Chella Rajan’s Recent Comments

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  Not Just Florida...

  For more than a decade, Robert Nicholls and others have been talking about the serious challenge of forced displacement associated with sea-level rise, and they didn't even have to go as high as 16 feet to make dire predictions for small island nations and deltaic regions around the world.

  The elephant in the room is how to address the problem of climate exiles (those forcibly displaced from nation-states that will become unviable). The Refugee Convention of 1951 doesn't give them the legal status of "refugees" so the world will have to come up with some new mechanism to give these stateless people a name, to begin with, and then homes.

  Sujatha Byravan and I have been writing on this topic for some time now -- a few of our recent papers can be found here:

  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=7 ...On West Antarctic ice-sheet collapse means more catastrophe for U.S. coasts posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 5 Responses

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  What, no lifestyle wedge?

  One of the basic flaws of the Pacala and Socolow framework is that they rely entirely on technology to get down to 550ppm. Romm seems to repeat this mistake in his argument.

  Yes, technology is going to have to play a huge role in reducing GHGs, but consider this: Americans emit at the rate of about 20 tons of CO2 per person while the average European has a carbon footprint that is about half as large. Technological and land-use differences play a small role in this difference; much more has to do with attitudes and life-style differences.

  I also won't waste my breath rebutting all the lame excuses people make for the large difference -- suffice it to say that a 20% reduction in personal footprint is possible today with simple lifestyle changes; in 10 years, with the help of enlightened tax policies and other governmental incentives, we could end up living in much smaller and more efficient houses, drive less, and become  more socially responsible consumers in general, all of which could add to the lifestyle wedge for this country alone.

  Globally, the lifestyle wedge would mean different things in different parts of the world. Business people, for instance, would need to reduce their flying drastically and in countries like India and China, the wealthy would need to shift their attitudes away from conventional American aspirations with Texas-size appetites.

  Simply saying that making lifestyle changes happen is too difficult won't do either. If it is going to take the next generation to make the change, then it's the kids now in primary school who need to be given the right messages about the enormous footprint they're already creating (see, for instance, http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=4618854&page=1). Working with policymakers and technologists will have to be complemented with changes in our education system. That should be a win-win strategy in any case.

  The alternative is indeed almost too dire to imagine (see, for instance, http://www.greenpeace.org/india/blue-alert-report)On The 14 wedges needed to stabilize emissions posted 1 year, 7 months ago 28 Responses

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  Technology + social change

  We can't do everything with technology alone. We need land-use changes and behaviorial shifts as well. But broad changes in policy and behavior will in turn occur only if sufficient numbers of individuals and groups reorient their cultural frame to think about their consumption and technology choices within the context of sustainable futures.

  In a paper on this topic published in Energy Policy (http://ssrn.com/abstract=956145), I wrote :
  "A major shift in outlook and practices of mobility need be neither utopian nor the result of some dark ideological program of persuasion; rather, it is highly probable that increased understanding of the imminent sustainability crisis alone will spawn new forms of collective reasoning to make personal adjustments seem obvious and necessary. Moreover, such change would  likely come into view within the social imagination as an expression of new conceptions of success, well being, and the ``good life'' rather than as a denial in the quantity or quality of goods and services consumed. In short, it is timely to begin considering behavioral concerns as well as technology, largely because doing so
  may actually help overcome some of the institutional and political barriers that currently seem intractable."On Transit investment should and will be a part of the peak oil solution posted 1 year, 7 months ago 39 Responses