Author: Bryan Walker

Klein in Bolivia: global democracy is the way forward

Naomi Klein has been to Bolivia. She reports in the Guardian on the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earthheld this week.

The Copenhagen Accord speaks of keeping global warming to two degrees. In fact to date the emissions reductions pledged under the Accord put the world on the path to three degrees. But two degrees, Morales told the conference, “would mean the melting of the Andean and Himalayan glaciers.”

Klein points out that Bolivia is in the midst of a dramatic political transformation which has nationalised key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples.

“But when it comes to Bolivia’s most pressing, existential crisis – the fact that its glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in two major cities – Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their fate on their own.”

Only deep emission cuts in the industrialised world can avert the catastrophe facing countries like Bolivia and Tuvalu. That’s what the leaders of endangered nations argued for passionately at Copenhagen. “They were politely told the political will in the north just wasn’t there.”

They were also shut out of the closed door negotiations which led to the Accord. And when Bolivia and Ecuador refused to endorse the Accord the US government cut their climate aid by $3 million and $2.5 million respectively. “It’s not a freerider process,” was the explanation of US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing.  That strikes me as an extremely ironic statement given the disproportionate emissions of the US, a point which Klein makes in this way:

“Anyone wondering why activists from the global south reject the idea of ‘climate aid’ and are instead demanding repayment of ‘climate debts’ has their answer here.”

Klein goes so far as to say that the message in Pershing’s words was that if you are poor you don’t have the right to prioritise your own survival. This is the context for her characterisation of the conference as “a revolt against this experience of helplessness, an attempt to build a base of power behind the right to survive.”

There were four big ideas proposed for the conference by the Bolivian government:

  • “That nature should be granted rights that protect ecosystems from annihilation (a ‘universal declaration of Mother Earth rights’);
  • that those who violate those rights and other international environmental agreements should face legal consequences (a ‘climate justice tribunal’);
  • that poor countries should receive various forms of compensation for a crisis they are facing but had little role in creating (‘climate debt’);
  • and that there should be a mechanism for people around the world to express their views on these topics (‘world people’s referendum on climate change’).”

Seventeen civil society working groups worked for weeks online and for a week together to prepare recommendations. Klein describes the process as “fascinating but far from perfect”, and suggests that its most important contribution may be Bolivia’s enthusiastic commitment to participatory democracy.

She thinks this because of her concern that after the failure of Copenhagen the idea that democracy is at fault “went viral”. The UN process of votes to 192 countries is too cumbersome and solutions are better found in small groups.  She sees James Lovelock’s recent statement as an example: “It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

Klein won’t have a bar of this. It is the small groupings which have caused us to lose ground and weakened already inadequate existing agreements. She notes that Bolivia came to Copenhagen with a climate change policy drafted by social movements through a participatory process, resulting, in her view, in the most transformative and radical vision so far.

She sees the people’s conference as Bolivia trying to take what it has done at national level and globalise it, inviting the world to participate in drafting a joint climate agenda ahead of the next UN climate conference in Cancun. She quotes Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón: “The only thing that can save mankind from a tragedy is the exercise of global democracy.”

Her conclusion:

“If he is right, the Bolivian process might save not just our warming planet, but our failing democracies as well. Not a bad deal at all.”

Whatever one makes of the various avenues being pursued (if that’s not too strong a word) in achieving emission reductions, there is a need for the voices of the most endangered nations to be heard.  It seems likely that they will need to be raised to the level of loud and clear before a great deal of notice is taken of them. Bolivia recognises its vulnerability to glacier melt, and to various other threats which were identified in an Oxfam report last year discussed here on Hot Topic. It would be a failure of a government’s duty to its citizens to remain quiet. Their steps to mobilise global opinion should not be treated with indifference or contempt. And it is to be hoped that the US cutting off of funding will be reversed. It looked suspiciously like punishment, and undeserved at that.

Conference in Bolivia: who pays the price of change?

“We are very worried because we have no water. Half the people of this community have already left. Those who remain are struggling with the lack of water.”

 

Those are the words of a villager in a small Bolivian village called Khapi which is suffering from the effects of retreating glaciers in the Andes.  A BBC news report explains how it is for the villagers. Over the past 10 or 15 years, changing weather patterns have led to irregular water flows – the streams become torrents or dwindle to just trickles. “Our crops are dry now, our animals are dying; we want to cry.”

There are only 40 families in the village, but they’re ready to take their case to international forums. One of their leaders is Alivio Aruquipa (pictured):

“For the past two decades, we, the people from the Andean regions have been suffering because of the greenhouse emissions from the developed countries. If they don’t stop our glaciers will disappear soon. We want those countries to compensate us for all the damage they have done to nature…

“We don’t know how to calculate the compensation because we are not professionals, we are simply farmers. But we would like assistance, and then to receive some money and, with that money, to build dykes to store the water, improve the water canals.”

Hot Topic carried a post last November on the necessity of adaptation in Bolivia, following an Oxfam report.  The BBC news item is another example of the increasing body of evidence which bears out predictions of likely impacts of climate change. It will be discounted by some as anecdotal but there comes a point where the sheer volume of converging stories means they deserve credence.

The call for compensation is a just one, and rightly part of the price we should pay to assist poorer people already suffering the effects of human-caused climate change. In some respects it is in lieu of the price we ought to have put on carbon some years back. It’s a call which the Bolivian government is pushing. They would like to see an international environmental court where compensation claims can be made.

Bolivia is right now hosting its own international conference on climate change, the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. It’s attended by a mixture of NGOs and government representatives, and in some respects it’s an attempt to recover the ground Bolivia considered was lost at Copenhagen when the Accord was put together by a small group of larger countries. Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s UN ambassador, who has been prominent in the organising of the conference says:

“The only way to get climate negotiations back on track, not just for Bolivia or other countries, but for all of life, biodiversity, our Mother Earth, is to put civil society back into the process. The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy.”

Robert Eshelman describes the conference in the Huffington Post:

“…participants [include] Bill McKibben, NASA scientist Jim Hansen, Martin Khor, G77 + China negotiator Lumumba Di Aping, and Vandana Shiva. Throughout the conference, seventeen working groups will convene to discuss issues ranging from deforestation and climate migrants to the rights of indigenous peoples and developing technologies for poor and low-lying nations to adapt to the impacts of climate change.”

He sees divergence from the kind of path the US is wanting to follow:

“While the U.S. will use the Major Economies Forum and the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas to spotlight how small group and bilateral discussions among leading economies, rather than the 192-nation U.N. process, is the best way forward on climate negotiations, participants at the Bolivian conference argue that the conversation about, and the process for, developing strategies to address climate change needs to be expanded, not narrowed, bringing more voices into the debate around climate change.”

Hopefully this needn’t indicate stalemate, but both paths can be pursued. If they’re not there is real danger of the poorest nations suffering the injustice of neglect.

Beatin’ the heat

It was a happy experience to open the Waikato Times last week and see across from the editorial page the profile of scientist Jim Salinger under the headline Salinger doesn’t feel critics’ heat.  The articlewas based on an interview with Salinger, who was visiting Hamilton to speak to Forest and Bird’s AGM about research on climate change since the 2007 IPCC report.

It opened with the recognition that in recent months Salinger has had to stave off repeated criticism of his work by the likes of Rodney Hide and the Climate Science Coalition.  Even his decades-old PhD thesis has come under fire.

Salinger explains that when he did his thesis he simply wanted to work out what was happening with New Zealand climate.

“In those days we weren’t considering the greenhouse effect, and I thought ‘this is an interesting topic, see if New Zealand’s climate has changed’.”

He discovered the climate was warming slowly, and he’s confident that if Niwa rechecks his work using modern techniques they’ll come up with the same conclusions.

About the attacks, he chuckles slightly and says:

“Science is about facts, not beliefs. I like to look at the facts and see what they say – if people want to attack me as a person, that has nothing to do with my science. It doesn’t worry me.

“…This whole group are trying to accuse me, and my overseas scientific colleagues, of fraud.

“Well, there is going to have to be a hell of a lot of people involved in this “fraud’…They’re trying to say the International Panel on Climate Change is a fraudulent activity, and in fact it’s a very thorough process.”

The theft of the UEA emails he sees as a deliberate attempt to discredit the scientists and the science. After outlining the basics of the evidence of warming, and along the way defending the peer-review system, he summarises that his concern is whether the planet will be fit for survival by humans as a species.

I reflected when reading the article that it is sad that the mainstream science Salinger represents should have to be presented to Waikato Times readers as a response to the ignorant and despicable attacks mounted on New Zealand climate scientists by the ACT party and the Climate Science Coalition.  The interviewing journalist Jeff Neems did a good job of ensuring that the science showed through clearly, but as a society we are apparently not yet ready to regard it as news enough in itself that leading scientists are greatly alarmed at what they are discovering about the effect of greenhouse gases on the climate. Had the Times not recently reported the attacks of Hide and company I imagine it is likely that Salinger would have slipped in and out of Hamilton virtually unnoticed except by those attending the Forest and Bird AGM.

I don’t mean to attack the Waikato Times particularly.  It has a better record in these matters than many New Zealand papers. But the press as a whole should have been doing much more than it has in focusing public attention on the seriousness of the issue. The science Jim Salinger represents shouldn’t have to depend on the campaigning of Greenpeace to get media attention. He and others who work in the climate science field should be reported regularly and seriously. His wondering whether the planet will remain fit for human survival is not idle. It’s a serious science-based concern and the public should know that many leading scientists have such a level of concern. Hide and his companions strike at the foundations of intellectual regard on which the functioning of society depends. Our newspapers should be strengthening those foundations.

Eco-pragmatists need stiffer spines

Forty years ago Denis Hayes was US national coordinator for the first Earth Day.  This year he is international chair for the 22 April event. He has a notable record as an environmental activist and early proponent of solar power. But he’s chafing under the blandness that he detects threatening environmental movements in the US. In an articlerecently published in Yale Environment 360 he both supports Earth Day and warns of its limitations. In particular he’s concerned that American environmentalist groups are being inveigled into political compromises on climate change which impair any prospect of adequate legislation in the US.

He recalls the origins of Earth Day:

“Earth Day 1970, for which I served as national coordinator, was huge. Twenty million Americans took part. Millions of Americans who didn’t know what “the environment” was in 1969 discovered in 1970 that they were environmentalists.

“Moreover, Earth Day was bipartisan.”

 

For a time results followed:

“Over the next three years, Congress passed the most far-reaching cluster of legislation since the New Deal — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and myriad other laws that have fundamentally changed the nation. Trillions of dollars have been spent differently than they would have but for this new regulatory framework.”

Understandably, he says, the environmental movement drew the lesson that it should try to grow as large as possible and be bipartisan.  But times have changed. Reagan assembled the most anti-environment cabinet in history. Bipartisanship isn’t working in today’s scene.

“…the Republican leadership is now so robustly anti-environmental that the League of Conservation Voters uses affirmative action in evaluating its scorecards. A Democrat with a 60 percent voting record is seen as awful, while a Republican with 60 percent is seen as exceptional.”

Striving for bipartisan support in such a context produces legislation that is at best inadequate and at worst designed to fail. Earth Day itself, which is a mainstream phenomenon,  must continue to be as embracing as possible, with a broad common denominator. But the environmental movement mustn’t rely on this approach to effectively address climate change.

“… to succeed against the wealthy, powerful forces arrayed against it on issues like climate disruption, ocean acidification, and a global epidemic of extinction, the environmental movement also needs a large block of people who will fight for a sustainable future valiantly and without compromise.”

It’s no good relying on Congress to do the right thing.

“Although Congress has some brilliant, courageous individual members, as an institution it is dumb and cowardly. The only way that Congress will act intelligently and boldly on this issue is if we give it no choice.”

The current Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill now making the rounds in the Senate gets weaker at every draft.

“Every draft does a poorer job of putting a reasonable price on carbon. Every draft is larded with more taxpayers dollars for socialized, centralized nuclear power and for ‘clean coal.’ Every draft carries more sweeteners for the utility industry, the automobile industry, the coal and oil industries, and the industrial farmers and foresters”

The eco-pragmatist view is that this is the price that must be paid to get any climate bill at all. Hayes laments that this pragmatic view has been broadly, if reluctantly, embraced by most of the large, mainstream national environmental groups working on climate as well as by the Obama Administration.

It’s time for sterner stuff. Instead of weakening the bill, we need to change the politics.

“Politicians who try to ignore climate disruption — and that’s a whole lot of them — need to start losing their jobs next November.”

There was a sharp edge to the first Earth Day in the US. Hayes notes that the organizers jumped into the subsequent Congressional elections, seeking to defeat a “Dirty Dozen” of incumbent Congressmen. The targets were selected because they had abysmal environmental records, but also because they were in tight races and were from districts with a major environmental issue that voters cared about. Seven Congressmen were taken out that election.  Hayes considers that was a useful shock for legislators and helped the 1970 Clean Air Act pass the Senate unanimously.

He wants to see environmental groups put aside support for further compromise and concentrate instead on creating an intense environmental voting bloc that will subordinate all other issues to climate. That block needs to construct a successful campaign to return some Congressional villains to private life—perhaps even a couple of dozen.

“We must make it crystal clear to politicians everywhere that we are serious. This issue to too vital and too urgent to do any less.”

Hayes claims, incidentally, that the Cantwell-Collins bill in the senate is acknowledged by most experts as the best climate legislation that has yet been proposed. It’s the only option under consideration that would make a significant dent in emissions in the near term. It has a cap but no trade. Carbon permits are auctioned and the proceeds returned to the public on a pro rata basis. It sounds like what James Hansen is so strongly advocating.

I admit to having difficulty following the labyrinthine processes of American politics, but Hayes seems to be grappling with an underlying issue which is not confined to the US. Is something better than nothing in legislation to tackle climate change?  Do we settle for less and hope it might grow into more with time?  Or do we say we haven’t got that time, that nothing less than adequate, and soon, will do?

In the bunker: entrepreneurs wage war on carbon

If you want cheering up, a visit to the Carbon War Room web site may do the trick. Not everything has to wait on government action. Richard Branson is one of the founders of the organisation. “Harnessing the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change”is how it describes its work.

Branson explains:

“Why is an entrepreneurial approach needed? Entrepreneurs play a unique role in tackling environmental problems head on because we spot possibilities where others only see obstacles. We convened the Carbon War Room to deliver sustainable market models to increase the effectiveness of climate change efforts underway.”

Businesses active in the sustainable energy world are represented on the Board. The CEO is Jigar Shah (pictured), the founder of SunEdison, a large solar energy company which now has more solar energy systems and megawatts under management than any other company. Among his credentials is the fact that he sits on the boards of the Prometheus Institute and Greenpeace USA.

Seven theatres of war are identified – electricity, transport, the built environment, industry, land use, emerging economies, carbon management. There are battles to be fought in each theatre. Several are under way, but for this post I’ll concentrate on Operation Rock the Boat, focused on shipping in the transport theatre.

The shipping fleet, which carries over 85% of all cargo worldwide, emits more than one billion tons of CO2e, making it the world’s sixth largest emitter when compared to countries.  It doesn’t need to produce this level of emissions: existing technology presents an opportunity for up to 75% efficiency gains, with many required investments repaid in less than three years. Improvements can be focused on relatively few vessels to make a difference, since only 15% of the fleet accounts for 50% of emissions.

Carbon War Room (CWR) has identified two key leverage points. The first is that there is at present no ubiquitous standard by which a ship’s environmental impact can be understood.  A platform for accountability is needed.  Second, there is a principal agent problem, analogous to the landlord who lacks incentive to retrofit if the tenant pays the energy bill. The companies that build and retrofit ships do not receive sufficient economic benefit from environmental impact improvements – the consequent savings go to the clients.

CWR’s objective is to play a key support role in putting the shipping industry on the pathway to inevitable transformation within five years. This will in part be triggered by mandatory efficiency labeling in place by 2011 in some regions. A transformed fleet could cut emissions by over half a billion tons annually by 2020, on a path for reductions of over one billion tons by 2050. The transformation will self-finance because of decreased operating expenses.

Here’s the strategy:

“We are building a strong coalition of shippers and their clients, port authorities, financiers, technology providers, NGOs, and industry experts.”

There are five critical components in their approach.

  1. A rating system to create a benchmark efficiency that influences key stakeholder decisions.
  2. Early adopters. Using leaders to send a clear signal to industry that innovative businesses will embrace the new standards.
  3. Unlocking legal barriers. Charter party agreements and shipyard contracts are dated and do not reflect the lifespan efficiency economics of a vessel.
  4. Policy innovation.  Accelerate adoption and enforcement of new regulations on shipping efficiency reporting.
  5. Science. Improve understanding of the link between black carbon from shipping and Arctic ice cap melt and support research of alternative technologies.

I was impressed by the operational planning. All success to them in their coalition building

[youtube]4y42daL0kmQ[/youtube]

In this short Youtube clip Jigar Shah, after talking about Earth Day, explains more of the thinking behind the Carbon War Room. I particularly appreciated his affirmation that a low-carbon future is not inimical to our economies. I’ve transcribed a few sentences:

“There are many people who still believe that the solutions that we’re pursuing through entrepreneurs are going to hurt our economic growth. And I think that’s simply not true. I think with the innovation we’ve seen over the past ten years and before, that we actually have the technologies today to switch to a low-carbon future while still pursuing all of the economic growth that we expect and deserve [need?] to bring the billions of people round the world out of poverty”.