Tom Athanasiou’s Posts

• climate check please!

  "The Bill" 0

  Posted 3 months, 1 week ago

  Best short film about climate justice ever -- even if it is in German.  (It's got subtitles.)

• The blame game gets ready for prime time

  Bonn was disappointing, and Copenhagen will be too. Who to blame? 2

  Posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago

  The latest round of climate talks was a big disappointment, and Copenhagen will almost certainly be another. If it is, who will get blamed?

• The greening of the global south

  Drawing actual conclusions about the international challenge 11

  Posted 1 year, 8 months ago

  Here's something novel: a well-informed and honest article from a significant British magazine (Prospect) that looks hard at the core political challenges of global climate stabilization and then draws some conclusions. And it's written by Simon Retallack, who knows his way around both the climate policy debate and the climate movement.

• Climate Code Red

  The case for a sustainability emergency 18

  Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

  The pressure to soft-pedal is very, very high. I know because I feel it. I'm tempted. I do not wish to be dismissed as an apocalyptic. So when I read, in this fine and even astonishing report, that "politics as usual" must be cast aside, and quickly, there's something in me that balks.

  After all, the mainline debate at Bali was about a "25-40% cut by 2020" for the developed countries. Isn't this enough? Doesn't it tell us that we're already moving as quickly as we can? Must we call for emergency mobilization? Must we seek to put all… Read More

• Where do we go from here?

  The Bali meeting, and the lessons learned 11

  Posted 1 year, 10 months ago

  It's important, this time, to draw conclusions, and to do so publicly. Because Bali has taken us -- barely and painfully -- over a line and into a new and even more difficult level in the climate game we'll be playing for the rest of our lives. In fact, it's not too much to say that, with the realizations of the last year and their culmination at the 13th Conference of Parties, the game has, finally, belatedly, begun in earnest.

  First up, we knew going into Bali that if the old routine continued without variation, we'd really… Read More

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Tom Athanasiou’s Recent Comments

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  The Schellnhuber paper is indeed interesting. And his recent talks have been bracing. But a few points of clarification on the per cap side are in order. First of all, and most importantly, the WGBU is *not* Contraction and Convergence, as Bill Hook has implied above, The "budget approach," which it represents, is based on *cumulative* per-cap emissions. Thus, the WGBU proposal is more akin to the "carbon debt" approach which has gained so much traction in the negotiations this past year than it is with C&C. See for example http://www.ecoequity.org/2009/07/the-remaining-emissions-budget/. Notably, though, WGBU seeks equality in the 2010 to 2050 emissions window, which is pretty outrageous from a historical perspective. That is to say, all emissions prior to 2010 are written off. It's really a sign of his desperation that he advocates such a late start date. Oh Shit indeed. Cheers, tomaOn A scary new climate study will have you saying 'Oh, shit!' posted 3 weeks, 3 days ago 16 Responses

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  Steve;

  Great post.  I want to particularly commend you for your explanation of why cutting consumption subsides -- which generally serve to improve that access of the poor to energy services -- is "not the place to start." 

  I also want to support your caution against getting this wrong, in terms of taking something that should be brilliant -- the elimination of fossil subsides -- and turning it into a device for pressuring the South in the Copenhagen negotiations.

  "a negotiating tactic designed to show that the developing world has plenty of funds available to adapt to climate change and invest in clean energy, if only they would stop making energy affordable for their populations"

  Personally, I'm living in hope, and betting that things don't get that bad.  I mean, damn, would that be stupid!

  
  -- toma

   

  On Obama to propose ending fossil fuel subsidies in Pittsburgh? posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago 3 Responses

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  Nice piece Dave;

  You're absolutely right that the Obama team is playing a many sided game. And that if we're lucky it will turn out well. 

  It goes without saying, or should, that other nations are also playing many-sided games.  There are bilaterals happening on all sides, and there's the G8, and the G5, and the G20, and the UN general assembly later this year, and the MEF process, and all the rest of it.

  All this dialogs and multilogs make a difference.  But it should also be stressed, and stressed again, that having lots of ways of talking about the problem, however helpful it may be, doesn't change the structure of the problem. 

  And the fundamental point, in this regard, is that we are late, late, late.  The current marker for the current science is the Meinhausen et. al. paper -- Greenhouse-gas emissions targets for limiting global warming to 2C -- that was published in Nature back in April.  It tells us, among other things, that to have a 75% chance of holding the 2C target (the one that the US just begrudingly accepted) total global GHG emissions in the period 2000 to 2050 must be held to 1000 Gigatons of C02 equvalent.  And we've already released about 300 of those.

  Not to start throwing numbers around, but this is going to be very, very hard.  And this in turn puts the developing countries in a very bad situation.  Because, while we all know that the future is unwritten, and the world is changing, and all the rest of that good stuff, the fact is that, at this point, even a modest version of the good life means increased access to energy services for lots and lots of people, and given the technics that we've been left with, this means increased GHG emissions as well.

  What does this mean?  Only that, as Alden Meyer just noted in the pages of the Times, in an aticle called Poorer Nations Reject a Target on Emissions Cut, "They're saying, 'We just don't trust you guys.'"  And that everything depends on recognizing that words alone -- no matter what venues they're spoken -- are not going to change this.

  The key is going to be finance and technology.  Lots of it.  As in a "finance and technology support package for mitigation and adaptaion in the developing world."  And then using this package to build not just momentum but trust as well.  The extra meetings don't hurt, but they're not going to accomplish anything alone. 

  Not that this is anything you disagree with.  But somehow you managed to write a nice piece about the talks, the many talks, without mentioning the elephant in the room.

  Wherever that room is, and however many people or however few people are in it, it's the same elephant.

   

   

  On What is Obama's international climate strategy? posted 4 months ago 9 Responses

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  All very interest, but ...

  Tom A here.  

  Thanks for all the attention, Gar, and I feel that I should weigh in, but this innovation debate is getting a bit specialized for me.

  Let me just make two points.

  First, as I said in response to your last posting, we see a role for trading, but
  

  
  We do not dismiss fund based system, or taxes.   Indeed we think they're going to be essential, and that the most viable mix of financial institutions will almost certainly include both, as well as taxes, regulation in great heaping gobs, mandated civil-society participation, and much else.  
  

  Second, I do want to say that there are lots of reasons to oppose trading that have quite vanished from this conversation.  One of them is that trading is typically (but not necessarily) something that happens between private actors.  Which is, of course, code for "corporations."  And particularly with regard to activities that involve weak local communities -- eg forest communities -- this can be a very bad idea.

  Anyway, there's a lot going on here, and I don't really have much to add.  Except the belief that we have got to find a fair, efficient, institutionally and politically viable means of moving lots of money around the planet.  My sense is that there is not going to be one such solution, but rather a kind of mixed economy that involves cap and auction, trading, levies on trading, development funds, tech transfer deals, a layered system of regulations, carbon taxes and so on.  And my interest is in making sure the whole mess, taken together, is capable of supporting an emergency transition.

  So, sure, trading is a problem.  But we are running out of time folks.  And it's not the only problem.  

  As a friend of mine just said, "The politics of emergency are the politics of solidarity."  In that context, we can solve these problems.  At least that's what I choose to believe.

  -- toma

  Tom Athanasiou toma@ecoequity.org

  On Carbon offsetting is not the best way for the global north to subsidize the global south posted 1 year, 8 months ago 12 Responses

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  Not a bad summary, but...

  1. There are three authors.  The third is Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and he's a full equity partner.  So to speak.  

  2. We do argue that trading can be fixed, or rather we hope it can be.  But we're very clear that this can only happen under a global cap, and we're quite critical of trading as we know it today.  

  3. For example, we're as down on the CDM (or as we sometimes call it, "CDM first," because we believe the next version will be meaningfully different) as you are.  Oh, and by the way, since we don't think there is going to be a global cap in the absence of some sort of global, principle-based burden-sharing system, we're not too optimistic about "CDM next" either, not if it's all we get.

  4. We do not dismiss fund based system, or taxes.   Indeed we think they're going to be essential, and that the most viable mix of financial institutions will almost certainly include both, as well as taxes, regulation in great heaping gobs, mandated civil-society participation, and much else.  

  4. That said, we do use trading to illustrate points, so you can be forgiven your confusion.  But, seriously, we set out to be quite deliberately vague about financial mechanisms, though we're likely to get less vague in the future.  So when you say that "The argument, essentially is that while neither [ trading or funds ] has worked, carbon trading can be fixed while aid can't" you're talking Simon, not us.  

  5. To be sure, I commended Simon for his bravery in making this argument.  He deserves it.

  Finally, and on a different line, you left out a key part of the argument.  We claim that national obligations to pay, obligation that we calculate on the basis of responsibility and capacity, are not merely obligations to pay for mitigation, but obligations to pay for adaptation as well.  This is important for lots of reasons, not least of which is that, properly defined, adaptation costs may well be higher than mitigation costs.

  Cheers, toma
  

  Tom Athanasiou toma@ecoequity.org

  On A brief summary of Tom & Paul's approach to international climate justice posted 1 year, 8 months ago 1 Response