and convergence
Aubrey Meyer of the London-based Global Commons Institute has proposed an international solution – ‘Contraction and Convergence’ (C&C). This proposal recognizes that the only realistic way to avoid global political stalemate is to accept the need for equity – that each person has an equal right to the use of the atmosphere. At the moment, the wide divergence in carbon footprints means that each American is using nearly twenty times as much atmospheric space as each Indian. By demanding that India makes cuts at the same time as the US, the American government is in effect proposing to cement this inequity – something the Indian government is understandably unwilling to sign up to.
C&C gets around this problem by putting in place a framework for ‘convergence’ to equity where, by a negotiable date (say, 2030), each country in the world will have an equal emissions entitlement based on its population. While all of our carbon footprints might not be the same by that date, our rights would be.
So people in rich countries who want to use more than their fair share would have to pay for the right to do so by buying unused allocations from people in poorer countries. The result would likely be a net transfer of wealth from rich to poor, which would help tackle global poverty at the same time as global warming. This wouldn’t be charity, but trade – something world leaders are more likely to sign up to.
Of course, convergence is only one half of the equation. The other would be ‘contraction’, where global emissions contract downwards towards a sustainable level that would avoid serious climate change damages.
So far, C&C has gained substantial support from the African group of nations, while in the UK it has been recommended by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Aubrey Meyer suggests that C&C could provide a stronger framework for climate change action once the Kyoto Protocol lapses in 2012.
Kyoto and international negotiations
In theory, the international community is already committed to solving climate change, and has been for more than a decade. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit by leaders from 150 nations, including the first President George Bush on behalf of the United States. In its Article Two, it said the following:
‘The ultimate objective of this Convention…is to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.’
Trouble was, no one defined ‘dangerous’. Moreover, the Convention was only voluntary, without specific measures to actually enforce its stated objective. Nothing much happened as a result, and greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise after the UNFCCC was signed. In order to address this, the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in Japan in 1997 to try to give the Convention some teeth. Industrialized countries agreed that they should take the first steps towards cutting emissions, since they were the highest percapita polluters. Different nations took on different CO2 reduction targets: the United States agreed to a cut of 7%, while the EU got a cut of 8%. Japan and Canada each took on 6%, while Australia negotiated itself an increase in emissions by claiming special status as a smaller country. In total, emissions from the industrialized world under Kyoto were supposed to fall by 5% by 2012.
Kyoto was finalized amid great celebrations in December 1997, and hailed as a triumph for global environmental protection. If it had worked, perhaps this book would not have needed to be written. Unfortunately things went somewhat downhill after all the delegates went home and the ink began to dry. First, no one did anything to cut emissions. Japanese, Canadian and US emissions continued to climb steeply, despite the countries’ Kyoto targets. European emissions were more stable, largely because of the happy accident of economic collapse in post-Communist Eastern Europe, which dramatically curtailed emissions from the old factories and power stations of the Soviet bloc.
Kyoto’s negotiating process continued at annual UN summits after 1997, but each successive meeting introduced new loopholes that served to weaken the treaty. Then in 2001, a further blow came when the second George Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto, arguing that it would be too much of a strain on his country’s economy (though many pointed at his administration’s close links with the oil industry as a deeper reason for the hostility to Kyoto). The US played a further negative role by undermining the negotiations at the UN climate summits, and by trying to organize an alliance of other Kyoto-hostile powers.
It took seven long years before the Kyoto Protocol even came into force. It finally became legally binding in February 2005 when Russia belatedly ratified the treaty. Even so, the US and Australia remain on the outside, and Canada has said that it will not be able to meet its emissions target. Within the EU, Ireland and Spain are also grossly over-budget, and may have to buy ‘emissions credits’ from more thrifty countries.
CARBON RATIONING
Many people see rationing as the only verifiable long-term way to get people to change their lifestyles. It’s the ultimate in carbon footprinting: rather than each individual having to work out their footprint using calculations like the ones later in this book, it would all be done automatically, perhaps with an electronic card. Each time you fill up the car, you would have to
Tip: It’s not all bad news on the US front. Following the lead of Seattle’s Mayor Greg Nickels, by September 2006, 295 city mayors, representing fifty million Americans, had pledged to implement the Kyoto agreement in their localities.
swipe your carbon ration card and surrender some units. You would also need enough carbon ration to cover your heating and other domestic needs.
The beauty of carbon rationing, according to its proponents, is that it would be government-enforced – making it much more likely to work than voluntary approaches. Because each person starts off the year with an equal ration, it would also be fair, just as everyone during the Second World War had an equal allocation of food and other necessities in order to jointly share in the war effort. One difference from wartime rations, however, is that carbon rations would be tradeable. This would introduce some flexibility – if you really have to have that power-boat, then you can buy an unused ration from someone who is happy to forgo such luxuries. The financial incentives would therefore reward those who kept their carbon emissions low, because they could sell their unused ration on the open market.
At the moment, things work the other way round – it is often cheaper to be energy-profligate. Budget
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