Climate Equity Reference Project
Here’s a nice little quote (from May Boeve at www.350.org) from Tom Athanasiou’s Cancun Setup: One year after Copenhagen, and counting. We cite it just because we like 350.org so much, and because they find our work to be useful. See also this nice notice by Bill McKibben in Foreign Policy magazine — sometimes its good to be “relentless.”
Just before Cancun, FORES, a Swedish research institute that appears to have a significant footprint, published the second edition of a proposal which they called A Bretton Woods for the Climate. It’s book length, and interesting in a number of ways, not the least of which is the uses to which it puts the Greenhouse Development Rights approach. More generally, it deserves real respect for the depth of its commitment to both ethics and realism, and for its intellectual seriousness. This being the second edition, the authors invited comments, and received two. The first is from Harvard’s Robert N. Stavins and the second is from us, the GDRs authors group. Our comment begins on page 191.
It’s good to see this paper, by Jing Cao of Tsinghua University in China, being published by the The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements. Jing Cao has been working on Chinese variants of GDRs for some time now (see Greenhouse Development Rights with Chinese Characteristics) and with this post-Copenhagen work she explicitly argues that the GDRs approach is a valuable guide to the future. Her abstract:
“Time to respond to the severe threat posed by global climate change is running short. Though the most recent international climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) achieved some consensus in the form of the Copenhagen Accord, they failed to produce an adequate and legally binding action plan for achieving long-term reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Looking beyond Copenhagen, this paper proposes a new architecture for international climate policy going forward. It highlights a top-down, burden-sharing rule that is designed to produce a fair distribution of burdens across countries while also (a) giving priority to economic development and concerns about wealth inequality and (b) achieving emission reductions consistent with holding the expected increase in global average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius. In addition, this paper discusses several key design elements that will be important, especially from the perspective of developing countries, to the success of future international climate negotiations. These design elements include agreements on burden sharing, choice of policy instruments, financial mechanisms and technology transfer, penalties for noncompliance, and linkages between trade and climate change. “
This report — Not Just a Number: Achieving a CO2 Concentration of 350 ppm or Less To Avoid Catastrophic Climate Impacts — was released by 350.org and the Center on Biological Diversity during the run-up to the Cancun conference in late 2010. It was widely circulated, particularly to delegates, at the Tianjin meeting in October, as a backgrounder for the discussion of the long term goal.
Not Just a Number is a nice, and very accessible review of the scientific evidence in support of a long-term global goal of 350 ppm. And it quite underscores the need for a renewed sense of urgency in the negotiations. Greenhouse Development Rights thus finds an appropriate place here, as an effort-sharing framework appropriate to an urgent response. If we ever get around to one.
We were very pleased to see this book — Climate Justice: Ethics, Energy, and Public Policy — and to review its detailed, even comprehensive, and very sympathetic treatment of GDRs.
Climate Justice is interesting in both conception and execution. The problem of climate stabilization is, after all, one that cannot be solved in the terms of normal life and normal morality. Thus, the interest (and spirit) that — to use the ugly, American term, “the faith community” — is bringing to the party is very important indeed. Which is where this book comes in. Not a collection of essays but an extended essay in its own right, this book really (I’m not just saying this) is an excellent introduction to the impossible problem that we cannot, but must solve.
By the way, we willingly note that Jim Martin-Schramm, the professor of theology that wrote Climate Justice, faults GDRs on one matter: practicability. He is of course right to do so. But then again, the problem here is not exclusive to GDRs. Fact is, there is not yet the political space for any really serious response to the climate emergency.
