Down and Out in Durban
A massive scientific effort has determined that the human enterprise can afford to emit a further 565 billion tonnes of carbon (GtC) into the atmosphere if we want an 80% chance of keeping the world below 2 degrees C of warming, a threshold we already know will deliver its own significant challenges. Beyond this carbon ‘ration’ we must achieve a zero carbon infrastructure, which is a very big deal, and a project we should start on while the energy available can fuel the transition. Right now we emit close to 10 GtC/yr, and the amount is increasing each year. This mostly comes from the energy that drives growth—the hydrocarbons, coal, oil and gas. Electricity and transportation are the largest contributing sectors, and since most ground transportation could be electrically driven the pre-eminent challenge is to generate electricity from clean sources. We need to use the remaining hydrocarbon budget to manufacture the technologies of wind, wave, geothermal and solar energy transformation. Some argue nuclear too will be essential for baseload power.
Durban has been damnably disappointing. Something like being re-incarnated into a previously unsuccessful and frustrating life. It’s pre-1993 again. Before the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change laid out the challenge, before the 1997 Kyoto Accord acknowledged, in a binding treaty, the historical contribution of carbon by the industrialized west and allowed that the big consumers would be first to work on efficiencies and cut back their emissions. Meanwhile the developing countries would necessarily be increasing their emissions as they converged in technology and living standards. After 2012 everyone would have to agree to emission targets if climate change was to be contained.
Kyoto was sensible, fair, rational. But jealousy and greed soon erupted. The west found it too hard to lead, too hard to find the way to a less energy intensive but still growing economy. So they moaned about the others not having targets and with few exceptions did not meet their own targets. China and India moved as expected along the development path, and learned to depend on it – seeing a powerful future as the blessing of rapid growth raced them through the industrial transition. They want no legal obligations to curb this option – one they feel justifiably deserving of. They negotiated in Durban until they got just this – maintenance of the ‘principle of differentiated responsibilities’ – with no new legal limit of carbon emissions until after 2020. This will probably be too late to avoid a 3-4 degree C average temperature rise—a disaster for humanity and a major rearrangement of the biosphere as extinctions increase when species are pushed to adapt. A high price indeed.
But nobody’s avarice could transcend Canada’s. The Prime Minister, having spent years intoning the tar sand mantrum—“bigger than Saudi; stronger than Chavez; home mighty dollar come”, was not about to let a mere international treaty disturb his vision. Canada withdraws, in an unprecedented commitment to climate failure. Canada is precisely 180 degrees out of alignment with what needs to happen. Already among the world’s top 5 per capita consumers we now want to be a top provider, and damn the consequences. This kind of betrayal is hard to take. Given the climate science there are only three ordinary responses possible; act accordingly, refuse to acknowledge, or contest the science. Some extraordinary thinkers imagine the consequences of business as usual, namely a vastly warmer Earth, as humanity’s Armageddon through which the blessed will arise and the damned will fry. We should all pray this kind of thinking has not pervaded the Cabinet Room. Right now I’m not so sure.
