We have it backwards – Managing Symptoms versus Investing in Cures

I’ve returned from Copenhagen, had some time to reflect on what transpired, how it has affected my thinking and begun to draw some conclusions about what’s next. All this will be fodder for a series of 12 essays that will take us from today to the end of the year and serve as the basis of discussion of what now lies beyond Copenhagen.

On the First Day After Copenhagen

On the first day after Copenhagen, a conclusion came to me…

We are going about this climate change thing all wrong for three reasons. First, as was predicted by many before the UN’s summit in Copenhagen, no one party will want to concede more than other parties, therefore any negotiated agreement will be minimal and certainly not the at the level the scientists suggest are necessary to avoid global warming and dramatic climate change. Second, the UN process will just take too long. We have been working on Kyoto since 1997, and it will take several more years to get a definite and binding agreement and the resulting timetables for implementation will be too long to achieve the goals set. More simply, it’s a case of too little too late. My third point is the UNFCC process and the Kyoto Protocol are attempting to manage, control and regulate the symptoms of the climate change rather than root cause of the problem itself. This approach is fraught with fundamental problems; from the collective process of setting equitable emission limits, to rules for measuring and monitoring of emissions, to validation and compliance.

The Copenhagen Accord is a step forward in the process but was ultimately developed outside the UN process by a small handful of nations and, as predicted, is much weaker than the treaty that has been in development for the past two years. Many are calling into question the UN’s process and its role in climate change moving forward. The U.N.'s own Yvo de Boer said in an interview with Reuters after the conference, "You could argue that it would be far more effective to just address climate change in the G20, whose members account for most carbon emissions… (But) it's not correct from an equity or from an environmental point of view because that would exclude many countries already on the front lines of impacts of climate change." Another suggestion, the Major Economies Forum might be the correct venue.

At the same time, there’s good news. We know technologies can advance and be deployed very rapidly with the right investments and consumer behavior can change just as rapidly with the right incentives. Case in point, in the last two years in the US coal use has dropped 11 percent while an estimated 190 new wind farms with over 16,000 megawatts of generating capacity have come online, all without legislative or institutional mandate. An argument in favor of directly investing in cures rather than managing the symptoms.

To this point, I draw the reader's attention to a recently published report from the Stockholm Environmental Institute:

"Analyses at the global level and in regions, both in poor and rich nations, clearly show that energy transformations towards a low-carbon future are technologically possible, even over the short term, and that they are socially desirable, and to a large extent economically profitable. Recent energy scenarios show that the EU can achieve 40 per cent emission reductions by 2020 with current technologies, and that India and China can bend their emission trajectories while increasing energy access and securing their economic and development goals over the coming decades."1

The clock is ticking. The environmental tipping point, the point of no return, lies somewhere ahead with the most recent scientific data suggesting it will occur sooner than we previously thought. For example, recent studies predict the polar ice cap could be gone in summertime as early as 2015 compared to previous model predictions of 2025. It might just be that if we get the economics right, a market driven strategy of investment and deployment of new technologies along with market interventions/incentives could trigger independent or small scale collective action that will turn the tide on carbon emissions and reverse global warming before the multilateral negotiation process completes the initial step of developing a definite and binding agreement that can be ratified for the 192 member nations.

1 A Copenhagen Prognosis: Towards a Safe Climate Future