So I ditched some school.
Which is how I found myself not in Texas this past week, but in front of classrooms of high-schoolers talking about the ethics and science of climate change, against the backdrop of a Connecticut that has yet to receive snowfall this winter.
And how I found myself in London, unexpectedly happening upon the remnants of a huge climate demonstration that had taken place near the American embassy.
And why I spent the night amid red and green balloons with pictures of cars (red) and trains (green) next to the symbol “CO2” in the Brussels train station.
I write this from Hamburg, Germany, on St. Nicholas Day, where signs outside the Rathaus, or government building, herald demonstrations and public discussions on how international climate action will affect Hamburg.
I am on my way to Copenhagen, Denmark, for the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which will run from Dec. 7 to 18. These conferences are held annually. The most famous is 1997’s COP-3, which produced the Kyoto Protocol.
COP-15 has long been anticipated as an opportunity to update Kyoto. The first Kyoto compliance period ends in 2012, after which another protocol is meant to direct international action.
While a binding protocol is no longer expected out of COP-15 at this point, the United States and China have made encouraging statements about potential willingness to take some kind of target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions relative to what they may otherwise have been.
That’s rather cautiously worded, but such is the nature of climate negotiations. Reducing emissions over baseline — what would happen without targeted action — is much different from reducing emissions, which is much different from reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As a teacher who hosted me in her classroom last week said, “Anyone who tells you this climate stuff isn’t complicated is lying.”
Many think that the American and Chinese statements belie far too little willingness to act. Given that these two countries alone account for more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions and are not currently bound by any commitments to reduce or slow those emissions, even weak statements are an important step.
So what is going to happen in Copenhagen if a binding treaty is no longer expected?
The U.S. and China will continue to get a lot of attention. American participation in global climate schemes would mean a lot for carbon markets, and Chinese willingness to take targets has implications for future actions by other developing countries.
There will also be a lot of bitter disagreements whose root causes have very little to do with scientific certainty. Ethics run deep in the climate debate, and no amount of science can change the fact that people have different opinions about things like the value of the future relative to the present or the importance of equity relative to swift action.
Forestry and land use changes that store more carbon in terrestrial systems will likely get some screen time, as will debates about changes in competitiveness as a result of climate action and about the Clean Development Mechanism, which theoretically allows wealthier countries to invest in carbon reductions in less developed countries. The Clean Development Mechanism is widely viewed as deeply flawed, and there are disagreements about whether it can or should be fixed.
The question of if and how to incorporate developing countries into global efforts to reduce the potential for climate change and adapt to the climate changes that will be observed will also be important.
For my part, I hope that Copenhagen recognizes a goal of global sustainability, which includes but is not restricted to a low-carbon society. Low-carbon technologies are many and varied, and they can have drastically different impacts on land, water, community and other systems that need to be considered.
I also hope that the importance of collective action is stressed. Climate change is a global problem, and many of the problems with current actions would be reduced or eliminated by global participation.
Concerns about losing competitiveness to countries with lower environmental standards are much less relevant if environmental standards are not very different across countries. Leakage problems, where carbon emissions simply move from areas with carbon restrictions to areas without restrictions, will not be as dangerous when all regions have carbon standards.
Copenhagen will be politically and psychologically important for many regions and many reasons. If you’re interested, keep an eye on the news for the next couple of weeks. It should be an interesting ride.
Grubert is an energy and earth resources graduate student.
7 comments
to capture the public’s imagination…
So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements
and make little mention of any doubts…
Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.”
- Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.”
- Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations
on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
- Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research“The models are convenient fictions
that provide something very useful.”
- Dr David Frame,
climate modeler, Oxford UniversityBut I guess some liar who flunked out of divinity school and gets a C-minus in college science (Al Gore) is who we should believe and sacrifice our economy for.