clothing, housing as well as sufficient community health and other public services, to sustain a satisfactory level of well-being beyond bare minimum survival needs. (Note: Working definitions of “sufficiency” and a “global sufficiency index” have been proposed and need further development and definition. As part of this project, we hope to soon advance a viable new clear standard.) Meanwhile, the argument is compellingly made by some Southern countries, historically disadvantaged, that they should not be asked to “power down” to the same degree as Northern countries. In the interests of survival, they may often need to increase their material throughputs, and energy use, from renewable sources; not to approach a level of excess consumption, but toward a level of “sufficiency,” well within the planet’s capacity to sustain.
Thus, the concepts of “cap and share,” or, “contraction and convergence” have emerged. As wealthy over-consuming countries reduce their activity far below present overconsumptive levels, the goal is for the poorest countries and peoples to bring their levels up until “convergence” or equity is approached. Overall, however, the convergence target must remain far below the maximum sustainable levels for all planetary material throughputs, including total energy use, thus requiring profound net reductions in all areas. To assist this process will require considerable reallocation of planetary resources, wealth and sustainable technologies from the rich countries to the poorest countries and peoples, being certain to avoid the pitfalls and corruptions of prior historic patterns of aid, also usually rooted in colonial contexts. For example, within poor countries there are sometimes very wealthy elite minorities who gained from colonialism and globalization; they are sometimes called “the north within the south.” Transfers and contributions from this wealthy class should be included in the domestic equation. (Note: There are a growing number of proposals for how such transfers from North to South might operate, several of which are mentioned in the Resources section. We do not favor any of these proposals above others at this time; all should be studied and debated as to their optimum viability.) Equally important: The interests of equity also require rapid withdrawal of giant export-oriented agricultural corporations from food growing lands in poor countries. These lands have mainly been acquired over years by a variety of unacceptable means—sometimes militarily, or with the help of corrupt regimes—and most recently via the appalling rules of global bureaucracies, including the WTO and World Bank. Lands thus alienated from local people must be returned to the control of local communities and farmers. This in itself would free millions of people to re-assume their traditional local food growing activities that sustained their communities. Ultimately, the goal must be to achieve international accords on formulas that achieve “contraction” and “convergence,” i.e., formally mandated global economic formulas that lead to overall economic “contraction”—to live within realistic planetary limits—and “convergence” at an agreed global standard of“sufficiency” for all, as planetary health and resources permit. We believe that such a transition can lead to successful responses to this crisis, increased equity within and among countries, and a renewed sense of personal and global good feeling, well-being and peace. MANIFESTO on Global Economic Transition -
Powering-Down for the Future
Toward a Global Movement for Systemic Change: Economies of Ecological Sustainability, Equity, Sufficiency and Peace, “Less and local” -
EDITOR Jerry Mander
A Project of the International Forum on Globalization
The Institute for Policy Studies Global Project on Economic Transformations.
CO-SIGNERS: THE MANIFESTO ON GLOBAL ECONOMIC TRANSITIONS
(Organizations listed for identification purposes only)
Jerry Mander, co-director, International Forum on Globalization; co-editor,
Medea Benjamin, co-founder, Global Exchange; co-founder Code Pink
John Cavanagh, director, Institute for Policy Studies; co-editor, Alternatives to Economic Globalization
Sarah Anderson, director, global economy program, Institute for Policy Studies
Debi Barker, co-director, International Forum on Globalization
Tom Athanasiou, executive director, EcoEquity
Maude Barlow, national chairperson, Council of Canadians (Canada)
David Batker, executive director, Earth Economics
Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle, Ecological Options Network
Mike Brune, executive director, Rainforest Action Network
Peter Bunyard, science editor, The Ecologist (UK)
Tom Butler, Foundation for Deep Ecology; former editor, Wild Earth
Ernest Callenbach, author, Ecotopia
William R. Catton, Jr., professor emeritus, Washington State University
Tony Clarke, director, Polaris Institute (Canada)
Josh Farley, fellow, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont
Ross Gelbspan, author, The Heat is On and Boiling Point
Susan George, board chair, Transnat’l. Institute; author, Fate Worse Than Debt (France)
Edward R. Goldsmith, founder, The Ecologist; author, The Way (UK) 33
Claire Greensfelder, director, Plutonium Free Future; co-author, The Safe Energy Handbook
Charles Hall, Professor, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
Randy Hayes, founder, Rainforest Action Network; senior fellow, Int’l. Forum on Globalization
Richard Heinberg, author, Power Down, and The Party’s Over; fellow, Post Carbon Institute
Colin Hines, director, Protest the Local, Globally (UK)
Rob Hopkins, founder, Transition Towns Totnes Movement (UK)
Smitu Kothari, founder, Lokayan and Intercultural Resources (New Delhi, India)
David Korten, president, Positive Futures Network; author, The Great Turning
Satish Kumar, editor, Resurgence magazine; president, Schumacher College (UK)
Sara Larrain, director, Chile Sustentable (Chile)
Jeremy Leggett, CEO, Solar Century; author, The Carbon War (UK)
Ann Leonard, coordinator, Funders Working Group for Sustainable Production and Consumption
Caroline Lucas, member, European Parliament (UK)
Victor Menotti, program director, International Forum on Globalization
Frances Moore Lappé, author, Hope’s Edge and Diet for a Small Planet
Pat Murphy & Megan Quinn, The Community Solution
Samuel Nguiffo, director, Center for Environment and Development (Cameroon)
Helena Norberg-Hodge, director, Int’l Society for Ecology and Culture; author, Ancient Futures (UK)
Lúcia Ortiz, general coordinator, Friends of the Earth (Brazil)
Jakub Patocka, Literarky Magazine (Czech Republic)
David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agricultural science, Cornell University
Thomas Princen, associate professor of natural resources and environmental policy, University of Michigan
22 June 2012 - "C&C is & remains the only scientifically robust, politically & ethically justifiable framework." QUB
C&C is and remains the only scientifically robust, politically and ethically justifiable framework for enabling a global 'just transition' to decarbonisation in relation to climate change
Contraction and Convergence is a proposal from the Global Commons Institute for how the Earth's atmosphere (the 'global commons’) should be shared, which is another way of saying how the right to produce polluting carbon dioxide should be distributed (Meyer, 2000). It is a simple plan to cap total emissions at the level suggested by the best available science (relying on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and then to share these equally between all the world's citizens so that everybody receives a carbon credit. The Figure illustrates the Contraction and Convergence model, indicating how emissions have risen and how they countries will be expected to reduce them over the next 50 years. The contraction is this decline: the convergence is the movement towards global equality in per capita emissions.
21 June 2012 - This Manifesto presented C&C. It is as interesting for who signed it as what's in it.
As the currently over-consuming nations of the world proceed to “power down” their energy use, and to reduce material throughputs, while lowering personal consumption levels, overall global impacts can eventually be optimized well below the maximum sustainable capacities of the planet. However, we must remain cognizant of enormous disparities among nations as to present levels of use. Many nations and peoples of the world already live at very low consumption levels; in fact far below levels that can sustain personal, family and/or community well-being. Such disparities among and within nations are often the result of prior or present colonial periods of exploitation. It is unarguable that many countries of the industrial north have achieved their excessive natural resource use by depriving southern countries of theirs, a process that continues in many places today. Recognizing this, we believe that each person and community, whether in the industrial North, or the global South, has fundamental rights to “sufficient” food, shelter, clothing, housing as well as sufficient community health and other public services, to sustain a satisfactory level of well-being beyond bare minimum survival needs. (Note: Working definitions of “sufficiency” and a “global sufficiency index” have been proposed and need further development and definition. As part of this project, we hope to soon advance a viable new clear standard.) Meanwhile, the argument is compellingly made by some Southern countries, historically disadvantaged, that they should not be asked to “power down” to the same degree as Northern countries. In the interests of survival, they may often need to increase their material throughputs, and energy use, from renewable sources; not to approach a level of excess consumption, but toward a level of “sufficiency,” well within the planet’s capacity to sustain.
Thus, the concepts of “cap and share,” or, “contraction and convergence” have emerged. As wealthy over-consuming countries reduce their activity far below present overconsumptive levels, the goal is for the poorest countries and peoples to bring their levels up until “convergence” or equity is approached. Overall, however, the convergence target must remain far below the maximum sustainable levels for all planetary material throughputs, including total energy use, thus requiring profound net reductions in all areas. To assist this process will require considerable reallocation of planetary resources, wealth and sustainable technologies from the rich countries to the poorest countries and peoples, being certain to avoid the pitfalls and corruptions of prior historic patterns of aid, also usually rooted in colonial contexts. For example, within poor countries there are sometimes very wealthy elite minorities who gained from colonialism and globalization; they are sometimes called “the north within the south.” Transfers and contributions from this wealthy class should be included in the domestic equation. (Note: There are a growing number of proposals for how such transfers from North to South might operate, several of which are mentioned in the Resources section. We do not favor any of these proposals above others at this time; all should be studied and debated as to their optimum viability.) Equally important: The interests of equity also require rapid withdrawal of giant export-oriented agricultural corporations from food growing lands in poor countries. These lands have mainly been acquired over years by a variety of unacceptable means—sometimes militarily, or with the help of corrupt regimes—and most recently via the appalling rules of global bureaucracies, including the WTO and World Bank. Lands thus alienated from local people must be returned to the control of local communities and farmers. This in itself would free millions of people to re-assume their traditional local food growing activities that sustained their communities. Ultimately, the goal must be to achieve international accords on formulas that achieve “contraction” and “convergence,” i.e., formally mandated global economic formulas that lead to overall economic “contraction”—to live within realistic planetary limits—and “convergence” at an agreed global standard of“sufficiency” for all, as planetary health and resources permit. We believe that such a transition can lead to successful responses to this crisis, increased equity within and among countries, and a renewed sense of personal and global good feeling, well-being and peace. MANIFESTO on Global Economic Transition -
Powering-Down for the Future
Toward a Global Movement for Systemic Change: Economies of Ecological Sustainability, Equity, Sufficiency and Peace, “Less and local” -
EDITOR Jerry Mander
A Project of the International Forum on Globalization
The Institute for Policy Studies Global Project on Economic Transformations.
CO-SIGNERS: THE MANIFESTO ON GLOBAL ECONOMIC TRANSITIONS
(Organizations listed for identification purposes only)
Jerry Mander, co-director, International Forum on Globalization; co-editor, The Case Against the Global Economy
John Cavanagh, director, Institute for Policy Studies; co-editor, Alternatives to Economic Globalization
Sarah Anderson, director, global economy program, Institute for Policy Studies
Debi Barker, co-director, International Forum on Globalization
Tom Athanasiou, executive director, EcoEquity
Maude Barlow, national chairperson, Council of Canadians (Canada)
David Batker, executive director, Earth Economics
Medea Benjamin, co-founder, Global Exchange; co-founder Code Pink
Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle, Ecological Options Network
Mike Brune, executive director, Rainforest Action Network
Peter Bunyard, science editor, The Ecologist (UK)
Tom Butler, Foundation for Deep Ecology; former editor, Wild Earth
Ernest Callenbach, author, Ecotopia
William R. Catton, Jr., professor emeritus, Washington State University
Tony Clarke, director, Polaris Institute (Canada)
Josh Farley, fellow, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont
Ross Gelbspan, author, The Heat is On and Boiling Point
Susan George, board chair, Transnat’l. Institute; author, Fate Worse Than Debt (France)
Edward R. Goldsmith, founder, The Ecologist; author, The Way (UK) 33
Claire Greensfelder, director, Plutonium Free Future; co-author, The Safe Energy Handbook
Charles Hall, Professor, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
Randy Hayes, founder, Rainforest Action Network; senior fellow, Int’l. Forum on Globalization
Richard Heinberg, author, Power Down, and The Party’s Over; fellow, Post Carbon Institute
Colin Hines, director, Protest the Local, Globally (UK)
Rob Hopkins, founder, Transition Towns Totnes Movement (UK)
Smitu Kothari, founder, Lokayan and Intercultural Resources (New Delhi, India)
David Korten, president, Positive Futures Network; author, The Great Turning
Satish Kumar, editor, Resurgence magazine; president, Schumacher College (UK)
Sara Larrain, director, Chile Sustentable (Chile)
Jeremy Leggett, CEO, Solar Century; author, The Carbon War (UK)
Ann Leonard, coordinator, Funders Working Group for Sustainable Production and Consumption
Caroline Lucas, member, European Parliament (UK)
Victor Menotti, program director, International Forum on Globalization
Frances Moore Lappé, author, Hope’s Edge and Diet for a Small Planet
Pat Murphy & Megan Quinn, The Community Solution
Samuel Nguiffo, director, Center for Environment and Development (Cameroon)
Helena Norberg-Hodge, director, Int’l Society for Ecology and Culture; author, Ancient Futures (UK)
Lúcia Ortiz, general coordinator, Friends of the Earth (Brazil)
Jakub Patocka, Literarky Magazine (Czech Republic)
David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agricultural science, Cornell University
Thomas Princen, associate professor of natural resources and environmental policy, University of Michigan
21 June 2012 - "Why we need C&C - to stop global bath overflowing." Australia Broadcasting Corporation
All countries must drastically limit their greenhouse gas emissions and the right to emit should be shared equally amongst individuals.
Comment
Since 1800, when we started burning oil, coal, gas and forests in great quantities, we have emitted well over one and a half trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere. About half has stayed there. Because greenhouse gases trap heat, the increased warming accompanying that build-up so far has been around one degree Celsius on average globally.
This is significant, as no matter what, there's more to come. In a simple analogy, these emissions of greenhouse gases flow like water from a tap into a bathtub. To stop the bath overflowing, we must turn the tap right off.
To stop greenhouse gas levels rising out of control, we must stop the emissions. Since it's more difficult than simply turning off a bath tap, we must bring our emissions under control so they are at a decreasing rate and no longer an accelerating rate, as they are currently.
We started international negotiations about this predicament over twenty years ago yet expert opinion still today tends to project that it will be very difficult to stop greenhouse gases rising in future to around double what they were in 1800. So it looks like at least another degree temperature rise is on the way.
Considering the damage already caused by the one extra degree of warming so far, another degree really is a cause for major concern. But we must solve this problem faster than we create it.
But to do this is a real challenge as most of our wealth creation has so far been tied to these 'dirty' emissions. Also, wealth and emissions are very unevenly distributed globally: in a nutshell it is those who have made the money who made the mess.
So perhaps we can say there are two taps: people behind the one that is gushing are relatively few and wealthy and those behind the one that is trickling are many and are poor.
Yet those most responsible tend to say, 'I'm alright Jack' while those least responsible, like small island states who are most vulnerable ask 'must we disappear beneath the rising seas so you can carry on?' Those who still use little ask, 'do we have a turn to get rich like you?'
Our global response has been inadequate. It has been a wrangle between scientists, civil servants, diplomats, politicians, economists and the rich and poor. Scientists have a deliberate non-policy culture of 'uncertainty'. Diplomats reflect the views of the scientists, the civil servants who create bureaucracy and the politicians who are tribal and need to be popular and wealthy to get elected. Economists seek just to smooth away policy discussions by trying to put arbitrary prices on things.
Ineffectual overall, it is understandable that people feel confused, defensive, anxious, vulnerable, discarded and even hostile. It is also obvious that we're causing the problem faster than we're solving it, that no one can solve the problem alone and even together there is no point in doing too little, too late.
A 'global framework deal' is needed. It must reconcile these concerns and unite people around a common standard within the available time and resource limit.
Any future prosperity based on a global conversion to green growth is completely dependent on such an inclusive model and this is where the Global Commons Institute 'Contraction and Convergence' (C&C) model comes in.
I gave up a successful career in music to form GCI and start going to the UN in 1990. By 1992 the UN had agreed a Framework Climate Convention (UNFCCC) the goal of which was to stabilise the rising concentration of greenhouse in the atmosphere at a level that was not dangerous. The principles of which were precaution and equity. By 1995 GCI had created the C&C framework model, and by 2004 the UNFCCC executive said "C&C is inevitably needed for compliance".
C&C is now widely cited and arguably the most widely supported basis of a global deal in the whole debate.
'Contraction' refers to the total weight and full-term path of future emissions that stabilises concentrations, that is, we turn the tap off before the bath overflows. 'Convergence' means that in the future greenhouse gas emissions will be shared equally, based on a per-person allowance - regardless of the country they are from.
Conversion to green-growth with clean energy is economically helped as the shares treated through C&C are valuable and tradable. This is not as a random part of some aspirational market-based guesswork like Kyoto, but agreed in C&C's rational full-term framework-based market.
There's no more time to lose. Insurers have calculated that the damage rate caused largely by changing climate is significantly faster than economic growth and that the future cost of failure is incalculable.
Like music, it fits together so we can all be in tune and in time to finish what we must do to avoid that cost.
No one has yet come up with anything better and our children will curse us for not turning this around fast enough to resolve it in their favour. Please consider joining with that and being able to look them in the eye.
Aubrey Meyer once played viola with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, before founding the Global Commons Institute in 1990.
20 June 2012 - "Population Sustainability Network; strong C&C advocate; happy to add our name to submission."
Dear Aubrey,
How splendid to hear from you.
The Population and Sustainability Network is a strong advocate of Contraction and Convergence, embodying as it does an equitable way of addressing climate policy while acknowledging the developing world's right to develop.
PSN is in support of this proposal, and we are happy to add our name to your submission to the UNFCCC Executive.
Contraction and Convergence
Climate change is driven, and its impacts are experienced, to different extents by different populations across the globe. Total emission figures mask a huge heterogeneity in per person energy consumption which varies widely both within national borders and between them. Equity, including equality of opportunities for development, must therefore be the central pillar around which climate change policy is developed. In response to these discrepancies, ‘Contraction and Convergence’ presents a framework in which finite bio-spherical capacity is equitably shared amongst all of the earth’s inhabitants, thus placing the importance of per capita emissions centre stage. This framework recognizes the right of the developing world to develop economically, and that their per capita emissions will rise as a result. On the other hand the emissions of the developed world will have to contract, with the overall objective of arriving at an equitable global per capita emission level. Population growth is fundamentally relevant to this model, since total population size will largely determine the cap at which total safe emissions can be set. Again the complexity of this issue is crucial to grasp: in the short term, it will be in the interests of individual countries to have large populations to capture as large a share of the global emissions as is possible. At the global level the reverse is the case; the larger the global population, the smaller the per capita global emission level will be.
PSN will promote increased understanding of the links between population and climate change and advance approaches, such as contraction and convergence, which mirror the PSN ‘Population – Consumption Coin’ concept by recognizing the twin rights and responsibilities of the developed and developing worlds. The Population and Sustainability Network
20 June 2012 - "C&C shows inviting powerful states to be part of the solution should be pursued". SIWI
20 June 2012 - "Could C&C be feasible & profitable?" Rocky Mountain Institute asks as it gets Blue Planet Prize.
The equitable vision of "contraction and convergence," where all countries have the same carbon emission rights per person and everyone continues to get richer, especially in developing countries, could head for carbon reductions around 90% over the next century. Could that grand vision of a richer, fairer, cooler, and safer world actually be feasible and profitable? ASAHI GLASS Blue Planet Lecture
Amory Lovins Rocky Mountain Institute
19 June 2012 - "My Party and I support the C&C principle." Vince Cable responds to C&C proposal.
19 06 2012
Dear Mr Meyer
Thank you for your email.
My party and I support the C&C principle.
I am now a minister and the Government's view is conveyed by Ed Davey, a Lib Dem colleague, who is, I am sure, very much on-side.
Yours sincerely
The Rt Hon DR VINCENT CABLE MP
MP for Twickenham, Teddington, Whitton & The Hamptons
2a Lion Road
Twickenham TW1 4JQ
"The C&C framework developed by Aubrey Meyer and the Global Commons Institute in
many ways offers a compelling vision of a future long-term climate regime, and has a
number of distinct benefits. These include: -
Recognition that per capita emissions of developed countries will need to come down
significantly over time;
The establishment of a firm global pathway to limit emissions, with corresponding long
term targets for all countries;
The development of an approach that many consider to represent a fair and equitable
response to climate challenge."
Nick Clegg - Deputy Prime Minister;"C&C Central to our Climate strategy."
"I fully agree that the GCI's Contraction & Convergence framework provides a realistic & equitable plan for global action. That is why C&C was a key part of the Liberal Democrat's manifesto and why I continue to believe the principle of C&C will be central to our long-term strategy on climate change." Nick Clegg Lib Dem MP [2010]
UK Deputy Prime Minister
Caroline Lucas MP - Leader Green Party;"C&C is Green Party Policy"
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.”
Adair Turner - Former Chairman Climate Change Committee"The only sound strategy is C&C."
"Climate change is likely to impose massive economic costs. The case for being prepared to spend huge resources to limit it is clear,” says Turner, arguing that the cost will be repaid many times over by the avoidance of disaster. In any case, “the developed world does not have the moral right to increase the risk of flooding in Bangladesh”, and, he adds acidly, “European executives worried about the cost of action should perhaps consider it the necessary price for preserving at least some skiing in the Alps. Long term the only sound strategy is that of ‘contraction and convergence’ – cutting greenhouse emissions to the point where they are shared equally, worldwide, on a per capita basis.” Lord Adair Turner - Chairman UK Climate Change Committee
Interview in Green Futures
Adair Turner characterised the UK Climate Act as C&C in evidence to the EAC and DECC select committees in 2009 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. He agreed 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.” Evidence to House of Commons
Climate and Energy Committee
DfT, DTI and Defra) and, in terms of local level data for each of the three cities, local authorities ( e.g. Highland Council). The work also draws on scenario planning - [1] Tyndall Centre, [2] Foresight Futures, [3] Henley Centre/Environment Agency and [4] Contraction and Convergence. The strength of scenario planning lies in its ability to illustrate possible future 'paths', consider emerging (or possibly emergent) issues and so aid in the management of risks and opportunities The report draws upon 13 scenarios from four sources:
The Tyndall Centre - four scenarios - these explicitly focus on the different ways in which a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions can be achieved by 2050. The four scenarios are based upon varying levels of economic growth and energy demand.
Foresight Futures - four scenarios - although not specifically based on climate change, they contain scenarios that are consistent with CO2 reduction. They are based upon different sets of social values (either individual or community focused) and governance arrangements (either interdependent or autonomous).
Henley Centre/Environment Agency - four scenarios - these are focused on 'environmental futures' in the round and are based upon different visions of consumption (dematerialised or material consumption) and UK governance systems (sustainability-led compared to growth-led).
Contraction and Convergence - one scenario - while not strictly a scenario planning tool, this approach provides a valid and important input by virtue of its strong focus upon (social) distributional issues and equity.
taking a global lead on climate change
We will set a target for a zero-carbon Britain that doesn’t contribute at all to global warming – making the British economy carbon-neutral overall by 2050 with only 10 per cent offsets, and reducing carbon emissions in the UK by over 40 per cent of 1990 levels with no offsets by 2020 as a step on the way. Liberal Democrats are committed to securing a legally binding global agreement on limiting the increase in global temperatures to below 1.7 degrees Celsius. We believe that such an agreement must be based on the principles of contraction and convergence (reducing emissions overall, while equalising emissions between the developed and developing worlds). Liberal Democrat Manifesto
Contraction and convergence is the only truly equitable model for international action, under which the world moves to a position where every person is entitled to the same emissions as everyone else. This is a fair and equitable model when high per capita emitters agree to act fast to come down to the level of others. Garnaut, however, has used it, based on Australia’s high population growth projections, to argue that Australia should move slowly to reduce our per capita emissions. Green Senator Christine Milne Australia
With PM Julia Gillard [Microphone] & others
Key Principles
The Green Party believes that:
1. Climate change policy should be guided by the science with the
interests of the global community and environment ahead of the goal of economic growth
2. We must think long term and start early because of the lag time in climate effects.
3. We need to act quickly if we are to successfully limit global warming to
2 degrees C and prevent runaway climate change.
4. Total global emissions must be reduced quickly and converge to emission quotas that are based on equal per capita entitlements - a process known as contraction and convergence.
5. In order to achieve the necessary permanent reductions in greenhouse emissions all countries must be part of a binding international agreement that sets regular targets for emissions and monitors compliance with them.
6. Those countries with the highest per capita emissions must do the most to reduce their emissions.
7. Those sectors with the ability to reduce their emissions or to switch to non-emitting activities must do so as quickly as possible.
8. All sectors of the economy should cover the overall cost to the taxpayer of their emissions and do this in a fair and equitable manner, with no free riders. New Zealand Green Party
C.3 Contraction and Convergence
CC220 The Kyoto Protocol says nothing about the future beyond 2012. To address that timescale the Green Party advocates the adoption by the UNFCCC of a frame-work of Contraction and Convergence (C&C) as the key ingredient in the global political solution to the problem of Climate Change mitigation, and urges the UK and other governments use it as the basis for negotiations in the international fora.
CC2214 C&C is a scheme to provide for a smooth and equitable transition to a safe level of global CO2 emissions from human activity. It can be adapted either to follow-on from a successful Kyoto Protocol, or can equally be used in case the KP is not brought into force by enough countries ratifying it. C&C is not an alternative to the KP; it is a long-term framework for global cooperation towards a genuine solution; while the KP is a short- term fix that takes only very limited steps forward. A GP policy statement describes C&C in more detail.
CC222 'Contraction', means adopting a scientifically determined safe target concentration level and setting global annual emissions levels which should take the atmosphere to that target. The UNFCCC should agree specific thresholds for unacceptable climate impacts, from which the IPCC should calculate the appropriate concentration level, to be reviewed at 5-yearly intervals.
CC223 'Convergence' means taking the world in an achievable way, both technically and politically, from the present situation to a common level of per-capita emissions in a target year. Under it nations are allocated annual quotas for emissions, which start from current or Kyoto-based levels in year 1 of the agreement and converge to equal per-capita allocations after a negotiated interval, probably of a few decades.
CC224 The C&C package is completed with an emissions-trading mechanism, which should include a percentage cap to limit the proportion of a country's reductions that can be bought rather than achieved domestically. Monitoring and enforcement mechanisms are also required and should be set up by the UNFCCC.
C.4 EU Emmisions trading Scheme
CC230 The current EU emissions trading scheme has two primary flaws; it not based on equal rights to the atmosphere, nor on global greenhouse-gas stabilisation targets. As a result the highest polluters are rewarded with the greatest allocation of emission permits, full carbon life-cycle emissions are not assessed and no attempt is made to correlate with global stabilisation targets. It needs complete restructuring in line with Contraction and Convergence principles. UK Green Party Manifesto
“I urge the UK Government to provide leadership on climate change by committing itself to Contraction and Convergence as the framework within which future international agreements to tackle climate change are negotiated. I confirm that the party also supports this pledge.” Simon Thomas
Policy Director Plaid Cymru
“Conference recognises the urgent need for action to mitigate climate change given the potentially disastrous consequences for the planet. We pledge to achieve a low carbon emitting society and commit the SNP to supporting the adoption of the internationally-recognised principle of “Contraction and Convergence”.” Alex Salmond
Scottish National Party
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.”
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 Michael Hutchinson
CEO Tangent Films The Rt Revd & Rt Hon Richard Chartres KCVO DD FSA
Bishop of London Anthony J. McMichael, MBBS, PhD
Professor and NHMRC Australia Fellow National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health
ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment
Australian National University
Honorary Professor of Climate Change and Human Health, University of Copenhagen Ruth Reed
President Royal Institute of British Architects [RIBA] Sunand Prasad
Former President of RIBA Maneka Gandhi Member of Parliament India David Wiggins
Wykeham Professor of Logic, Emeritus, Oxford University Lord David Puttnam Film Producer Jack Pringle
PPRIBA Hon AIA FRSA Dip Arch BA(hons)
Partner Pringle Brandon LLP; Director WIRED architects Ltd
Chair Article [25] (UK reg. charity 1112621 for Development and Disaster Relief)
Vice Chair Construction Industry Council (CIC)
Council Member International Union of Architects (UIA)
Past President Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)
Commandeur Des Arts et Lettres Sir John Harman FRSA Hon FICE, FIWEM, FIWM, FSE, DCL Professor Aubrey Manning, OBE,FRSE
Emeritus Professor of Natural History, University of Edinburgh Tim Livesey
The Archbishop of Canterbury's Secretary for Public Affairs Sir Crispin Tickell
Director Policy Foresight Programme Oxford University Professor Sir Michael Marmot MBBS, MPH, PhD, FRCP, FFPHM,FMedSci
Director, UCL International Institute for Society and Health
MRC Research Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London
Chairman, Commission on Social Determinants of Health
Chairman, Department of Health Scientific Reference Group Professor Sir Andy Haines
Director, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London WC1E 7HT
[in a personal capacity] Professor Brendan Mackey
The Fenner School of Environment & Society
The Australian National University
* Member, IUCN Council (Oceania Regional Councilor)
* Member, Earth Charter International Council Professor David Orr Environmental Studies and Politics Oberlin College and James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont. Alistair Woodward
Head of the School of Population Health, University of Auckland Dr Nigel Woodcock
Reader, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge Roger Arthur Graef OBE
criminologist and film-maker Professor Bill McGuire
Director, Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre
University College London Lord Anthony Giddens
Professor Emeritus LSE Susan Richards
non-executive director and founder of openDemocracy John Carstensen
Chief Executive Officer Society for the Environment Professor Mark Swilling
Sustainability Institute, School of Public Management and Planning
Stellenbosch University, South Africa Lynne Jackson
Coastal & Environmental Consulting
Cape Town, South Africa Dr David Pencheon
Director - NHS Sustainable Development Unit (SDU) Professor Anthony Costello FMedSci,
Director UCL Institute for Global Health Tom Spencer
Vice Chairman, Institute for Environmental Security Dr Mayer Hillman
Senior Fellow Emeritus Politcy Studies Institute Susan George
President of the board of the Transnational Institute Alex Kirby Former BBC News environment correspondent ProfessorTim Jackson
Sustainable Development Surrey University
Director of the Research group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment Professor William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC
UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, Vancouver, BC, CANADA Jeremy Leggett
Chairman Solar Century Andrew Dlugolecki
UK Climate Change Committee Member, Sub Committee on Adaptation The Hon. Tom Roper
Board Member, Climate Institute, Washington DC Adam Poole
The EDGE UK Professor Lord Smith of Clifton Peter Head,
Chairman of Global Planning Arup. Linda Rosenstock MD, MPH
Dean, UCLA School of Public Health
Former Director, U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Professor Alan Maryon-Davis
President, UK Faculty of Public Health John Guillebaud
Emeritus Professor of Family Planning & Reproductive Health, UCL Professor Hugh Montgomery
Director, UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance Dr Robin Stott
Director of the Climate and Health Council Emeritus Professor Brian Moss
University of Liverpool Steven Earl Salmony AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population [estab. 2001] Robert Costanza Gordon and Lulie Gund Professor of Ecological Economics
Director, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources
The University of Vermont Jenny Griffiths OBE,
Member, Climate and Health Council Tim Helweg Larsen Director Public Interest Research Centre Jonathon Porritt
Forum for the Future Sara Parkin,
Founder Director, Forum for the Future Lorna Walker
CABE Dave Hampton
Carbon Coach MA (Cantab) C Env C Eng FCIOB,
Society for the Environment Board Member, The Edge,
RIBA Sustainable Futures, Superhomer, Transition Town Marlow Founder Leslie Watson
Director Sustainability South West Nick Reeves
Executive Director CIWEM Professor Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker PhD
Lead Author, Factor Five, Former Chairman of the German Bundestag's Environment Committee Professor Robert B. Whitmarsh
School of Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre, SOUTHAMPTON Patrick Ainley
Professor of Training and Education, University of Greenwich Michael H. Glantz,
Director CCB (Consortium for Capacity Building)
INSTAAR University of Colorado Antonio Sarmiento G
Instituto de Matemáticas, UNAM México Tim Smit
Director of the EDEN Project Ulrich Loening
Former Director of the Centre for Human Ecology Paul Allen
External Relations Director of the Centre for Alternative Technology Dr Richard Horton
Editor in Chief Lancet Magazine Fiona Godlee
Editor in Chief British Medical Journal Dr Jean-Baptiste Kakoma
Rwandan School of Public Health Ian Roberts
Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health LSHTM
University of London Sarah Walpole, BSc, MBChB,
York District Hospital, UK Professor Sir Sabaratnam Arulkumaran
President, Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists, UK Mr Tim Campbell-Smith MBBS BSC FRCS (Gen Surg)
Consultant colorectal and general surgeon Mark Thompson
General Practitioner Dr. Marie-Claire Lobo
Consultant in Public Health Medicine NHS Hampshire Tony Waterston
Consultant paediatrician (retired)
Chair of Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health Advocacy committee Robert Johnstone MSc MInstP MIPEM CEng
Clinical Scientist, London
Professor David Webb
Engineering The Praxis Centre Leeds Metropolitan University Dr Stuart Parkinson
Scientists for Global Responsibility Professor Fiona Stanley
Director Telethon Institute for Child Health Research Perth Western Australia Bhavani Prakash
Founder Eco WALK the Talk.com, www.ecowalkthetalk.com/blog ProfessorAndrew Weaver
Canada Research Chair University of Victoria Dr Tom Barker
Sustainability ecologist, Dept of Ecology, University of Liverpool. Sean Kidney
Chair, Climate Bonds Initiative Dr Samuel Bonnett –
Biogeochemist, Institute for Sustainable Water,
Integrated Management and Ecosystem Research,
University of Liverpool. Dr Peter North,
Senior lecturer, Department of Geography,
University of Liverpool. Dr Jane Fisher,
Lecturer in Ecology,
Liverpool John Moores University. Prof Andy Plater,
Director of Oceans and Ecosystems Research Cluster and
Head of Green Economy incubation Network,
University of Liverpool Romayne Phoenix
London Green Party Campaigns Officer Penny Kemp - GCI Jim Berreen – GCI Dr Richard Lawson
General Practitioner Mr Mike Zeidler
Chairman, Association of Sustainability Practitioners John Bunzl
Trustee, International Simultaneous Policy Organisation Roger Martin
Chair, Optimum Population Trust Anthony and Anne Wilson
Staffordshire Marianne McKiggan
Crisis Forum David Cook Executive Ambassador the Natural Step Ian Roderick,
Director of the Schumacher Centre,
lead partner in the CONVERGE project Michael Herrmann
Senior Lecturer in Sustainability
Kingston University School of Architecture & Landscape
Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture Surrey Professor Peter Reason
School of Management, University of Bath John H Crook Phd DSc
Formerly Head of Joint School in Psychology and Zoology
Psychology Department, Bristol University Francesca Vandelli
Systemic Learning and Development Officer, Health and Social Care Bristol Tim Malnick
Co-Director Ashridge Masters in Sustainability and Responsibility Toddington Harper
MD, The Low Carbon Economy Ltd Dr Nicholas Allott
Postdoctoral research fellow at Centre
for the Study of Mind and Nature, Oslo University Doug Whitehead
Partner Consulting & Student Bond University
Post Graduate Programme Carbon Management
EnSight Consultancy, Brisbane Hilary Griffiths
Coordinator of Friends of the Earth, Guildford and Waverley. Elizabeth Tomlinson BSc (Econ), ITEC, LLSA, MBNSRTA Dr Keith Baker
Director, Sustainable Footprints Keith Taylor Green MEP
Jean Lambert
Green MEP Caroline Lucas MP Tim Yeo MP
Chairman of the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee Martin Caton MP Joan Walley MP Paul Flynn MP Jo Swinson MP Rt Hon Michael Meacher MP
UK House of Commons Dr. Rupert Read
Norwich Green Party and University of East Anglia Philosophy Department Jenny Jones AM
Green Party Group London Assembly Darren Johnson AM
Green Party Member London Assembly Dr Martin Hemingway
Green Party, North West Leeds James Del-Gatto
Head of CSR - SThree plc Raja Mitra
Senior executive & Management professional Stuart Jeffery
Campaigns Officer, Kent Green Party Andrew Dakers
Spokesperson for Hounslow Borough Liberal Democrats Meenakshi Subramaniam
UCCK, Kodaikanal Paul Anderson, PhD
Research Fellow, University of Warwick John Russell
Chairman Giltbrook Studios, Nottingham Esther Maughan McLachlan,
Managing Director, Strong Language Ltd. Stephen Thomson,
Editor, Plomomedia.com Peter Martin
Research Director CarbonSense Dave Yates
Newport Friends of the Earth Dr Michael Taylor
Retired Teacher Terry Wyatt Jo Abbess
BSc Miles Litvinoff
writer John Cossham Milena Buchs Stan Mowatt
Chemistry Teacher Audrey Urry
Liberal Democrat Chris Keene
Green Party Dr Clive R Sneddon
Liberal Democrat John Dougill
Artist Tony Burton
Wind Energy Consultant Tamas Szabados
PhD Maths Dept Budapest University Rebecca Findlay
Lambeth Green Party & Sustainable Streatham Brian Orr
Civil Servant Penney Poyzer
Author and Broadcaster Jeffrey Newman
Earth Charter Kate Prendergast
Freelance consultant, member Crisis Forum Mr Leo Giordano
Homes and Communities Agency Rev. Canon Peter Challen
Christian Council for Monetary Justice Alex Lawrie
CEO, Lightweight Community Transport
Chair, The Ecological Land Co-operative John Whiting
GCT Sabine McNeill
Green Credit Dr Alan Bullion
Business Analyst, Informa Agra Dr. Robert Davis Steve Wright
Reader Global Ethics, Leeds Metropolitan University Dr Arvind Sivaramakrishnan Michael Sackin Phil Harris
retired Government Grade 7 scientist Barbara Panvel
Centre for Holistic Studies [India] Dr Mark Levene
Reader in Comparative History, University of Southampton Jonathan Ward
MSci, MSocSc, StudentForce for Sustainability Richard Jordan MA Nic Lee and Heather Finlay
London Jim Roland
Liberal Democrat party member Ashton Shuttleworth
BSc (Dunelm) MSc DipIC DipFM FRGS - Environmental Finance and Consulting Ben Brangwyn
co-founder Transition Network Michelle Thomasson Transition Minchinhampton Anne Adams Peter Kent Bsc. Msc
Lib Dem. Town Councillor Clare Palgrave
Chair; Woking Local Action 21 Scott Ainslie Susan Chapman
BA (Theol) Retired Teacher Georgia Meyer Teacher Lucinda Cridland Sophie Rees Zahra Akram Laura Mccutcheon Rhiannon Dorrington Pippa Bartolotti Carolyn Kelley Gopalan Prakash Natarajan
IT Director Brian Wills Philip Valentino
The Food and More Project Owen Clarke
Green Party Torfaen Ms Mary Scott
Environmental consultant Angie Zelter
Reforest the Earth Nina Venkataraman Liam Proven
Writer - London Hugh Fraser
Transition Kensington Jean Vidler
Green Futures Festivals Co Ltd Ankaret Harmer
Kings Heath Transition Initiative & BrumLETS, Birmingham Dr Martin Hemingway
Green Party, North West Leeds Jamie Bull MSc
oCo Carbon Sheila Freeman
Friends of the Earth London Reggie Norton MA Christine Dawson
Artist Nicola Wareing
Physics Student, Lancaster University Chris Speyer
Writer Diana Korchien
Publisher of Calendar of Climate Change (2007, 2008, 2009)
Transition Leytonstone Ros Bedlow
Transition Leytonstone Roisin Robertson MICHT VTCT Janice Connully
Womens Theatre Julie Baker
Community Artist Al Dutton Alan Francis
Green Party Transport Speaker Brig Oubridge
Former Director, Big Green Gathering John Moore
Green Radio Simon Eastwood SteveMuggeridge
Director Big Green Gathering Linda Benfield
Director Big Green Gathering Helena Schnitner
Big Green Gathering Independent Astrologer Alan Turnbull
Director Floating Lotus Ossie Bash-Taqi
Chef Hugo Charlton
Barrister Eileen Noakes
19 June 2012 - "C&C should be accepted and implemented." Laser-like Medialens on this & much, much more.
June 19, 2012
Game Over For The Climate?
Whatever happened to the green movement? It’s been 50 years since the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, a powerful book about the environmental devastation wreaked by chemical pesticides. Since then we’ve had the rise and fall - or at least the compromised assimilation - of green groups such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Forum For the Future.
Last week, the Independent marked the half-century with a well-meaning but frankly insipid ‘landmark series’ titled ‘The Green Movement at 50’. But there’s a glaring hole in such coverage; and, indeed, in the ‘green movement’ itself: the insidious role of the corporate media, a key component of corporate globalisation, in driving humanity and ecosystems towards the brink of destruction.
The acclaimed biologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson puts the scale of the crisis bluntly:
‘We’re destroying the rest of life in one century. We’ll be down to half the species of plants and animals by the end of the century if we keep at this rate.’
And yet ‘very few people are paying attention’ to this disaster. Wilson, who is 82, directed his warning to the young in particular:
‘Why aren’t you young people out protesting the mess that’s being made of the planet? Why are you not repeating what was done in the ‘60s? Why aren’t you in the streets? And what in the world has happened to the green movement that used to be on our minds and accompanied by outrage and high hopes? What went wrong?’
The trouble is that most of what the public hears about politics, including environmental issues, comes from the corporate media. This is a disaster for genuine democracy. As discussed in a recent alert, the media industry is made up of large profit-seeking corporations whose main task is to sell audiences to wealthy advertisers – also corporations, of course - on whom the media depend for a huge slice of their revenues. It’s blindingly obvious that the corporate media is literally not in the business of alerting humanity to the real risk of climate catastrophe and what needs to be done to avert it.
Last month, leading climate scientist James Hansen, who was the first to warn the US Congress about global warming in 1988, observed that:
‘President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course.’
Hansen added:
‘The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. [...] Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.’
If adequate action doesn’t happen soon, says Hansen, it’s ‘game over for the climate’.
Always Stuck On Square One
And yet even liberal media outlets repeatedly present as fact that there has been government ‘failure’ to respond to climate change. They do very little to report that big business, acting through and outside government, and the corporate media itself, has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the required radical action.
Indeed, media debate on how best to respond to environmental crisis has barely moved in a generation. For years, the public has been assailed by the same anodyne editorials urging ‘the need for all of us to act now’. Meanwhile, for obvious reasons, corporate media organisations are silent about the inherently biocidal logic of corporate capitalism. They are silent about the reality that politics in the US and UK is largely ‘a two-party dictatorship in thraldom to giant corporations,’ as Ralph Nader has observed (interview with Paul Jay, The Real News Network, November 4, 2008). They are silent about the role of the mass media, especially advertising, in normalising the unthinkable of unrestrained consumption. The corporate media, including its liberal media wing, is a vital cog of the rampant global capitalism that threatens our very existence.
But – and here some of our readers start to protest or scratch their heads - surely the Guardian is immune to such political and commercial pressures? After all, it is owned by the non-profit Scott Trust, as the paper’s editors and journalists are fond of reminding their audience. But delve a little deeper and you will see that the newspaper is managed and operated by influential bigwigs with extensive ties to the establishment, ‘mainstream’ political parties, finance and big business (as we discussed at greater length in our book, Newspeak in the 21st Century, Pluto Press, London, 2009).
The truth is the Guardian is just as grubbily commercial as other corporate media organisations. In fact, a media insider revealed to us recently that the Guardian has a confidential business plan to address its current massive loss-making (a common affliction in today’s newspaper industry with the increasing leakage of advertising from papers to the internet). He told us that when a media website is ranked in the top 10 in the United States, the floodgates of online advertising open and its coffers start to fill. The online Guardian has therefore been marketing itself to US audiences as heavily as it can. Its stringently-moderated Comment is Free website is one of the crucial elements of that strategy. The Guardian is now at the threshold of accessing lucrative sums in advertising revenue.
With humanity heading for the climate abyss, it’s time for the green movement and those on the left to wake up to the reality that the Guardian, and the rest of the liberal-corporate media, is not in favour of the kind of radical change that is desperately needed.
The Sound Of A Door Closing Forever
Despite an endless series of escalating alarms from Mother Nature indicating the urgency of the climate crisis, no serious action is being undertaken to avert catastrophe. Whenever the corporate media bothers to report the latest sign of climate threat, it usually does so in passing and without proper analysis of the likely consequences, and what can and should be done. And then the issue is simply dropped and forgotten.
For example, the head of the International Energy Agency recently warned that the chance of limiting the rise in global temperatures this century to 2 degrees Celsius (2°C) above pre-industrial levels is reducing rapidly.
‘What I see now with existing investments for [power] plants under construction...we are seeing the door for a 2 degree Celsius target about to be closed and closed forever,’ Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist, told a Reuters’ Global Energy & Environment Summit.
‘This door is getting slimmer and slimmer in terms of physical and economic possibility,’ he warned.
According to the IEA, around 80 per cent of the total energy-related carbon emissions permissible by 2035 to limit warming to 2°C have already been taken up by existing power plants, buildings and factories.
The 2°C limit was agreed in 2010 at the UN climate summit in Cancún, Mexico. Why 2°C? The Reuters report explains:
‘Scientists say that crossing the threshold risks an unstable climate in which weather extremes are common...’
Tragically, the current trend in greenhouse gas emissions means that rising carbon dioxide emissions may well produce a 2°C rise as early as 2050 and a 2.8°C rise by 2080.
If there is ever any ‘mainstream’ discussion of ‘climate risk’, it is usually couched in terms of this ‘safe limit’ of 2°C warming. This was a major theme of the most recent UN climate summit in Durban in December 2011. For example, Louise Gray, environment correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, wrote that:
‘UN scientists have stated that emissions need to peak and start coming down before 2020 to stand a chance of keeping temperature rise within the “safe zone” of 2C.’
Lord Julian Hunt, former head of the UK Met Office, pointed out the best current estimate for global temperature rise by 2100 is 3.5°C and said that the ‘international consensus’ is that it ‘should be limited to 2C’.
A Guardian editorial declared:
‘The race to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2C is still winnable if there is a big change in the pace,’ although conceding that ‘a 3-4C rise looks the most likely outcome.’
Few voices disagree with this framing of the climate debate and what the ‘safe’ target should be. But Chris Shaw, a social sciences researcher at the University of Sussex, is one exception. Shaw has been investigating how international climate change policy is being driven by the ideological notion of a single global dangerous limit of 2°C warming. In reality, however, such a precise limit cannot be supported by the complexities of climate science. For example, low-lying coastal regions such as Bangladesh and Pacific islands are clearly more vulnerable to likely sea-level rises than elevated inland regions. Also, 2°C warming would be more harmful to some ecosystems than others; coral reefs may bleach out of existence once the oceans warm by as little as 1°C. Additionally, because of geographical variation in the effects of climate change, 2°C global average warming means that some parts of the world would actually experience as much as 4°C-5°C warming.
Shaw’s analysis shows how the ‘two degree dangerous limit’ framework of debate and policy-making has constructed climate change ‘as a problem solvable within existing value systems and patterns of social activity.’ In other words, corporate globalisation is not up for challenge. He stresses that even if we had a perfect forecast of future climate change and our vulnerability to it, 'deciding what counts as dangerous is still a value choice because what is considered to be an acceptable risk will vary between individuals and cultures.' The 2°C-limit ideology ‘elevates the idea of a single dangerous limit to the status of fact, and in so doing marginalises egalitarian and ecological perspectives’.
This propaganda process of marginalising sane alternatives has been no accident. As Shaw rightly observes:
'Since the Second World War, the prevailing consensus has been that all problems can be solved through the expert application of industrial technologies, rather than real changes in how we live our lives or, more fundamentally, in human consciousness. The two degree limit perpetuates this approach by diverting attention away from questions about the political and social order.'
Shaw concludes:
'What should be a political debate about how we want to live becomes reduced to a series of expert calculations about "how much CO2 can we continue emitting before we warm the world by two degrees?" or "what will be the effect on GDP of reducing emissions by 20 per cent?" Consequently, we are invited to see the world as a kind of planetary machine that requires engineering management and maintenance by experts.' (Email, June 18, 2012)
Climate activist and independent journalist Cory Morningstar observes that the first suggestion to use 2°C as a critical temperature limit for climate policy was not even made by a climate scientist. Rather it was put forward by the well-known neoclassical economist, W. D. Nordhaus:
‘Nordhaus has been one of the most influential economists involved in climate change models and construction of emissions scenarios for well over 30 years, having developed one of the earliest economic models to evaluate climate change policy. He has steadfastly opposed the drastic reductions in greenhouse gases emissions necessary for averting global catastrophe, “arguing instead for a slow process of emissions reduction, on the grounds that it would be more economically justifiable.”’
Morningstar, initiator of the grassroots group Canadians for Action on Climate Change, has carefully traced the cynical machinations of corporate ‘environmentalism’. She highlights the little-known fact that, rather than a 2°C target, the original ‘safe limit’ was given as just 1ºC by the United Nations Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases in 1990. But an unholy alliance of corporate interests resulted in it being buried and replaced by the higher target.
She adds:
‘As a consequence of such interference by many powerful players who sought to ensure the economic and political power structure would not be threatened, adaptation surfaced as the primary goal in international climate science and policy, effectively replacing the goals of prevention and mitigation from the 1980s.’
Morningstar warns of making false friends in the struggle to avert the climate chaos ahead:
‘The mainstream environmental movement no longer inspires nor leads society to an enlightened existence – it simply bows down to the status quo.’
Too many of these mainstream groups have, she says, essentially ‘teamed up’ with the very same corporations that need to be challenged; the same corporations who:
‘greenwash summits and caused such social injustice and environmental degradation in the first place and continue to lobby and bully to maintain the status quo of corporate dominance today.’
Chris Shaw points out that powerful policy actors, notably the European Union, have imposed the simple metric of the two degree limit which ‘is then parroted uncritically by the media and NGOs. The danger is that the concept communicates a fallacious sense of certainty.’ (Email, May 24, 2012)
He sums up:
‘The argument reduces to this - defining what counts as dangerous is a value choice, not an expert calculation. The neoliberal globalization agenda cannot accommodate almost seven billion different opinions [i.e. the global population] about how much warming should be risked in the name of continued economic growth.’
And so the ideology that best fits within the neoliberal agenda of corporate globalisation – in other words, a single warming limit - is the framework that prevails. Shaw says that 'a new way of talking and thinking about climate change is long overdue' and intends to set out options for this at his blog.
Contraction And Convergence
In a rare exception in the corporate media, an article by the Independent’s science editor Steve Connor at least allowed James Hansen a few short paragraphs to spell out the dangers of the 2ºC threshold - if not the economic-growth ideology that lies behind it - and what is really required instead:
‘The target of 2C... is a prescription for long-term disaster ...we are beginning to see signs of slow [climate] feedbacks beginning to come into play. Ice sheets are beginning to lose mass and methane hydrates are to some degree beginning to bubble out of melting permafrost.’
Along with other scientists and climate campaigners, Hansen believes the focus should be on limiting the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – now at around 390 parts per million (ppm) and rising annually by 2 ppm. Hansen says it should be no higher than 350 ppm to stop catastrophic events such as the melting of ice sheets, dangerous sea level rises and the huge release of methane from beneath the permafrost. This will require drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and even ‘biosequestration’, for example through reforestation, to soak up some of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
But even 350 ppm may well be too high, as Hansen himself acknowledges. There may need to be an upper limit of 300 ppm. Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the prestigious Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, goes further stating:
‘Our survival would very much depend on how well we were able to draw down carbon dioxide to 280 ppm.’
This would mean giving up fossil fuels completely; a move which would be fiercely and relentlessly opposed by vested interests.
So, if not the current UN process with its 2°C ‘safe limit’, what should be the framework for averting climate catastrophe? For many years now, we have advocated the climate policy known as ‘contraction and convergence’ proposed by the London-based Global Climate Institute led by the indefatigable Aubrey Meyer. By agreeing to a level of, say, 280 ppm, both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations would contract (i.e. reduce) their production of global-warming gases. This would be done by converging to an equitable per-capita basis of shared emission rights: more populous nations would be allowed to emit proportionally more than smaller nations.
Now that the Kyoto Protocol – the previous climate treaty - has expired in 2012, the United Nations is currently considering the best way forward for its climate negotiations. The GCI’s proposal of contraction and convergence is gathering a good head of steam. For the sake of planetary health – indeed humanity’s survival – it should be accepted and implemented.
The Megalomaniacal Megamachine
The mainstream environment movement, with its career campaigners and high-level hobnobbing with power, has largely failed the public. Tony Juniper, former director of Friends of the Earth (FoE), speaks grandly of the ‘two parallel discourses’ of planetary boundaries and economic growth ‘going in polar opposite directions’. That is all too obvious, and has been well-known for decades. He then claims that ‘the profoundest failure of all is our underlying disconnect from the Earth.’
Juniper explains:
‘We work to take on these environmental challenges without having any kind of profound connection with nature. We've lost it talking in a mechanistic, policy-oriented way.
‘We've tried to make it all about numbers, parts per million, complicated policy instruments, and as a result, we've lost something that's essential. Most people couldn't tell you the names of country flowers by the side of the road, the birds that are singing. It's a disconnect in our world view – a failure in our philosophy.’
Being able to name flowers by the side of the road is all good and well. But what about the deep structural causes in economics and politics that generate destruction and stifle change? In the late 1990s, one of us asked Juniper what he thought about the problem of the mainstream media acting as a propaganda system for corporate power. It was clear he had no idea what we were talking about.
Do leading environmentalists really have nothing more astute, inspiring and hard-hitting to say about a global industrial system of destructive capitalism which is consuming the planet? As one of the characters in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang observes in the battle against the corporate assault on nature:
‘We're not dealing with human beings. We're up against the megamachine. A megalomaniacal megamachine.’
Feeling ‘a profound connection with nature’ is vital for one’s well-being. But it will not get us very far if we do not also recognise and then dismantle the destructive financial practices of global ‘investors’, institutions of state-corporate power - with the media a key element - and the warmongering 'adventures' that are crushing people and planet.
In the week of the Rio 2012 Earth summit, 20 years on from the original jamboree in 1992, George Monbiot writes in the Guardian:
‘So this is the great question of our age: where is everyone? The monster social movements of the 19th century and first 80 years of the 20th have gone, and nothing has replaced them. Those of us who still contest unwarranted power find our footsteps echoing through cavernous halls once thronged by multitudes. When a few hundred people do make a stand – as the Occupy campers have done – the rest of the nation just waits for them to achieve the kind of change that requires the sustained work of millions.
‘Without mass movements, without the kind of confrontation required to revitalise democracy, everything of value is deleted from the political text. But we do not mobilise, perhaps because we are endlessly seduced by hope. Hope is the rope from which we all hang.’
Stirring words.
But Jonathan Cook, an independent journalist who used to work for the Guardian, notes sagely that:
‘There are no mass protest movements today because “we are endlessly seduced by hope". And who, I wonder, does most to promote such hope? How unfortunate that he ran out of space when he did - otherwise he might have been able to answer that very question for us.’ (Email, June 18, 2012)
In other words, Guardian columnist Monbiot misses out the crucial role of the corporate media, not least his own newspaper, in endlessly seducing us all by hope.
Cook adds:
'I was a little surprised by this level of chutzpah from Monbiot. In truth, who or what does he think could be capable of generating such hope and be so practised in the art of seduction? It's clearly not the politicians: they were around decades ago, when there were serious protest movements. But a wall-to-wall "professional" (ie corporate) media is of much more recent origin. In fact, the rise of such media appears to track very closely the increase in our soma-induced state.'
For years, the corporate media has selected and promoted high-profile green spokespeople - like the Green Party's Jonathan Porritt and Sara Parkin, Greenpeace's Lord Peter Melchett and Stephen Tindale, FoE's Charles Secrett and Tony Juniper, author Mark Lynas and Monbiot himself - who have then come to limit and dominate the environment debate within ‘respectable’ bounds.
In the 1980s, big business openly declared war on the green movement which it perceived as a genuine threat to power and profit. By a process of carefully limited corporate media 'inclusion', the honesty, vitality and truth of environmentalism have been corralled, contained, trivialised and stifled. Today, even as environmental problems have lurched from bad to worse, the green movement has virtually ceased to exist. The lessons are obvious. Corporate media 'inclusion' of dissent hands influence and control to the very forces seeking to disempower dissent. No-one should be surprised by the results.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Please write to:
Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Twitter: @arusbridger
George Monbiot, Guardian columnist
Email:george@monbiot.info
Twitter: @georgemonbiot
Chris Blackhurst, Independent editor
Email: c.blackhurst@independent.co.uk
Twitter: @c_blackhurst
Michael McCarthy, Independent environment editor
Email: m.mccarthy@independent.co.uk
Twitter: @mjpmccathy
19 June 2012 - Climate Siren calls for civil disobedience over impending climate catastrophe
We are calling for a great effort of civil disobedience in the UK.
We are calling for this great effort of civil disobedience in order to demand urgent, concerted and meaningful action to tackle the unprecedented national and global emergency presented by the catastrophic destabilisation of global climate.
We have been watching with quiet anger and deep despair the relentless approach of an unprecedented tragedy.
Since the path of human history is so littered with pain, cruelty, catastrophe and tragic folly it is hard to imagine something yet more unspeakably vast in the sheer scale of human anguish that it will encompass. Yet we can see the spectre of such a monumental tragedy approaching with a clarity that increases almost as fast as the time we have left to prevent it slips away.
No amount of wishful thinking or double talk can obscure the fact that the science is brutally clear. Without a radical change of course we will see the deaths of billions of the world's population before the century is out. It will simply be the biggest catastrophe ever in human history. Given the course we're currently on, any outcome less calamitous is now clearly unrealistic even if the precise nature and ultimate scale of this oncoming catastrophe is impossible to predict.
Many have already quietly lost hope. Others push the truth away or hide from it within the concerns of day to day. Others believe or pretend to believe that a certain level of tinkering with the problem will suffice for a solution.
Whilst we respect, commend and encourage every effort taken to tackle this desperate crisis the simple truth is that nothing that is being done now, at a national or international level, approaches the scale of response that is urgently required to stem the tide of tragedy.
Worse, the whole debate and public perception, even as shaped by the more sympathetic media and the messaging of NGOs, is skewed towards and defined by the political realities surrounding our painfully inadequate level of response. This is not to mention the motley band of fools and knaves who deny - to various and shifting degrees - the whole thing and the dark sinister power of the blindly rapacious vested interests that stand behind them, although they, of course, are also a big factor in exacerbating the situation. The result in any case is a false perception about the true scale of the crisis. The simple clear message that we need to mobilise the whole of society for a massive urgent effort shaped by the science and not wishful thinking or vested interests, and on a scale of a kind unprecedented outside of wartime, is obscured by the constant hum of superficial debate about what amounts to no more than the grossly inadequate versus the marginally less grossly inadequate in our level of response.
We respect that societies need a common code and laws to work by. We will do no harm to person and nor do we intend any gratuitous harm even to property. But there have always been values and goals that have transcended the laws that society makes - as so many struggles for suffrage, for self-determination, for justice and equality have shown in the past.
We are calling for a great effort of civil disobedience as a clarion call for urgency that will break the paralysing spell of apathy, creeping despair, ignorance, myopia and self-deluding make-believe. If there ever was a time when such an effort is needed it is now. If there ever was a time when such an effort was justified it is now.
Even if we fail in what has become an almost superhuman task, to achieve the ultimate goal of turning the tide of tragedy it will be important that we made this great effort and did not stand idle, just watching it happen. And given the stakes are so high even the slimmest chance of prevailing makes failing to make the effort seem unforgivable.
We can't make this great effort of civil disobedience happen on our own, but we want to help you make it happen.
We are calling initially for a conspicuous act of civil disobedience on Saturday 23rd June, in London, at the time of the Rio Earth Summit (in actual fact just after) , if you and enough others are willing to make it happen. We have no time to lose.
Text us
You can make a start by texting your mobile phone number to us at 07903 800 216. Or alternatively you can email it to us at climatesiren@climate-siren.com. This will allow us to keep in contact with you by text and let you know what to do nearer the date as well as giving us an idea of potential numbers.
The nature of what we are planning means that we have to keep it secret, as you will readily understand, but in the end it will be your decision as to whether it is a valid action you will want to be a part of, or not.
Please, let's make it happen: text us your mobile number.
19 June 2012 - "C&C is practical & widely acceptable way of getting the agreement urgenty needed." Willka T'ika
This email serves to support the Contraction and Convergence Operational Framework submission to the UN Climate Change Negotiations. As people who operate in several countries around the world, we are made aware of the world wide affects of climate change as we are able to see with our own eyes glaciers contracting in the Andes, bringing the threat of starvation to people in what are now highly fertile and productive agricultural areas, the creeping growth of deserts in Africa in areas which were previously grasslands and the breaking off of huge sections of ice from the Antarctic Ice Shelf.
There can be no doubt that the situation is urgent and this Framework provides both a practical and widely acceptable means of bringing about the agreement that is so urgently needed. We do not have the time to go on talking.
It has our full support.
Mark Hennessy and Carol Cumes
Willka T'ika and Magical Journey
About Magical Journey
Carol Cumes and Mark Hennessy were born in South Africa and both had the fortune to grow up experiencing and enjoying the wilds of South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana. For over 20 years they have been involved in travel in a variety of roles including the managing of a tour company and major corporate conventions.
After graduating as a teacher, Carol spent a year living in Israel and traveling extensively in Europe. She moved to California with her family in 1975 where she trained in yoga, shamanic studies, flower essences and meditation. She established Magical Journey, a travel company offering authentic sacred tours to open-minded people of all ages. Carol began arranging and leading tours, first to South Africa and then her passion drew her to focus on Peru where she has been arranging and conducting ‘Journeys’ ever since.
Coming in to close contact with the Quechua people of the Andes, particularly those in the remote mountain villages, Carol became fascinated by their spiritual traditions and culture and found that she was learning much of great value from their wisdom. In order to share the values of this knowledge and wisdom with the wider world, she wrote the book, Journey to Machu Picchu – Spritual Wisdom from the Andes.
In 1995 Carol moved to Peru and began building Willka T'ika Guest House. In 2009 Carol wrote her second book ‘Chakra Gardens – Opening the Senses of the Soul’, based on her experiences in cultivating the magnificent gardens at Willka T’ika. This book has earned Carol Several Golden Writer’s awards.
Mark, after graduating from University with a Mathematics degree, went to sea as a Naval Officer. After ten years he joined a major computer company where he rose through a marketing career to a top executive position in charge of Business Strategy and Development. His interest in the creative approach to 'real life' problems led him into many fields of thought and practice including Yoga and meditation techniques, unusual for a businessman. Mark maintains his belief that ideas and life practices only have value if they can be applied and tested in practical day-to-day living something that he did in his executive and management roles. He first came to Peru on a Salkkantay Wilderness Adventure in 1995 and since then has been assisting Carol on her tours and handling the business management of Magical Journey. When not in Peru, he lives in South Africa. He brings a life long love and experience of wild places and a "feet on the ground" influence to Magical Journeys.
18 June 2012 - UNFCCC website now shows growing support for C&C proposal as well as the proposal itself.
This C&C proposal to the UNFCCC is on the UNFCCC website in a version that now includes links to the support for it.
Full submission here shortened version on UNFCCC website here
Support continues to grow.
17 June 2012 - "C&C returns to principles of UNFCCC." Another strong academic voice supports C&C proposal.
In 2000 the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution [RCEP] famously called for a 60 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, based on the principle of contraction and convergence. In doing so it paved the way for the 80 per cent target now enshrined in legislation. This illustrates France's bid for cognitive leadership by promoting an argument for policy norms based on fairness. The French approach bears similarities to the 'contraction and convergence' model promoted by Meyer (2000), which views the atmosphere as a global commons and distributes national responsibilities on the basis of international and intergenerational equity. In addition, China and the developing world have a normative preference for the 'contraction and convergence' model.
Meyer, A (2000) “Contraction and Convergence - The Global Solution to Climate Change” Green Books The European Union as a Leader in International Climate Change Politics
Rüdiger Wurzel (Editor), James Connelly (Editor)
It is a great pleasure to write in support of your Contraction and Convergence proposal to the UNFCCC. As a teacher and author on environmental ethics and politics I am convinced that C and C represents a real and important and principled way forward on the urgent and pressing issue of climate change and I wholeheartedly endorse your campaign
Yours sincerely
James
James Connelly
Professor of Politics
Department of Politics and International Studies
University of Hull
Cottingham Road
Hull HU6 7RX
Director of the Institute of Applied Ethics
Director of Centre for Idealism and New Liberalism
17 June 2012 - "C&C would eliminate bureacracy & petty back-room dealing" UBC Graduate Course
At the end of the day, a large (idealistic) part of me wonders whether a revamped international agreement that included automatic transfer mechanisms, such as Contraction and Convergence would be a better pathway forward given that it would eliminate so much of the bureaucracy, petty backroom-dealing, and lengthy, laborious negotiations. Although, getting political negotiators to agree to Contraction and Convergence would probably require lengthy and laborious negotiations, not to mention a likely necessary shift in power dynamics among the U.S., China and India. Climate Dialogue
16 June 2012 - "Principle without practice is useless, but practice without principle is dangerous."
15 June 2012 - IAP Rio statement on "Consumption Patterns & Population" is basically People & Planet from RS
The world’s science academies, through the IAP, have published over the last 20 years joint statements calling upon governments and international bodies to take decisive action on population, consumption and sustainable development.
While progress has been made in some areas, the challenge of finding a path to global sustainability has not been met and the consequences of failure are now clearer and increasingly pressing. As policy makers prepare for the Rio+20 UN Earth Summit, the IAP re-examines these important issues and again calls for urgent and coordinated international action to address these profound challenges to humanity.
Increasing population growth and unsustainable consumption together pose two of the greatest challenges facing the world. The global population is currently around 7 billion and most projections suggest that it will probably lie between 8 and 11 billion by 2050. Most of this population increase will occur in low-income countries. Global consumption levels are at an all time high, largely because of the high per capita consumption of developed countries. At the same time, 1.3 billion people remain in absolute poverty, unable to meet even their basic needs.
Population and patterns of consumption should be of major concern to policy makers because: -
They determine the rates at which natural resources are exploited and the ability of the earth to sustainably provide the food, water, energy and other resources required by its inhabitants. Current patterns of consumption, especially in high-income countries, are eroding natural capital at rates that are severely damaging the interests of future generations.
Population is an important component of a complex nexus of processes that determine the economic and social development of a country. Rapid population growth can be an obstacle to improving standards of living in poor countries, to eliminating poverty and to reducing gender inequality. If the right conditions are in place measures that reduce fertility rates while respecting human rights can stimulate and facilitate economic development, improve health and living standards, and increase political and social stability and security.
Changes in population age structure may occur as a result of declining birth and death rates and can have important social, economic and potentially environmental ramifications. Ageing of populations in the high, many of the middle and some of the low-income countries is occurring at historically unprecedented rates, while in some low-income countries the proportion of children and young people is very high.
Population growth can contribute to movements of people (for example from the countryside to cities or
between countries). By 2050, 70% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities with significant challenges for urban planning and logistics. While urbanisation and migration may present opportunities for economic and social development, and resource efficiencies, if unexpected and unplanned, they can be economically and politically disruptive and have serious environmental impacts.
The combination of unsustainable consumption patterns, especially in high-income countries, and of the number of people on the planet, directly affects the capacity of the earth to support its natural biodiversity.
1 IAP Statement on Population Growth (1994) http://www.interacademies.net/10878/13940.aspx
2 IAP Statement on Transition to Sustainability (2000), http://www.interacademies.net/10878/13933.aspx
3 See also Royal Society (2012), People and the Planet. Royal Society, London.
Population and consumption are at the heart of sustainable development and efforts to move the world towards the sustainable use of its natural resources. Both are politically and ethically sensitive, but it is essential that this does not lead to them being neglected by policy makers. The world needs to adopt a rational and evidence-based approach to addressing the issues raised by population growth and unsustainable consumption patterns, one that respects human rights and the legitimate aspirations of people and countries with low-income to improve their living standards and levels of well-being.
The IAP science academies recommend that national and international policy and decision makers act: -
To ensure that population and consumption are considered in all policies, including those related to poverty reduction and economic development, global governance, education, health, gender equality, biodiversity and the environment.
To make global consumption sustainable; to reduce levels of damaging types of consumption and develop more sustainable alternatives. Action is critically needed in higher-income countries. It is also urgent that options be available and implemented in the least developed countries by which they can move out of poverty, increase their health and well-being, and protect their own environmental resources.
To encourage development strategies that help to reduce population growth. Programmes that promote education, in particular of women and girls, should be central to these strategies.
To make certain that everyone has access to comprehensive reproductive health and family planning programmes. This issue requires substantial additional resources and policy attention from governments and international donors.
To encourage modes of development that do not repeat mistakes made in the past by today’s developed countries but which allow low-income countries to “leap frog” to sustainable patterns of consumption.
To encourage “green economy” innovations designed simultaneously to increase human well-being and reduce environmental impacts.
To develop policies that maximise the benefits of greater life expectancy, that improve the quality of life of older people, and that create new opportunities for their continued contribution to society.
To develop policies that maximise the economic and social benefits of migration to both source and recipient countries.
To recognise that continuing population growth will contribute to increased urbanisation, and to develop and implement urban planning policies that take into account consumption needs and demographic trends while capitalising on the potential economic, social and environmental benefits of urban living.
To use existing knowledge more effectively and to prioritise research in the natural and social sciences that will provide innovative solutions to the challenges of sustainability.
The Need for Urgent Action
The Global Network of Science Academies’ common goal remains the improvement of the quality of life for all, for those living now and in the future, and in particular to help build the knowledge base required to achieve these aims. The choices made about population and resource use over the next fifty years will have effects that last for centuries. There are a range of possible futures. If we act now, it is realistic to imagine trajectories where population growth comes to a halt, consumption becomes sustainable, human-induced global change is kept within manageable limits, and human well-being increases. A failure to act will put us on track to alternative futures with severe and potentially catastrophic implications for human well-being. The longer the delay, the more radical and difficult measures will be needed. Everyone has a role to play: individuals, non-governmental organisations, and both the public and private sectors. It is critical that national and international policy makers, acting individually and collectively, take immediate action to address these difficult but vitally important issues.
IAP - the global network of science academies currently has a membership of 105 scientific academies from around the world; these include both national academies/institutions as well as regional/global groupings of scientists. For information, see the IAP Directory here
June 2012
April 2012 - People & Planet Report Royal Society "C&C minded but Caveat Emptor"
The recent Royal Society report addresses population and consumption. It sets this in the increasingly critical context of the greenhouse gas emissions driving global climate change. Noting what it describes as the injustice of over-consumption and under-consumption, it calls for a framework to address this. This is a sensible message. It has been repeated with increasing urgency for many years. It is now increasingly listened to and that is encouraging.
The report omits reference to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC] where - still with more heat than light - these matters are negotiated. However it has several recommendations and since one of the principal authors of the report is Professor Tim Jackson, it is welcome to see that his long-term advocacy of the pragmatic Contraction and Convergence [C&C] framework for greenhouse gas emissions so clearly informs these.
That said, I have two major reservations about the report: -
[1] The framework envisaged for 'economic-governance' is price-led. This is what we already have and why we are in such jeopardy. While attempting to price 'natural capital' and 'species' is not irrelevant, from the viewpoint of 'economic-governance', this is an 'economics response'. The tough fact is that it is economics per se that now is - and must be - governed by the very limits which the report seeks to address.
This is not fundamentally therefore an issue of the 'monetary unit' and 'pricing', it is an issue of realism, regulation and demand-management.
The report calls for a 'stable socio-economic structure' for generations to come', which is sensible. However, the monetary-unit is increasingly unstable and periodically chaotic. Particularly at these times, the monetary-unit is increasingly divorced from the real and concrete resources on which we depend, from any limits to the liquidation and consumption of these resources and completely divorced from any notion of the 'equitable consumption' of these resources.
Pricing per se will not limit human demand to the extent needed to get us out of the global double-jeopardy of inequity and collapse that we are in. The report could have addressed this more clearly.
[2] Following from that the report states that, "it is indeed possible to imagine an unequal yet sustainable world, but such a world would deny many people the opportunity to flourish." This limits inequality to being merely a 'moral issue' about which a choice to continue or to correct can be made, with either option providing a 'sustainable world'.
It is this view that makes possible the price-led response option identified above. It mimics the shibboleth that 'the poor will always be with us' and believing this is like booking a passage on the two-tier Titannic.
The driver of reconciliation within the limits that govern us now is the realization that if we're going down, we're all going down. People and Planet Royal Society
More views on the current Report in the Guardian organised by Leo Hickman
15 June 2012 - "Appalled that problems of Ecology & Equity get more severe" Faith Leaders speak to Rio+20
Towards Rio + 20 and Beyond – A Turning Point in Earth History – Summary Statement*
As leaders, teachers, and students of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions, we are appalled that the interconnected problems of development, equity and ecology have become more severe over the past twenty years. Many of the dangerous trends we are witnessing are a result of our current, unsustainable, growth-based economic paradigm. We urgently need to change current mindsets towards a sharp focus on the goals of material sufficiency, the eradication of poverty, equitable distribution, and sustainable wellbeing and human happiness.
We, who represent such a broad diversity of religious and spiritual expressions, commit to the following: -
We repent where our traditions and organizations have failed to work for true equality of all people, and have
supported the destruction of the environment.
We embrace with joy the opportunity to forge a global interreligious, tribal and indigenous, intercultural and
intergenerational partnership to bring about the fundamental changes that are necessary in our values, life styles, and
economic structures for advancing the Great Transition to a world of justice, sustainability, and peace.
For humanity to live peacefully we commit to take action for justice to prevail. Our spirituality inspires us to act in
solidarity with those in need and the most vulnerable who are disproportionally affected by climate change while
having contibuted little to its causes.
We recognize that “business as usual” threatens the survival of humans and many species and commit to work
collaboratively towards the creation of a new economy that flourishes within the natural bounds of our planet and
serves human happiness and well-being that comes from living life in harmony with the natural world, with our
communities, and with our inner selves.
Our religious and spiritual traditions command us not only to feed the hungry, but to give of our own bread. This is
not a deed of charity but of justice. We therefore call upon each citizen of the world community to pledge each year to our capacity an extra Millennium Share of 0.1 % of one’s income to raise the necessary funds to alleviate abject
misery and realize the Millennium Development Goals. We commit to support the creation of a Council of
Conscience of esteemed men and women to administer this fund.
We urge the representatives of all governments to: -
Show courageous leadership in addressing the major global challenges that threaten the very survival of humanity on this planet. This desires their highest priorities.
Accept the fundamental importance of shared ethical and spiritual values as expressed in the Earth Charter, the
Charter for Compassion as well as the Uppsala Interfaith Climate Manifesto in creating a green economy and making the transition to a sustainable way of life.
Create a green economy that ensures social justice and equity and supports the common good of all and not just a few, protects the ecological balance and creates economic sufficiency by internalizing social and environmental costs into the economic bottom line.
Adopt alternative economic indicators to GDP that fortunately have been emerging that include social well-being and
ecological, ethical, moral and cultural integrity such as Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Paradigm.
Build structures of sustainable development governance that increase the capacity of governments to guarantee the right to food and proper nutrition, the right to safe and clean drinking water, the right to development and to a healthy environment and protects common goods such as water and land from privatization and commoditization.
Governments and multinational corporations must be held accountable for their activities.
This is a solemn moment of global decision making. The Rio + 20 Conference provides a historic opportunity to lead the world into a more sustainable future. We do not have another twenty years to lose. To move forward in our best interests and even more in the interests of those yet to be born, we must fundamentally change the concepts that underlie our negotiation practices and realize that only together can we forge inclusive solutions.
Humble in the consciousness that the consequences of our decisions and actions will be felt by many generations to come, we turn to the Source of All Blessings for strength and courage. May our children, and our children’s children take pride in our actions.
*summary statement revised and adopted at the Wings for Rio + 20 Leadership Forum in The Hague on May 2.
The longer version of the statement can be downloaded here
Endorsed by: -
Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, President and Founder, Jacob Soetendorp Institute for Humam Values
His Holiness, the XIVth Dalai Lama
Dadi Janki, Spiritual Head, Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University
Imam Umer Ahmed Ilyasi, Chief Imam of India and President, All India Imam Organization
Most Revrd. Dr. Thabo Cecil Makgba, Archbishp of Cape Town
Pauline Tangiora, Maori Elder, Aotearoa / New Zealand
Brigitte van Baren, Zen Teacher in the Tradition of Empty Cloud and Sanbo Kyadan Society, Director Inner Sense
Dr. Katherine Marshall, Executive Director at World Faiths Development Dialogue, Senior Advisor at the World Bank
The Elijah Board of World Religious Leaders, including
• His All Holiness, Patriarch Bartholemew
• Cardinal Jorge Maria Mejia, Vatican
• Abbot Primate Notker Wolf OSB, Italy
• Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
• Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar
• Rabbi David Rosen
• Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric
• Prince Hassan bin Talal
• Shaykh Hisham Kabbani
• Swami Agnivesh
• Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma)
• Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
• Dharma Master Hsin-Tao, Taiwan
• Venerable Khandro Rinpoche
• Venerable Prof. Jinwol Sunim
Sr. Joan Kirby, Temple of Understanding
Marcus Braybroke, President, World Congress of Faiths
Bishop Lennart Koskinen, Church of Sweden
Dr. Gerardo Gonzalez, Multi-faith Coalition for Partnering with the UN
Jehan Bagli, World Zoroastrian Organization, Canada
Sharon Hamilton-Getz, NGO Committee on Spirituality, Values and Global Concerns-NY
12 June 2012 - The Future We Want; "Resource Justice means C&C." NGO's struggle with C&C at Rio+20
27. We underscore that green economy is not intended as a rigid set of rules but rather as a decision-making framework to foster integrated consideration of the three pillars of sustainable development in all relevant domains of public and private decision-making.
27. [We underscore that [green – NGOs – Delete] [a sustainable – NGOs] economy [is – NGOs –Delete] [should – NGOs] [constitute – Indigenous Peoples] not intended as a rigid set of rules but rather as a decision-making framework to foster integrated consideration of the three pillars of sustainable development in all relevant domains of public and private decision-making. – NGOs – Delete para. (Non-agreement between NGOs)]
[Achieving world-wide Green Economies, and with that resource justice, means also a scheme of contraction and convergence for over- and under-consumers of natural resources and waste disposal. – NGOs]
[27 bis. We recognize the importance of ensuring that green economy policies and projects contribute to sustainable development. In order to guide action, we agree that green economy activities must comply with the following principles:
Equity between and within countries.
Inclusiveness and participation (youth, women, poor and low skilled workers)
Transformation of traditional and creation of new green and decent jobs.
Respect for the rights of workers and trade unions.
Fulfilment of social objectives and satisfaction of human needs in the long term, including universal access to water, food, housing, energy, land, health, education, transport and culture.
Based on the efficient use of natural resources, prioritisation of renewable sources, internalisation of social and environmental costs, lifecycle analysis and aiming at being zero carbon and zero waste.
Focus on materials’ productivity rather than on cutting labour costs.
Just Transition for workers and communities that might be affected by change, including widening social protection schemes and developing social dialogue mechanisms on green economy policies.
Promotion of democracy.
Based on the real economy and be non-speculative. - Workers & Trade Unions].
This was all immediately attacked as 'The Future We Dread' by the 'Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow' [CFACT]. CFACT is a grouping in Washington DC centering on Lord Christopher Monkton. His opinions on the science of climate change are reminiscent of Peer Gynt's onion - peel the layers away and there's nothing there.
12 June 2012 - "Take a glimpse into Plato's world." The [Awesome] Road to Reality by Sir Roger Penrose
". . . I have allowed myself to stray too much from the issues that will concern us here. The main purpose of this chapter has been to emphasize the central importance that mathematics has in science, both ancient and modern. Let us now take a glimpse into Plato’s world - at least into a relatively small but important part of that world, of particular relevance to the nature of physical reality." The Road to Reality - Sir Roger Penrose Dodecahedron Flexapen
Primarily C&C is a proposal to the UNFCCC before it is a proposal to civil society . . . and as such is a very specific calculation procedure with a view to UNFCCC-compliance. Michael Meacher called it an hueristic-device and in a fundamental sense it is 'Platonic'. As Mary Otto Chang says, in UN-speak C&C is a 'neutral methodology' which is appropriate as the UN can't exactly negotiate 'ethics' . . . .
Our great difficulty in the 'post-modernity' of market-collapse' is that the genuine resilience of evolutionary 'bio-diversity' has now been transmuted into the 'portfolio diversity' beloved of operators in 'the free-market' and it is this that is now falsely described as 'resilience'.
The conservation movement is led by organisations that have now been sucked into the destructive charybdis of the very bio-diversity they sought to conserve while this is egged on by 'evolutionary biologists' and the free-market-fundamentalists they have spawned.
In his latest book, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, the ‘evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins promised this time to simply present the ‘evidence’ for his Darwinian thesis, rather than engage with the arguments he has said are attacking it. However, in Chapter Two of his book he launches into a scathing attack on his ‘real enemy’ and it transpires that it is not the ‘creationists’, it is ‘the dead hand of Plato’. This dead hand, he says, is the single thing that over a period of now well over 2,000 years is most responsible for why people do not see the secular reality and resilience of ‘evolutionism’.
As conservation advocates of bio-diversity become more and more subsumed by the pseudo-model of resilience in the market with portfolio-diversity, this row emerges as far more profound than the row between the left and the right. It is the oldest of rows between order and chaos. The row is between Platonists and the anti-Platonists. This is where the 'paradigm shift' will occur [if it does].
The hard truth is that UNFCCC-compliance will never be result of the chaos.
That is why the work of Roger Penrose is so important.
12 June 2012 - "Reduce material throughput to create C&C" Science Magazine Rands et al
"In both developed and emerging economies, we need to reduce the carbon and material throughput demanded by current patterns of production and consumption if we are to create viable and democratically acceptable trajectories of contraction and convergence in resource use.
In parallel, we must recognize that successful human development agendas are underpinned by functional ecosystems, and by biodiversity.This is the year in which governments, business, and civil society could decide to take seriously the central role of biodiversity in human well-being and quality of life and to invest in securing the sustainable flow of nature’s public goods for present and future generations."
Michael R. W. Rands
Cambridge Conservation Initiative, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
Bhaskar Vira, William M. Adams
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
Stuart H. M. Butchart, Leon Bennun
BirdLife International, Wellbrook Court, Cambridge
Andrew Clements
British Trust for Ornithology, The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk
David Coomes,
Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge
Abigail Entwistle
Fauna and Flora International, Jupiter House, Cambridge
Ian Hodge
Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge
Jörn P. W. Scharlemann, Valerie Kapos
United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre
Cambridge
Valerie Kapos
Cambridge Conservation Forum, c/o Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge
William J. Sutherland
Conservation Science Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge
Michael R. W. Rands,
Cambridge Conservation Initiative, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
William M. Adams,
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge
Leon Bennun,
BirdLife International, Wellbrook Court, Cambridge
10 June 2012 - "The most rational policy is C&C" Climate Change & Sustainable Development: Potthast & Meisch
How does sustainable intensification measure against these facts? First, given that a large part of the problem is distribution and not absolute deficiency, it is more sensible to target the underlying problem of distribution directly. Second, intensifying livestock agriculture can lead to further reductions in the crops available to people of poorer nations. Third intensive livestock agriculture can be associated with deforestation causing further emissions.
The most rational policy is contraction and convergence. This recommends a contraction of meat and dairy consumption in parts of the developed world and a limited increase in the developing world leading ultimately to a convergence of consumption at a sustainable level. This is consistent with feeding the world more equitably and reducing food injustice. Finally all of this is consistent with respecting the welfare of sentient farm animals because intensification often diminishes animal welfare. This is consonant with respecting society’s democratic concern for animalwelfare. S P McCulloch, The Royal Veterinary College, University of London
How then would an equal share proposal benefit those two groups alike? As a more specific avenue towards the allocation of equal entitlements, the Contraction and Convergence [C&C] approach was suggested in the early 1990's by Aubrey Meyer from the London based Global Commons institute [Meyer 2000]. Under a C&C approach every individual is granted an equal right to emit GHGs since every individual has th e right to the use of the benefits of provided by a shared resource. Second, a global cap is placed on emissions, on the basis of a scientific analysis of the amount of GHG's the global environment can withstand. Third, each nation is awarded an emissions budget consistent with the capacity of the global environment to absorb GHG S [Page, 2006: 177]. This implies that the industrialized nations have to contract GHG emissions while the non-industrialized can raise their emissions for a limited time in the future. The non-industrialized nations can sell the emission permits that they do not require to industrialized nations in need of additional permits, thereby creating revenues to fund adaptation, development and poverty reduction, while the industrialized nations use the permits to soften their transition towards a renewable energy economy. Thus, after the contraction of the industrialized nations and the increase in the emissions of the non- industrialized nations, the emissions trajectory of both converges to an equal level.
A sine-qua-non for this scenario to be successful is the collective political will to determine the start and the length of the convergence period [Simms, 200S: 178-179]. Needless to say, the longer the transition's starting point is postponed, the more the problem is exacerbated and the more the invasive the convergence trajectory will need to be. Current estimates show that to stabilize atmospheric levels of CO2 to at 440 ppmv which would correspond with a rise of 2°C, a CO2 peak should occur between 2020 and 2030 and the CO2 emissions should decline to zero by 2052 [GCI, 2011]. Equal per capita entitlements to greenhouse gas emissions: a justice based critique
J Dirix W Peeters S Sterckx
Contraction and Covergence versus Greenhouse Development Rights
The two already mentioned competing concepts in CE are Contraction and Convergence [C&C]. The core idea is presented in Meyer [1999 for furterh developments see the website of Meyer’s Global Commons Institute] and Greenhouse Development Rights [GDR Baer et al 2008 see www.ecoequity.org] The position adopted here is clearly a variant of C&C which is augmented by some ideas on adaptation beyond the vulnerability criterion, some hopes for CDR and strict caveats against SRM.
The GDR concept supposes a global emergency situation and combines strict mitigation with mandatory assistance to adaptation in the global South and with a benchmark in monetary income below which persons have no obligation to curb their GHG emissions or care for climate change. The charming idea that rich persons in poor countries should contribute to mitigation and adaptation is not at the heart of the GDR concept. A human right is seen as a right to create monetary income is placed at the centre of the system of human rights.
The concept of C&C as proposed by Meyer [1999] includes a gradual convergence from now to 2050 which seems both feasible a fair. Such a scheme puts a mitigation burden on countries like China. The heaviest burden clearly falls on states whose economies have been based on cheap energy as in the US.
While C&C allocates resources, GDR allocates burdens. Under the criteria of responsibility and ability, the burdens of single states are calculated. As a result, the burdens of states like Germany, the USA and other wealthy industrialized countries become greater than 100% emissions reduction.
Even if these states reduced all GHG emissions to zero, there remains a financial burden to help to assist Southern Countries to adapt. On the other side, economics which do not convert GHG emissions into income efficiently will be benefitted under a GDR scheme. The attractiveness of GDR has faded at a closer look [Kraus Ott 2009]. It combines an emergency ethics with a conventional approach to development to a measure which creates results that look somewhat over-demanding in a macro-economic perspective.
For Northern countries the economic impacts of C&C are severe but viable under a prudent long-term transition management. Germany could reach 100% electricity supply from renewables by 2040 if there will be close cooperation with Scandinavian states [SRU 2011]. There are reasons to claim that the C&C concept, that must be enlarged to the domain of adaptation and might adopt some important points from GDR, is all things considered the ‘better’ concept.
Conclusion
The triangular affair between mitigation, adaptation and climate-engineering strategies should not be seen as a portfolio. Within this triangular affair mitigation deserves the priority because mitigation is a precondition for adaptation and CDR being successfully performed. Mitigation on a global scale is by no means Utopian anymore. If the course of action will be agreed and become a safely paved and reliable pathway, the speed of taking steps may be increased up to running.
Climate change raises huge challenges for agriculture but there is no time for despair yet. Under a global C&C regime, agriculture could be adapted to modest climate change and, by doing so, become transformed into a more organic and sustainable 'Gestalt’. Adaptation and transformation are two sides of the same coin. K Ott C Baatz
09 June 2012 - "Hence the appeal to C&C." Westra Sosokolne Spady
The United States Executive Order 13514, requires ‘federal agencies to improve energy efficiency . . . mitigation of greenhouse gases . . . and recycling’ [White House, 2009, para 85]; and the European Union is somewhat less inconclusive, as it explicitly recognizes that the natural resource base for human life and development is in great danger and that fundamental changes in the way that societies produce and consume are vital for achieving sustainable development. Yet even this ignores the need for de-growth – contraction and convergence – and the fact that, according to the ecological footprint analysis [Rees 2006 pp 143-158] the present rates of consumption and economic ‘development’ are completely unsustainable, as they already exceed the capacity of the Earth to sustain present human populations. Hence the only possible development may be spiritual, intellectual or moral, as every other form of material development is already unsustainable.
At the end of the first decade of the twenty first Century, a consensus began to emerge: we have come to a decisive turning point, a great transition. The transition has many dimensions: economic social environmental and cultural. The weight of evidence suggests that a steady growth of energy and material consumption associated with the consumer societies that have spread around the world cannot continue. Given that several billion people have access to less energy and material resources than are required to meet basic needs and support a decent standard of living, the amount of reduction in consumption [i.e. contraction in its demand for energy] required by the developed world is substantial. And, if we believe that ever-widening disparities are socially unfair and potentially very damaging to the very fabric of civilization regionally and globally, then convergence between those who consume and those who do not is needed: hence the appeal to 'contraction and convergence'. In a period of time when the suggestion of a slowdown in economic growth triggers panic, the expectation that the wealthier world will greatly reduce energy and material consumption, and that it will good for us, may be seen as too hopeful and a stretch, but it's a stretch that is both possible and necessary. The intent of this chapter is to argue why the transition to a lower energy intensive economy can be a positive thing for human health. Human Health and Ecological Integrity Ethics Law and Human Rights
Laura Westra Colin Soskolne Donald Spady
"The Kyoto Protocol, completed in the early hours of December 11th 1997, at present is no more than a potential breakthrough in the development of effective global policy for the control of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and the mitigation of human-induced global climate changes. The core issue of the negotiations has been deferred until COP4 in November 1998. The industrial countries have negotiated a compromise that subject to ratification will legally bind them to commitments beyond those in the UNFCCC. But, the ratification of the Protocol by the US still remains contingent on achieving the “meaningful participation” of “key” developing countries in the abatement regime and the multilateral acceptance of international emissions trading. This is a struggle to define property rights. These key developing countries include India and China and they have made it clear that their acceptance of trading is contingent on the achievement of “equitable allocations” of emissions entitlements based on achieving equal per capita entitlements globally.
COP issued instructions to the technical bodies attached to the UNFCCC to “define the relevant principles, modalities, rules and guidelines for emissions trading” in time for COP4 in November 1998 in Buenos Aires. GCI argues that "Contraction and Convergence" is the approach that can break through this deadlock and welcomes the fact that major parties and interest groups in this dispute have already acknowledged that they take this approach seriously and that it has growing support throughout the world. As a leading economics commentator Peter Jay has noted, “… unless there is some recognition that eventually no one group of human being can expect to have an internationally recognised right to consume more of the world's limited capacity to absorb greenhouse gas emissions than any other group, it is hard to see how a globally enforceable policy can be built by consent.” And in the words of the President of GLOBE International, "Contraction and Convergence is not simply the right way to solve the problem, it is the only way to solve the problem.”http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/globe_.pdf The Kyoto Protocol and the Emergence of “Contraction and Convergence”
as a framework for an international political solution to greenhouse gas emissions abatement.
A Meyer 1997 -Springer Verlag
09 June 2012 - C&C support grows deeply & diversely; Rio+20 draft shows Parties as deeply divided as ever.
While support continues to grow deeply and diversely for the C&C Submission to the UNFCCC parties to Rio+20 conference seem more deeply divided over climate change than ever - draft negotiating text as leaked to Guardian here
06 June 2012 - "Schumacher Society works with others on issues of resource-justice based on C&C." CEL review
Small is Beautiful : The Legacy of E.F.Schumacher – review
Posted on June 6, 2012 by poppy
Small is Beautiful in the 21st Century:
The Legacy of E.F.Schumacher, by Diana Schumacher, Green Books, 127 pages, ISBN 978-1900322751, RRP £8.00.
This concise yet comprehensive book, published to commemorate the centenary of Schumacher’s birth, is both an exploration and celebration of the legacy of his pioneering work and philosophy. The author, Diana Schumacher, is well-placed to write such a book, being both his daughter-in-law and the co-founder of many organisations linked to his work (eg.The Schumacher Society and the New Economics Foundation) as well as an author and influential thinker in the field of ethics, ecology and the environment.
The opening chapter is a brief account of Schumacher’s life and ideas, including his growing spiritual awareness that led to his embrace of the Christian Faith and his being received into the Catholic Church a few years before his death. The emphasis is clearly on an overview of his ideas rather than a detailed biography. The chapter that follows is a more detailed exploration of the origins and work of The Schumacher Society, formed after his death in 1977, mainly at the instigation of Satish Kumar. Some of the better-known activities of the Society include ‘Resurgence’ magazine, the Bristol Schumacher Lectures, Green Books and Schumacher College, Dartington. The Society also co-operates with other organisations and individuals with whom it has a mutual interest, such as the Institute for Sustainable Systems in Bristol. Another is Go Zero and the The Converging World which seek to address issues around waste and resource justice based on Contraction and Convergence principles.
Chapter 3 describes Schumacher’s involvement with the Third World and the concept of Intermediate Technology as a solution to the eradication of poverty and the promotion of sustainable development. Many of these ideas were inspired by Buddhist studies and Gandhi’s philosophy. Many current projects have resulted from these concepts, predominantly under the auspices of the Schumacher Centre for Development and the Jeevika Trust, both operating in India. Chapter 4 outlines Schumacher’s lifelong interest in organic agriculture, local production and the importance of people’s connectedness with the soil. He became President of the Soil Association in 1972 and did much to enhance it’s reputation and widen it’s influence. The present-day Transition Town Movement, although founded after his death, owes much to Schumacher’s thinking.
Chapter 5 details the formation, development and current work of the Centre for Alternative Technology – including renewable energy technologies, low-carbon building, water and waste, organic food production and education and training in ecology. It’s connection with Schumacher is seen in the parallels with Intermediate Technology work in developing countries, combined with a general philosophy on sustainable futures. Schumacher was a trained economist and chapter 6 examines his contribution to the new economics that finally took root in The New Economics Foundation which is founded on the premise of steering economics towards sustainability, social justice and ethics. The penultimate chapter of the book looks at Schumacher’s ideas for transforming industrial work in the First World, with particular emphasis on humanisation and co-operation in the workplace. The Scott Bader Commonwealth is used as a successful example of such an approach. Unfortunately, as the author points out, many of Schumacher’s ideas, whilst being readily embraced by the Third World, have not found favour in the First World, which has been to the detriment of both.
The concluding chapter of this fascinating book assesses the relevance of Schumacher today and outlines how his holistic approach could address some of the major global issues of our time – food security, peace, resource depletion, climate change – that pose a challenge to the whole of humanity and the Planet. However, the conclusion is that it will take a major shift in consciousness, probably brought about by extreme necessity, to effect the change that is needed. Some of this is already happening, such as in the field of renewable energy and international climate agreements, but the sense of urgency is still there. For those of us familiar with Schumacher’s writing, this is a timely reminder of just how radical and forward- thinking his ideas were. For those who have not read ‘Small is Beautiful’ I would recommend that you use this as a ‘taster’ and then get a copy of the original. Diana Schumacher has produced a well-written and accessible book that deserves a place on the shelf of every Christian ecologist to both inspire and inform.
Linda Wickham
03 June 2012 - "Pleased to lend personal support to C&C." Prof Brendan Mackey, Earth charter Co-Chair
Fortunately, the world’s nations have signed the UNFCCC – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which commits all nations to work together to solve global warming.2 The UNFCCC allows for ongoing negotiation of additional agreements, called ‘protocols,’ to guide the actions needed to solve the problem. The Kyoto Protocol3 is one such agreement negotiated committing nations to take some important ‘baby steps’ along the road of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, national governments now need to agree on a new protocol binding countries to reduce total global warming emissions to a safe level with targets and timetables.
Without such an agreement, all our individual and collective efforts will fail to solve the problem. What would a new binding protocol look like?
The answer is called Contraction and Convergence. C&C is a framework that makes governments agree on three vital questions.
First, what is a safe concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases?
Secondly: When will total global greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to the amount needed to maintain atmospheric concentrations at the agreed safe level – 2050, 2100, next year? The sooner the better, of course, as the longer we wait the more harm is done to people and nature and the more expensive it becomes to fix.
The third important question a C&C framework would make governments reach agreement on is how the permissible annual amount of greenhouse gas emissions will be allocated between nations.
The simplest and fairest way is to give every person an equal share, called a per capita allocation. An important feature of C&C is it treats nations fairly.9 Under this framework, emission entitlements of people in a poor country will increase relative to what it is now, while that of people in a wealthy country will decrease. This is fair as historically poor countries have not caused the global warming problem and they need now quickly to develop to eliminate poverty. However, under a new C&C-framed protocol, all countries, including developing countries, will be committed to meeting their specified national greenhouse gas targets by the agreed date. Once a new protocol is in place, based on the equitable C&C framework, national governments can begin the complex task of working out how to most efficiently and fairly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to the agreed safe level.
Preamble – We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future.
As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. We must recognize, in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it’s imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.
Universal Responsibility – We must decide to live with a sense of universal responsibility, identifying ourselves with the whole Earth community and our local communities. We are at once citizens of different nations and of one world in which the local and global are linked. Everyone shares responsibility for the present and future well-being of the human family and the larger living world. The spirit of human solidarity and kinship with all life is strengthened when we live with reverence for the mystery of being, gratitude for the gift of life, and humility regarding the human place in nature. See website for full Charter with 14 principles to affirm for a sustainable life:
03 June 2012 - "As a principle C&C is almost incontravertible." Professor Tim Jackson Surrey
Tim Jackson
Professor of Sustainable Development
University of Surrey
Director of the ESRC Research Group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment (RESOLVE)
"Contraction and Convergence (C&C) refers to an approach originally proposed by the Global Commons Institute (GCI) but now widely agreed to represent a fair and meaningful way of achieving stabilization targets. Overall emissions 'contract’ to a level compatible with the stabilization target, and per capita emissions 'converge' towards an equal per capita shares of the overall emissions budget. Very simply, C&C is a way of transparently structuring future negotiations on the understanding that prosperity is governed by ecological limits on the one hand and fair shares on the other." For more information on the approach see for example Meyer 2004, See also briefings by the Global Commons Institute, online here and here Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet
Tim Jackson
03 June 2012 - "We assume a global deal based on C&C" More input to Rio + 20 The Great Transition NEF
"We assume a global ‘deal’ based on ‘contraction and convergence’ to limit, reduce and maintain total global emissions within defined limits (the contraction); we also assume that the UK’s total share of emissions progressively comes into line with its fair global share (the ‘convergence’), with significant transfer payments to developing countries during the process to facilitate their sustainable development." The Great Transition New Economics Foundation - 2010Rio+20
The Great Transition NEF Recommendation: - "Government must agree a global fair deal on climate change with appropriate contraction and convergence targets to avert dangerous climate change, reflecting the UK’s ‘fair share’ of total sustainable carbon emissions."
03 June 2012 - "Convene round-tables to understand & explain C&C." More input to Rio + 20; Ramapo College
Dear Aubrey
By all means, do count me as a supporter.
Ashwani Vasishth, PhD,
Center for Sustainability, Ramapo College of New Jersey
For editorial revisions and proposals, contact Ashwani Vasishth <vasishth@ramapo.edu>
Changing How We Measure and Manage the World’s Diverse Economies
The time has come to transcend growth-based metrics such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and move toward a more sophisticated set of indicators that more realistically take account of genuine progress towards human wellbeing and restoration of natural capital. This will allow us to transition to a planetary system of resource and wealth management, one that better nurtures the global commons. What we need is a system of economic control that is sophisticated enough to allow the implementation of ideas such as Contraction and Convergence—in which nations across the board commit themselves to addressing and dismantling the acutely increasing levels of disparity and deprivation, while the richer nations contract their consumption in a manner that allows all nations to converge toward a more equitable future state of development. At the same time, we need to move toward a system of economics that takes better account of externalities, such that the prices of goods and services begin to accurately reflect their actual and true costs to society.
We urge that Governments make clear commitments to: -
Keep Equity front and centre in economic decision-making.
Move beyond GDP to a more holistic suite of indicators.
Retract all fossil fuel subsidies and other subsidies that harm the environment, distort markets and create barriers to sustainable development. Where needed, and particularly in developing countries, safeguards must be established to protect vulnerable sectors of society. And as harmful subsidies are reformed, support should be focused on transitioning to clean, renewable energy technologies, as well as green industries and technologies, especially those in their infancy.
Take serious global action to promote sustainable consumption and production.
Set up systems for decentralised planning of sustainable infrastructure.
Focus on Green Jobs and Decent Work, while phasing out “brown” jobs.
Give priority to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in national planning.
Establish a global framework for corporate accountability.
Establish a Planetary Global Commons Management System that regulates the use of natural
resources, waste and wealth.
Implement the Contraction and Convergence model of growth, in which all countries shift their ecological footprint to sustainable levels. This implies that the richer countries shrink
their ecological footprint, while developing nations stabilize theirs on a per capita basis, until
all countries converge to an equitable footprint that is suitable for One Planet Living.
Action #3: Implementing A Contraction & Convergence Model
Support the implementation of this model at the global level, and track its deployment across Regions and over time.
Uchita de Zoysa, Centre for Environment and Development (CED), Sri Lanka
Ashwani Vasishth, Center for Sustainability, Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA
Leida Rijnhout, Northern Alliance for Sustainability (ANPED), Belgium
Kim Carstensen, Fair Green Solutions, Denmark
Tara Rao, Fair Green Solutions, India
03 June 2012 - "C&C makes intra & inter-generational considerations central." UNDP Paper to Rio + 20
Proposals include 'contraction and convergence‘, an idea promoted by the Global Commons Institute and supported by many developing nations (Meyer 2000). This framework aims to 'contract‘ overall carbon emission safely below the threshold to avoid runaway climate feedbacks and keep warming within tolerable limits. At the same time overall per capita carbon emissions would converge‘ by redistributing emissions entitlements.
‘Grandfathering‘, favoured by the US, take the status quo as the most legitimate starting point while seeking to maximise the utility of current generations. C&C proposals place intra and intergenerational equity principles more centrally and give different weight to the social and economic benefits accrued from historical emissions. Human Development Reseach Paper
Peter Newell, Jon Phillips and Dustin Mulvaney UNDP
03 June 2012 - UK Sust-Dev-Com: "C&C for GHG should be applied more generally." Input to Rio + 20
Imposing clearly defined resource/emissions caps
A lasting prosperity requires a much closer attention to the ecological limits of economic activity. Identifying and imposing strict resource and emission caps is vital for a sustainable economy. The contraction and convergence model developed for climate related emissions should be applied more generally.
Declining caps on throughput should be established for all non-renewable resources. Sustainable yields should be identified for renewable resources. Limits should be established for per capita emissions and wastes. Effective mechanisms for imposing caps on these material flows should be set in place. Once established, these limits need to be built into the macro-economic frameworks developed in 1 above.
Example/precedent: UK climate change budgets; the Supplier Obligation; rationing – post-war and Cuba; contraction & convergence proposals; Kyoto and post-Kyoto negotiations; concept of ecological space.
Input to Rio + 20
02 June 2012 - "CEL endorses C&C - GCI's work continues to be an inspiration." Christian Ecology Link
Dear Aubrey
Christian Ecology Link would like to endorse your proposal to UNFCCC, as per your email below.
Your work continues to be an inspiration - not least the fact that you keep going when the rest of the world would rather 'move on' from climate change. Hope all is well for you, and I send best wishes from friends at CEL.
Brendan
Professor Brendan Mackey Griffiths University
"We need C&C. Its what links the science to the politics."
Professor Brendan Mackey Griffiths University
"As with all great ideas, C&C is deceptively simple, addresses the root causes of the problem, and is recognized as a grave threat to those vested interests who fear the climate change problem’s successful resolution because of the fundamental changes it will wrought on our economic status quo. The sustained effort of GCI over 20 years is a testimony to Aubrey's integrity, commitment, and resolve. The logic and calculus of C&C is inescapable once an objective analysis is undertaken. For years, it was foolishly dismissed as impractical! Somewhat ironically, those who now view the problem with a clear head are increasingly accepting that C&C presents the only politically acceptable solution to the foundational question of how the permissible emissions can be distributed amongst the people of Earth." Professor Brendan Mackey Griffiths University Winning the Struggle Against Global Warming
What Will It Take? The Earth Charter Global Dialogue on Ethics and Climate Change
Brendan Mackey and Song Li
02 June 2012 - "C&C a measurable, workable model to address risk of mass extinction." Science for Peace
Science for Peace unreservedly endorses Contraction and Convergence (C&C) as the baseline framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in such a way as to avoid premature death and preventable misery due to climate change. The application of C&C has been unconscionably delayed, largely due to powerful interest groups that cross national boundaries.
The incontestable need to save lives, perhaps our species is core to C&C. Contraction helpfully clarifies a direction that is now tragically and ignorantly sidelined: C&C explicitly requires reduction and elimination of GHG emissions vs the euphemistic “adaptation and mitigation” framing.
Extensive applied research needs to be done: the concept of per capita emissions needs assessment within and across national boundaries, including precise calculations of international emissions (e.g. a CEO will be responsible for far more emissions than an assessment based on personal consumption only); specific sectors will require far-reaching contraction, such as the military, industrial agriculture, international aviation and shipping. Remaining quotas of carbon-based energy as assessed by C&C will need to be utilized intelligently with the aim of providing for human needs (e.g. prioritizing use for water infrastructure, soil restoration).
The UNFCCC is responsible to the global population for providing a workable framework. It is now self-evident that failure to do so leads to a clear risk of mass extinctions. C&C is a measurable, workable model designed to address this reality.
I’m an environmental social scientist with degrees in botany, geography, conservation policy and environmental education whose expertise and current research interests are in four broad areas, each of which critically explores some aspect(s) of the complex and embedded relations between humans and the environment, whether mediated by institutions or social movement organizations, and the effects of this on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity.
The areas are:
the nexus between the concepts of environmental justice and sustainability and, specifically, the possibility of a ‘just sustainability‘;
the potential of the concept of ‘spatial justice’ to contribute to ‘just sustainability‘;
the potential in emerging discourses around ‘food justice/sovereignty‘ to contribute to discourses around ‘just sustainability‘;
the concepts of interculturalism, cultural competency, culturally inclusive practice and culturally inclusive spaces in urban planning.
Just sustainability is more more accurately described as just sustainabilities because the singular form suggests there is one prescription for sustainability that can be universalized. The plural however acknowledges the relative, place and culturally bound nature of the concept. Just sustainabilities is the integration of social/spatial justice and sustainability and is “the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems”.
I was co-founder in 1988, and chair until 1994, of the Black Environment Network (BEN), the first environmental justice-based organization of its kind in Britain. I was co-founder in 1996, and am co-editor of Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability and was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of the Arts (FRSA) in the same year.
I am Series Editor of Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice an exciting new Series to be published by Zed Books. I am also Contributing Editor to Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and a member of the editorial boards of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture , Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, and the Australian Journal of Environmental Education. In addition, I am Visiting Professor at Northumbria University, Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK, and at the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
My publications, which number over 150, include books, peer reviewed articles, book chapters, published conference presentations, published reports, book reviews, newspaper articles, Op-Eds and articles in professional magazines and journals.
To keep up with my latest ideas, thoughts and speaking engagements, visit my Blog ‘Just sustainabilities: Re-imagining (e)quality, living within limits’ and my Twitter site by clicking on the buttons on the upper right corner of this page. To involve me in potential consulting projects, please visit Urban (E)quality Catalysts, my new consulting group whose aim is to advance just sustainability across diverse urban communities, helping to ensure both environmental quality and human equality in civic planning, policy, and practice.
Professor Julian Agyeman Ph.D. FRSA,
Chair, Department of Urban + Environmental Policy + Planning (UEP),
Tufts University,
97 Talbot Avenue,
Medford MA 02155. USA.
01 June 2012 - "Add my name to the C&C Proposal to UNFCCC" Professor Gary Yohe Wesleyan University
Good luck with this... the devil is in the details, and the falacy of scale lies therein.
It is, though, clear that the developed world must do its part to
reduce emissions and
allow developing countries to skip intervening and historical high emissions periods of economic development by providing ways to skip historical generations of harmful technological production techniques (by sharing new technologies, e.g.).
Gary
Gary W. Yohe
Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies
Wesleyan University
238 Church Street
Middletown, CT 06459 USA
"We chose one of the many possible options for the international regime of of differentiating future commitments [post 2012]: the Contraction and Convergence approach. It is selected here as it is a widely known and transparent approach that defines emissions allowances on the basis of convergence of per capita emissions allowances [starting after 2012] of all countries [including the USA] under a contracting global emissions pathway (Meyer 2000)." Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change Schellnhuber, Cramer, Nakicenovic, Tom Wigley, Gary Yohe
01 June 2012 - "C&C The Last Hope?" Earth Environments David Huddart & Tim Stott, Wiley
Contraction and converqence:
The last hope?
Surporled by China, Germany, The European Parliament, Stern and many others, this concept is on the idea that everyone on planet Earth has the right to emit the same quantity of GHG. At present a US citizen emits 20 tonnes of CO2 each year, a UK citizen emits 11 tonnes while a Nigerian only emits 0.09 tonnes. Contraction and Convergence [C&C] is the Global Commone Institute’s proposed UNFCCC-compliant climate mitigation strategy for an equitable solution to cutting greenhouse gas emissions through collective global action.
The ultimate objective of the UN Climate Treaty is to move to safe and stable GHG concentration in the atmosphere and C&C starts with this. C&C recognizes that subject to this limit, we all have an equal entitlement to emit GHGs to the atmosphere, since continuing unequal use will make it impossible to get global agreement needed for success. The Kyoto Protocol cannot be the basis of this success, because it is not science-based and, due to divergent national interests, it does not include all countries.
Scientists have advised on safe concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and on the global cap on emissions necessary to achieve it. A level of 450 ppmv has until recently been regarded as the upper limit for keeping under the maximum temperature oncrease of 2 degrees above the pre-industrial average.
From the inception of a global agreement, C&C schedules the mandatory annual global contraction [reduction of emissions] that will keep CO2 concentrations from rising beyond the agreed safe level. This rate of contraction must be periodically adjusted to take account of the increasing release of GHGs caused by climate warming. C&C proposes emissions entitlements to every country. While starting with current emissions, it proposes a scheduled convergence to equal per person entitlements for everyone on the planet by an agreed date [see figure above]. That way, convergence will reduce the carbon shares of the developed over-emitting countries sharply until they converge with the [temporarily rising] shares of the developing countries. The latter will be able to sell their surplus carbon shares to the wealthier nations. Emissions trading will be subject to rapid investment in renewable energy.
The 14th session of the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention [COP-14] will be held in conjunction with the 4th Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol [COP 14] in Poznan, Poland, from 1 to 12 December 2008. In 2012 the Kyoto Protocol expires. To keep the process going there is an urgent need for a new climate protocol. In 2012 the Kyoto Protocol runs out. It is to be hoped that discussions at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009 and subsequent agreements lead to a Copenhagen Protocol to prevent global warming and climate change. Earth Environments: Past, Present and Future
By David Huddart, Tim Stott
01 June 2012 - C&C "A necessary condition for a just and sustainable world." Herman Daly University of Maryland
"A necessary condition for a just and sustainable world."
All best wishes for your important efforts.
Herman
Herman Daly
Emeritus Professor University of Maryland
Implications of systematic caps on natural resources
A lasting prosperity requires a much closer attention to the ecological limits of economic activity. Identifying and imposing strict resource and emission caps is vital for a sustainable economy.
Limits should be established for per capita emissions and wastes. Effective mechanisms for imposing caps on these material flows should be set in place. Once established, these limits need to be built into the macro-economic frameworks.
Building a Sustainable and Desirable Economy-in-Society-in-Nature
Robert Costanza
Ida Kubiszewski Carol Franco Institute for Sustainable Solutions,
Portland State University
Gar Alperovitz The Democracy Collaborative and Department of Government and Politics,
University of Maryland
Herman Daly
School of Public Affairs,
University of Maryland
Joshua Farley
Department of Community Development and Applied Economics,
and Gund Institute for Ecological Economics,
University of Vermont
Tim Jackson Sustainable Lifestyles Research Group,
University of Surrey, UK
Juliet Schor
Department of Sociology,
Boston College
Peter Victor
Faculty of Environmental Studies,
York University, Canada
Ronald Colman
Genuine Progress Index Atlantic,
Nova Scotia, Canada
Some moral arguments for action on climate change depend not on the past but the present. They get us past a certain sort of recrimination – an objection to historical arguments on the grounds of a lack of foreknowledge on the part of the West – and move us all in the direction of equality with a clear and green conscience.
You might think, for example, that however we got to where we are, the benefits and burdens associated with using fossil fuels ought now be shared out equally. That’s what human beings ought to do with a limited, scarce and common resource. Maybe this is something you think follows from reflection on distributive justice or fairness. Maybe it has to do with emissions rights, which follow in a way from the rights that some argue all human beings have – rights to a secure and free life, for example.
If there are ‘safe’ emissions levels, if we can think clearly about the planet’s sinks as common resources to be divided up equally, then it follows pretty sharply that everyone on the planet has an equal right to emit within those safe limits. Perhaps you think in terms of a greenhouse budget, that some maximum concentration of greenhouses gasses in the atmosphere is acceptable, and we must divvy up the shares that remain equally, and take care to stay under that limit. (Here’s Peter Singer, arguing for a ‘fair deal on climate change’; you can read more details in ‘One Atmosphere’ in his book, One World.)
Whichever of these lines you choose to take, given the enormous levels of emission per capita in the West, it’s been argued on almost all sides that the West has an obligation to reign in its consumption, bringing it down and in line with others whose use of the planet’s common resources is less reckless. This, anyway, is part of the thinking behind such things as the contraction and convergence model, advocated with gusto by Aubrey Meyer and the Global Commons Institute and endorsed by a very large number of people and organizations, as a means to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions equitably. The idea is that some safe global emissions ceiling is set, everyone has an equal right to emit greenhouse gasses beneath that ceiling, and countries get emissions budgets based on population. High per capita emissions in the developed world contract, leaving room for the developing world to develop its way out of poverty, while levels converge beneath some safe threshold and, together, wind down and avoid the worst of climate change.
“If we agree to per capita allowances for all by 2030 then assigned amounts for Annex One countries would be drastically reduced. However, because all countries would have assigned amounts, maximum use of global emissions trading would strongly reduce the cost of compliance. In such a scenario Industrial Countries would have to do more, but it would be cheaper and easier.”
Jan Pronk COP6 2000, Dutch Environment Minister
“Liberal Democrats argue for the principle of contraction and convergence with the long-term goal of equalising per capita emissions globally.”
Chris Huhne, now the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
“When we ask the opinions of people from all circles, many people, in particular the scientists, think the emissions control standard should be formulated on a per capita basis. According to the UN Charter, everybody is born equal, and has inalienable rights to enjoy modern technological civilization.”
China State Counsellor Dr Song Jian, COP 3 1997
“We do not believe that the ethos of democracy can support any norm other than equal per capita rights to global environmental resources.”
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Prime Minister of India, 2002
“The international climate regime should be based on legitimate principles of equity, such as long-term convergence of emission levels per capita in the various countries.”
Nicholas Sarkozy President of France 2008
“In the final analysis the per capita emissions in emerging economies will meet those of industrialised countries. I cannot imagine the emerging economies will one day be permitted to emit more CO2 per capita than we in the industrialised countries. With this proposal, emerging nations with rapidly expanding economies could be on board the global climate negotiations scheduled for 2009.”
Angela Merkel President of Germany 2008
But, again, the facts are changing. Around ten years ago, this was, and some places it still is, the model used for thinking about contraction and convergence:
The idea is that, fairly rapidly after 2000, developed countries have a steep drop in emissions to make, while China, India and the rest of the world can grow a bit, meeting us in 2030, where we all cruise downwards, eventually to nearly preindustrial levels in one hundred years or so. (EDIT: Note that the GCI has new models, updated for the current state of play, with new, challenging emissions reductions. You can see those, and the GCI’s dim view of the Durban platform, here.)
The trouble is that, in 2012, the world looks much different than it did just ten or even five years ago. The developed world has not undertaken a programme of rapid per capita emissions reduction, and China, India and the rest have not just grown a bit, with their emissions likely to flatten out and on course to meet us on the way down in 2030. While it is a mixed bag, with some countries taking steps to lower emissions rates, and indeed emissions dipping in places during the recession, the trend in global emissions has always been upwards – the global increase is now 45% on 1990 levels, coincidentally the date of the IPCC’s first assessment report.
According to a report published by the European Commission in September and another by the International Energy Agency this year, 2010 was a record year in terms of increasing emissions. The long term annual average increase in emissions from 1990 is 1.9%, but in 2010 the increase was 5.8%, the largest jump ever recorded. This was driven partly by increases in China of 10% and India of 9%, as well as rises in the developed world, notably the USA.
How far have we strayed from the lines on that graph? The USA’s emissions have not dropped sharply, but increased by 11% on 1990 levels. China did not slowly grow, but passed the US as the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2006. Amazingly, again according to the European Commission, China’s per capita emissions could equal US levels by 2017 – it’s thought China has already overtaken France and Spain. China has promised not to let itself reach US levels, and its investment in renewables is huge, but it is astonishing to think that a country with a billion more people in it could match the United States in its bloated per capita emissions rates in just 5 years. It’s growth on an extraordinary scale.
The trouble with the moral equation and present emissions is not just this mess of facts, but the time we have left between now and 2030. It made sense at the start of this century to talk about emissions rights and equal per capita shares, which we might divvy up and keep under a safe emissions limit. As we move closer to the point of convergence, the 2030 deadline and the so called safe threshold, our ability to do the right thing, our room for moral manoeuvring, wanes. Emissions rates, on this model, should have begun falling rapidly in the West 5 or 10 years ago, but they have generally increased. Per capita emissions in the developing world had a bit of breathing room, but were not expected to rocket up past our own, already excessive levels.
Kant’s dictum, ought implies can, is something worth reflecting on in this connection. It makes sense to say that we ought to do something only if we actually can do it. It makes sense to call for climate justice, to demand that emissions be shared out equally among the people of the world beneath some safe threshold, only if this is something we in fact can do. There is now at least the possibility that it is now too late to do the right thing — it might already be too late for the LCDs and small island states, who are calling for an immediate deal and even tougher targets. As the space on the graph between us and 2030 compresses, and the lines we have to contemplate riding out become steeper and steeper and therefore further and further from the realm of the physically possible, the possibility that it’s too late is genuinely before us. Facts here intrude on morality, and sometimes the possibility of doing the right or just or equitable thing can slip beyond our grasp if we let it.
This kind of thing isn’t entirely outside our experience. Suppose you’re at an office party, your friend has been drinking, and you know he’s going to make a fool of himself as he walks towards the boss. You’ve got a few moments to grab his arm and save him from trouble he doesn’t deserve. But in that moment, at a certain point, it becomes too late for you to act, and in a single quiet breath, all your inner reflection about what you ought to do changes, passes from a live practical question to something theoretical, to a moot discussion of what you might have done or should have done. Maybe it becomes regret. We’ve all felt that, that sense of a chance slipping away. It’s possible to have that feeling about sharing out emissions rights. It’s possible to have that feeling about this part of the moral dimension of climate change.
We’ll turn to sustainability arguments, which depend on the future, not the past or present, in the next post. Meanwhile, I’d like to know what you think about arguments for equal emissions rights. What I’m contemplating is that calls for equal rights to emit will at some point bang up against so called ‘safe emissions thresholds’. What do we do when it’s too late to for ‘climate justice’? There are further thoughts to be had about morality in extremis. As it gets harder and harder to do the right thing, as ‘safe’ emissions pathways get more and more steep, is there room to excuse ourselves, and say that equal emissions rights are just beyond us? I’d say no, but it’s hard to square that with other things that seem true.
