3E Intelligence

The following article is a long guest post by Eberhard Rhein, Senior Analyst at the European Policy Centre. Eberhard looks at the challenges for the EU in the area of international cooperation on climate change. I will publish my own reaction to Eberhard’s interesting contribution tomorrow.

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1. By 2020 the EU will account for only 10 percent of global greenhouse emissions. Whatever efforts it may undertake internally to reduce emissions, their impact on the global climate will be next to negligible.

2. It is naïve to believe that the EU may have an exemplary function for the rest of the world when it comes to concrete policy actions. The EU approach is too complex for the vast majority of countries, few of which have the political, legal and above all administrative means to adopt the EU toolbox.

3. Of course, it is politically essential for the EU to play a leading role in international climate policy. Without its drive the Kyoto Protocol would never have seen the day. But the Kyoto Protocol also shows the limits of EU action: its reductions of C02 emissions have been more than compensated by the ultra-rapid rise of emissions from emerging countries, in particular China, which did not have to take any commitments under Kyoto.

4. It is therefore vital for the EU to pursue a dual-track strategy:

· Approve its domestic framework for climate action, for which the corner stones have been laid out in March 2007 and January 2008.

· Prepare the outline of an effective global climate strategy.

The Commission should urgently form a task force for the second mission. It is strategically by far the more important one, on which the EU clearly needs much further thought. Of course, it is not up to the EU to play the saviour of humanity, but without a crystal-clear concept of where humanity should go in the coming 10-20 years, the EU runs the risk of ending in the maelstrom of UN bureaucracy and powerful forces trying to thwart necessary global action.

It is with a strategic global concept in mind that the EU should intensify its consultations with the major players during 2008 and 2009, even before the details of its own policy will be formally agreed in early 2009.

5. Time is terribly short for concluding the Bali talks. We are only 19 months away from early December 2009, when the international community is supposed to approve the main elements of the global climate policy for 2013-2020 and beyond.

Past experience in the EU and UN underscores the extreme difficulty of arriving at effective solutions without careful preparation among the main players. There is no hope for an effective outcome on global policy without the EU, US, China, Russia and Japan having reached a prior consensus on the main elements of a comprehensive solution.

6. So far, the substantive issues of the future global climate deal have hardly been discussed. The Bali Road map and action plan are nothing but a procedural note, in typical UN style.

There is no serious comprehensive issue paper on the table; everybody seems afraid of openly addressing the issues and their optimal solutions. The world can hardly wait until a few weeks before Copenhagen to address them.

7. The annex (hereunder) sets out a few unconventional ideas of how to arrive at a successful conclusion in Copenhagen. They have no other purpose but to stimulate thinking on alternative paths.

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A five –point global climate strategy 2013-30

It will be next to impossible to agree on binding C02 emissions targets for the major emitter countries.

There is no point either losing much time on global climate targets for 2050, however useful they may be as political objectives.

In order to make practical advances the international community has to focus on concrete measures that can produce rapid and verifiable results.

To that end the international community should concentrate its efforts on the main sources of emissions and agree on five-point programme concerning:

• Power generation
• Automobile transport
• Deforestation
• Fossil subsidies
• Gasoline/fuel taxes

1. Phase out C02 emissions from electricity generation by 2030

The main emitter countries should commit themselves to phasing out C02 emissions from power generation by 2030.

They should negotiate an appropriate protocol, which would become an integral part of the Legal Acts of the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

Participating countries would have to require new power plants to respect zero C02 emissions, say as of 2012, and set deadlines for retrofitting existing ones, latest by 2030.

It is possible to achieve C02-emission free power generation with presently available technologies, though at higher electricity rates than a present. Assuming electricity rates to rise by another 100 percent during the next 20 years, because of rising oil, gas and coal prices, the investments should still pay off.

Participants should be free to choose the most appropriate technologies and policy tools for phasing out their C02 emissions: hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, nuclear, carbon sequestration, waves or tides.

Emerging countries like China and India with huge capacities of coal-fired power plants might obtain an extension until 2035 for phasing out.

The impact of such a deal would be huge, essentially through anticipation.

• Power producers will have to revise their long-term planning;
• Research activity will get a big boost, everybody groping for the most efficient ways to generate C02-free power;
• Rising power prices will induce an investment wave into more energy-efficient appliances, machinery, cooling and heating equipment;
• The automobile industry will accelerate the development of electric engines that are bound to replace the combustion engine. This will pave the way to a “green” global automobile park.

Compliance will be easy to monitor.

Financing should not be a problem. There is plenty of international capital around to invest in cross-border power ventures.

The approach does not raise the issue of international competitiveness.

Electricity is not traded internationally, and all major power companies, being subject to identical constraints, will easily be able to pass their rising power costs on to manufacturing industries, services and households.

Higher power prices are not an argument for emerging countries to refuse participation in such an agreement. Power accounts only for a small percentage of manufacturing costs and everybody will gain from the higher energy- efficiency resulting from of higher power rates.

2. Set Stricter global fuel – efficiency standards for 2025

For the automobile industry a similar approach is conceivable.

The major countries with a sizeable automobile industry should undertake a concerted effort to adopt increasingly stricter C02 emission/fuel-efficiency standards.

All major producer countries are involved in such an effort. Some like the USA and China have passed appropriate legislation. What is required is to make these standards progressively more stringent. Thus the recent US legislation provides for mild standards compared to current EU proposals, and which would only be applicable as of 2018 (EU 2012).

The participating countries should negotiate a binding protocol that sets ambitious standards at the horizon of 2025, say of 80 g C02 emission/km, in view of providing the industry with energy - efficiency objective that would guide its R&D efforts.

The impact of fuel efficiency standards is bound to be slow, as it only affects new cars. It will take at least 10 years before new standards will become universally applicable.

That is why long term guidance to the industry is necessary. Companies need a long adjustment time.

Such a Protocol should also become an integral part of the Legal Acts of the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

3. Stop Deforestation by 2012

Deforestation of tropical forests accounts for about 25 percent of C02 emissions. It is therefore essential to stop deforestation at the earliest date possible.

In the past, national efforts to contain illegal logging and clearing of forest areas have failed for a series of reasons: lack of monitoring and effective policing, corruption, and criminal forest fires etc.

It is therefore essential to tackle the causes for deforestation and provide strong incentives to abstain from additional clearing of tropical forest areas.

To that end the international community should envisage the following measures, which should form part of a binding protocol to be negotiated between the interested parties:

• The main tropical forest countries – Brazil, Indonesia, Congo etc. – should commit themselves to put a ban on clearing of forest areas;
• The international community should fight illegal trade with tropical timber, as it has successfully done with ivory;
• The international community should compensate tropical forest countries for their preservation efforts. Compensation should be calculated in terms of “saved C02 emissions”. Depending on the future market prices of C02 emissions, the compensation is likely to run into several billion USD per year;
• The main importing countries – China, USA and EU - should suspend the import of all tropical timber, until the protocol will be fully effective.

This will be a hard nut to crack! The UN has tried to tackle it, but got lost in details and failed to establish the financial link with the “saved C02 emissions”.

It is essential to come up with courageous and effective measures.

4. Phase out consumer subsidies on fossil fuels by 2015

Subsidies on fossil fuels are still very common, especially in oil/gas producing countries. By keeping the domestic prices below world market prices governments encourage energy waste and boost C02 emissions. Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia have unduly high levels of per capita emissions, due to heavy consumer subsidies.

It is therefore urgent to put an end to this practice, which might account for up to 3 percent of global C02 emissions.

To that end, the UN should undertake the following actions:

• Establish a comprehensive list of all direct and indirect consumer subsidies of fossil energy;
• Estimate their impact on global C02 emissions;
• Propose a rapid time frame for phasing them out as part of the future climate policy framework;
• Negotiate an appropriate legal instrument with the countries concerned;Establish an effective monitoring mechanism.

5. Impose minimum excise taxes on fossil fuels

Per capita C02 emissions in the EU are less than half of those in the USA, essentially because the EU imposes high taxes on fossil fuels, in particular gasoline and diesel.

Excise taxes constitute an effective tool for fighting energy waste and high green house gas emissions. They should therefore be part of the Copenhagen agenda.

All countries should tax gasoline, diesel and kerosene by at least 25-30% of retail prices. In the EU the share of taxes is around 65%!

The EU should propose an international protocol –as part of the Copenhagen package – under which governments commit themselves to introduce appropriate legislation before 2015. The UN should monitor the implementation, publish an annual survey of these taxes and convene an annual meeting of “peer review”.

The inclusion of kerosene in this package would constitute a major contribution to reduction of C02 emissions by air traffic, without requiring the negotiation of a separate international protocol.

Conclusions

This 5-point climate action plan offers an optimal guarantee for a substantial reduction of global C02 emissions by 2030, say 40 percent compared to 2010, through its inclusion of the main emitter countries and its focus on the main sources of global C02 emissions.

It has the advantage of being easily to monitor.

Of course, this draft action plan will have to be fine-tuned to take into account objections from different corners.

OK, the Bali climate top decided on a roadmap for future negotiations, but without any direction (no 25-40% targets) and, what is more, without any real breakthrough in the mindset of most governments.

First of all, there is still no awareness that in the face of the global climate calamity, all the fighting over the role and responsibility of developed and developing countries is a waste of time, and time is the one thing we do not have. As long as national interests and the “God of unsustainable economic growth” continue to dominate governments, these international negotiations will never deliver. Yes, climate policies might slow down economic growth (and probably even more than the political and optimistic Stern report predicts) but we have no choice. We live on one planet Earth with more than 6 billion people and we better start acting (i.e. living, producing and consuming) accordingly. The problem is that we have no effective global governance structures

Secondly, in the next two years, another “long emergency” catastrophe is likely to take political centre-stage: the new energy scarcity caused by the voracious appetite of “today’s global economy, which has created a situation in which the world is not just getting hot, it’s getting raped” (Thomas Friedman: “It’s too late for later“, NY Times 16 Dec.). If the International Energy Agency keeps its promise in 2008, it will provide more transparency on the issue of oil, gas and coal reserves next year and that could be the next “Inconvenient Truth”. And, even if our global economy would go into a recession, the continued growth of the emerging economies will continue to put pressure on the energy demand-supply equation. This “second front” will make the war on climate change even more unwinnable.

So Bali will still not be the Pearl Harbor we needed to convince our governments that we are facing a new war, but this time a war with nature we can never win, not even with the best new technologies. George W. Bush once said about climate change: “The American way of life is not negotiable”. As long as we keep believing this, our war with nature will continue and we will be continuing our road to Armageddon. We will need to find peace with nature or perish; it is that simple.

As famous British historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote: “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder”

No, I have not become a climate disbeliever but as most readers of this blog will know I am very skeptical about the UN’s diplomatic climate circus. There are several structural reasons for this skepticism: the difficulties of negotiating and ratifying with over 180 countries, the absurd horse-trading (tit-for-tat compromises), the historical lessons learned from the flawed Kyoto Protocol, and last but not least, the carbon footprint of these mass events (15-20.000 people are expected in Bali).

There is also one more tactical reason that I have my doubts about this Bali meeting: the fact that it will be overshadowed by the stubbornness of the current US administration. There is no way the Bush negotiators will accept anything which would help the global climate debate go forward. And without full leadership of the US, there will be no serious change in the positions of China and India, two countries where the climate debate is completely overpowered by the need for more economic growth and energy supply security (to ensure that growth).

So if Bali will succeed in deciding on a roadmap, there is a chance that everyone will go home happy, spin a great success story to the media and then continue business as usual. On the other hand, a failure in Bali would send a strong signal to the big emitters that business as usual is no longer an option. I even believe a failure would be the wake-up call for a renewed impetus via the G8+5 process which could be much more effective once the new Democratic US President will be in power from beginning of 2009.

If such a new direction of climate diplomacy were to take place, I would also like to see that it starts looking at the other side of the ecological crisis: the future energy scarcity and its implications.

Further reading:

• Open Democracy: The accountability challenge for climate diplomacy
• Greenpeace: Guide to Kyoto, Bali, APEC, the G8 and Major Emitters meeting
• Los Angeles Times: Kyoto’s failure haunts new U.N. talks
• Reuters: Factbox: Main players at Bali climate talks
• Reuters: Chronology: from Live Earth to Bali.A  year of climate gatherings

There are three ways of looking at the new greenhouse emission figures presented by the UN’s climate change secretariat yesterday.

The pessimist will observe that the ”total greenhouse gas emissions of 40 industrialized countries rose to a near all-time high in 2005″ and that the trend since 2000 is going in the wrong direction, notwithstanding all political mitigation efforts of the Kyoto signatories.

The optimist will see the silver ligning in the fact that “the countries that signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol are projected to achieve reductions on the order of 11 per cent for the first Kyoto commitment period, from 2008 to 2012, provided policies and measures adopted by these countries deliver the reductions as projected. The Kyoto Protocol commits industrialized countries to a 5 per cent reduction target in 2008-2012 compared to 1990 levels”.

The realist (some would say the cynic) will, of course, see that it is only the historical collapse of the Eastern European economies which made Kyoto a small success.

So has Kyoto REALLY worked?

In view of the upcoming Bali climate summit, it would be good if there were a serious (and not a spin-) analysis of Kyoto’s successes and failures.

Further reading:

• UNFCCC secretariat: press release 20 November
• UNFCCC secretariat: presentations given at the Bonn press briefing
• AFP: Carbon pollution from industrialised countries rises again

Can one write something new about the latest synthesis report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Not really.

Not only is it just repeating what was in the three earlier reports this year (although maybe with a bit more political courage), but what it confirms is already known for years (although some still need convincing because they have so much to lose):

• that we have been playing Russian roulette with our planet’s atmosphere by over-exploiting within the last 150 years the abundant natural capital this planet has put at our (and other species’) disposal;
• that Gaia is now starting ”its revenge” (Lovelock);
• that the scientific community (because of its inherent conservatism) is still underestimating the speed and effects of global warming;
• that our Western way of life is not transposable to the whole world, meaning either we can learn to live with less so that others can have more, or we cynically prevent others (by force?) from reaching our levels of material abundance;
• that national interests and shortsightedness are the biggest barrier to the kind of unseen international cooperation that would be needed to tackle this global crisis;
• that the political elites are still chained by their myopic (and nearly religious) belief in an unsustainable economic growth model;
• that the business elites are slowly waking up to the dangers of this climate chaos, but are reluctant to shoulder the burden alone and that less enlightened economic players just close their eyes and whistle in the dark, in the hope that it was all just a bad dream;
• that consumers in the developed world still believe the age of abundance with an ever-growing material cake is never going to end;
• that citizens in the new emerging superpowers are being seduced by the pied piper of Western consumption.

So, when we look back 100 years from now to the four different IPCC reports published this year, how will history evaluate them? Or better still: will history remember them at all?

Further reading:

• IPCC: Summary for Policy Makers - draft 16 November 2007
• Climate Progress: Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly
• The Times: UN unveils full danger of climate change

• The UK government introduced the world’s first climate change bill into the House of Lords on 14 November. The bill aims at reducing the country’s geenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 32% by 2020 and by at least 60% by 2050. The bill proposes a system of five-year carbon budgets and sets up a  Committee on Climate Change, which will provide regular independent progress reports to track whether the Government will be able to meet its targets. DEFRA, the UK’s environment ministry, has a website with more background information including an impact assessment. The future progress of the bill can be monitored via the Parliament’s site. PeoplePlanet.net has an excellent summary of the bill and first reactions.
• International science magazine Nature has a three great articles on the upcoming Bali summit and the changing policy mood on the issue in the US. In an editorial (”The heat is on“), Nature explains the challenges and chances of the Bali meeting. In another article (”Climate politics: The first cut“), Nature interrogates five experts on the different climate proposals introduced in the US Congress. And last but not least, the magazine makes some very interesting observations on the possibilities and difficulties for a new US climate policy after the Bush era in an article called “Climate politics: Beyond Bush“.