Overview and vote: Contraction and Convergence

[simpolukadmin]

Title: Contraction and Convergence

Proposer: John Bunzl

Summary: A policy requiring nations to equitably effect, over a defined period of time, a global CONTRACTION of greenhouse gas emissions to within sustainable levels, as well as an equitable CONVERGENCE of permitted emissions levels between nations. While widely acknowledged as an appropriate policy to tackle global warming, C&C is likely to require the international political framework offered by Simpol if it is ever to be implemented. Contraction & Convergence is promoted by the Global Commons Institute http://www.gci.org.uk/. Full information can be found on their website.

Results in annual vote by SP Adopters:

2008
A: 78%
B: 8%
C: 10%
D: 4%

2007
A: 80%
B: 3%
C: 13%
D: 4%

[dave hampton]

There is this amazingly elegant and equitable (and vitally urgently needed) global CO2 reduction FRAMEWORK, that a musician and a couple of guys came up with, more than 15 years ago now. They have been promoting it hard ever since - against the strong commercial/political tide - and unaided by a skeptical media... (if you hear it being ?dissed? don?t be put off, make up your own mind)... it's exactly what the world needs... and tens of millions are now demanding it

It's called C&C - Contraction and Convergence - as proposed by Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Institute www.gci.org.uk/briefings/ICE.pdf
See www.gci.org.uk and information also at www.climatejustice.org.uk

It's a big and beautiful PLAN with a catchy steady beat. It's kinda self-evident, once you've 'got it'!

And it's the only plan ambitious enough (the cheek of it) to solve the climate problem faster than we create it! (yes, that means it is the only one that has a chance of working)

But despite politics and the media generally not wanting us to know how good C&C tastes, PEOPLE ARE FINDING OUT FOR THEMSELVES! 

SO PLEASE SUPPORT IT VIA SIMPOL

[precycled]

C&C is a compelling policy; GHG emissions do need to contract and it would be fair to provide for convergence between and within nations, so that some people do not shiver and starve so that others can pursue decadence. However the approach is obviously meeting political resistance and would benefit from reflection on how to make it work and work fast!

If we follow our intuition (and the "catchy steady beat") rather than our intellect we could easily end up perpetuating the climate problem instead of solving it. There is an instinctive temptation to address the market failure that causes climate change by setting limits for carbon. Emissions do need to be drastically cut and this is an obvious way to do it. Less obvious is how the same market failure is responsible for all aspects of unsustainability. A global deal to set mandatory limits on emissions would be a way to tell markets they have failed with carbon but to let them off with everything else. Carbon-limited capitalism is not equivalent to sustainable capitalism.  Whilst some problems may get better, others would get worse - notably conflict, destruction of nature and nuclear waste. Conceivably the minuses could outweigh the pluses and leave global society and its economy less able to handle anything, including the climate.

Sustainable economic reform has been kicking around as theory for more than 35 years so people could be forgiven for thinking that it can't be done. Governments haven't exactly been sweating to work hard on this and most of the academic research just tells us more about what won't work. More optimistically, the multitude of problems of unsustainability are now so blindingly obvious that only the most hardened deniers can continue to look the other way. And new research, including mine at http://www.blindspot.org.uk , offers new hope for solutions on the scale of all the problems  - not just emissions. This means that climate change need not be seen as a climate-only problem with emissions-only solutions. Climate change can be seen as a historical opportunity to raise political momentum for a serious attempt at a genuinely sustainable economics. Fix the economics and you get an increasingly sustainable society with an increasingly stable climate.

How would this work? Given that the necessary scale and speed of response is so massive, beyond what most people can even imagine, we need mechanisms of change which are sufficiently powerful. The carbon capping version of C&C would be as powerful as the political process for agreeing caps plus the carbon-markets and top-down regulation that would follow, assuming political success. The capping mechanism would fight against the forces of unsustainable economics which would still fail to account for most 'externalities' (damage).  The economic reform version of C&C would harness the full power of local and global markets with politicians only needing to agree targets rather than caps. These targets would set the 'accelerator' of contraction and the investment flows of convergence.

Given that there is no time to waste, how could a broad sustainable economic reform outpace a narrow climate-only reform? Intuitively it may seem that the smaller problems should be faster to solve.  Political resistance to capping in many countries underpins international emissions reduction agreements, which has been entirely ineffective over the past 15 years. Removing the obstacle of capping could allow agreements to surge ahead. The underlying cause of political resistance to capping is also fixed, since economic growth could proceed in a sustainably-functioning economy. Investment in solving problems is more productive than investment which causes problems. The message to the economy would be to do more, not less. More investment, more paid work, more innovation and more effort based on market signals supporting people's innate desire to do something worthwhile. A capping and rationing version of C&C might appear as a 'do less' message, affecting the human spirit differently - "How can we avoid this constraint?, How can we bend or break these rules?

Climate science is revealing, predictably, that things are worse than predicted. Acceptable risks to humanity now take us out out of the realms of what is easily imagined. Perhaps we need to be thinking about how to run society with the reverse of the usual expectations. What would it take to reverse the progressive loss of nature, to have nations compete to reduce arms spending, to actively lower existing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations over time? These things are not conceivable with either economics-as-usual or carbon-capped economics but they can be discussed as outcomes of a sustainable economic reform version of C&C.

[mikebrady]

Contraction and Convergence has my support. As part of the discussion on its development with the SP policy development process or to prompt an additional climate change proposal I am interested to know how polluters should pay for their excess greenhouse gas production.

What is interesting me in particular at the moment is the need to save the Amazon rain forest. As Aubrey Meyer explained in his talk at the UK Parliament, which is available to listen to on the Simpol website, the rain forest, which presently absorbs a great deal of carbon dioxide, could become a source of carbon dioxide. If it shrinks further due to human intervention and continues to dry out as a result of climate changes forest fires may become commonplace, so releasing stored carbon. Aubrey suggested forest fires are now being seen for the first time in the Amazon.

I have read detailed analysis of the difficulties facing the Brazilian government in controlling exploitation of the Amazon. In part there is a lack of resources for enforcement of legislation that has been introduced to protect the forest. However, perhaps of more significance is the economic realities facing both the government and individuals which has led to farmers increasingly encroaching on the area and cutting trees to sell and to clear farm land. An analysis by a Brazilian news weekly suggests it is 3 times as expensive for farmers to rejuvinate farmed land for continued use than to cut a new area for farming.

Now, it seems to me that an effective way to recruit the population into preserving the forest is to make it a paying concern. Already by law 80% of farm land has to be preserved as forest, which is ignored. If there was payment for maintaining or replanting forest then it is more likely to happen. There could be incentives for rejuvinating existing land rather than encroaching into the forest. Who should pay to maintain the carbon sinks? Brazil in part, of course, but also the rest of the world that has provided its pollution for free and is reliant on the rain forest to absorb it and to maintain the rainfall system of much of the world.

Anyway, I am interested to know more about the thought which must have already gone into such schemes and whether this can form part of the implementation procedure to achieve Contraction and Convergence. Over to the experts!!

[precycled]

Thanks for brushing the cobwebs off this forum Mike. Your question reveals that framework policies like C&C need some economic machinery to actually make them work. Otherwise it's like buying a car without an engine. Anyone trying to sell C&C as a global policy would be doing us all a favour if they can talk about how it runs as well as how it looks.

Although the discussion about C&C is strangely blinkered towards managing quantity-based limits, there is no reason why C&C should not be fitted with an engine that moves much faster towards net zero emissions by adjusting prices. This could blow the socks off political expectations for international climate agreements. It would even be possible to provide safety nets for meeting people's needs that are missing both in the current scarcity-related price surges and in most conventional price-correction proposals. IMHO the never-ending debate about emissions limits is blocking the chance for serious progress with climate and also tipping billions of people towards a future where they can't afford transport, heating or food.

So the economics which is generally ignored is more crucial than the emissions targets which get all the attention. If you're keeping up with climate science (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/07/climatechange.carbonemissions) you'll know that all net greenhouse gas emissions are 'excess'. So it's not just a matter of reining in a few big polluters or sharing out a reduced allowance. The polluters are us, everyone, the whole society and industry. And it's not just a matter of how we use fuels and energy. Every material flow, every interaction with nature and every social interaction all affect emissions. In other words proposals to fix the climate may not be found within the box marked climate and energy. We need a bigger box.

My proposal at http://www.simpol.org.uk/forum/index.php?board=8.0 provides a fairly simple polluter-pays scheme, called precycling insurance, which could work throughout all national economies. It would allow emissions to be cut everywhere towards zero net emissions and beyond. It would provide investment and funding for reversing the loss of nature everywhere, not just in the Amazon. This provides a mechanism for 'payments for environmental services' which you mention, whilst avoiding the two fatal errors in how these schemes have been used so far.  This would mark a transformation in attitudes towards nature, which would signal to governments that they should make vastly greater efforts with conservation. Governments would find that they no longer need to trash nature to run the economy, since the funding flows would add to both current GDP and future GDP (by supporting activity which is productive rather than wasteful). It would also end the nonsense of cutting forest being cheaper than adding compost to farmed land. Those interested can find more info in my climate briefing which is being publicised by the UN;  http://www.climateneutral.unep.org/cnn_members.aspx?m=195.

This may sound like a lot but I figure it would still not do enough fast enough.  The world is almost completely oblivious to the cataclysmic risks of positive feedback tipping points such as the one you mention, of the Amazon self-combusting. In a recent forum for 4600 UN-related people I proposed a radical switch in how nature is perceived and managed.  It was the only proposal on equity and environmental resources to make it into the final report being presented at an international meeting of government ministers in July. Here's the text from page 11 of the report at http://www.un.org/ecosoc/newfunct/Summary_of_eDiscussion_Final.pdf

"Promoting equity in the distribution of benefits from environmental resources
A participant pointed out that we must live on ecological revenue, not capital, and therefore it is imperative not just to slow the rapid loss of nature but to halt and reverse it. True equity in the distribution of benefits means that access is granted to all citizens, at a (not-necessarily financial) cost which all nationals can afford. Promoting equity in the distribution of environmental resources requires the local governments to acknowledge their environmental services as local treasures and meet their local needs first. A contributor reiterated that rich nations cannot enjoy environmental safety without caring for poverty and other pressing problems in poor nations. It was suggested that an effective way to protect ecological capital while promoting equity would be for all land, sea and non-renewable resource ownership title to be interpreted by international treaty as a title of stewardship of the ecological capital on behalf of future generations. The remedy under international law for failure to safeguard ecological capital would be access to the resource being transferred to a community-based trust, creating an economic incentive for resource owners to protect ecological capital, and a legal basis for communities to gain access to resources while expanding ecological capital and services."

[mikebrady]

Thanks for this James. I'm following the links.

I found 'The Story of Stuff' on Youtube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqZMTY4V7Ts&feature=user

[precycled]

Yes, Story of Stuff is so far the world's best presentation of the destructive folly of running a linear economy - turning ever fewer resources into ever more waste and pollution. The movie has a good go at showing how the alternative circular economy could take care of pretty much all acute global problems. However the world is still waiting for a film or animation which shows how to do this. Asking everyone to do their bit, single-issue initiatives, rationing and taxes are irrelevant when what's needed is fast broad paradigm change.

To see Story of Stuff I'd recommend Annie Leonard's own site http://www.storyofstuff.com which has a lot of interesting related material and a blog where you can leave comments. If you want to market SP there you could say that SP includes policies which could give the story of stuff a happy ending.

[Bren]

Hi there,

thanks for sharing your website etc here, James, and Mike for the 'Stuff' link.

Here is William McDonough explaining 'Cradle to Cradle' which is essentially this very idea of circular economics and production/consumption/re-use or precycling:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IoRjz8iTVoo

all the best and good luck with your (land near) Lewes project

Bren

[precycled]

Many thanks Bren!
As you suggest, cradle to cradle is the same kind of thing. Precycling is the action that makes the vision of cradle to cradle happen. Circular economics joins this up with all the interdependent issues such as climate, nature, food, employment and community. This is the future of economic growth, if growth is to have any future at all. Precycling insurance is an economic tool that could be applied globally to make cradle to cradle, precycling and circular economics come to life.  The economy could be switched from creating multiple massive problems to solving them on the same scale.
James

[mikebrady]

There is an article from Nicholas Stern in The Guardian today. He wrote the Stern Review for the UK government on the economics of climate change, arguing there is a financial case for taking necessary action.

His article today argues that a concerted programme of work to transform societies into sustainable, low-carbon ones would also be part of an effective response to the coming global recession which has been sparked by the credit crunch.

Given the UK government has put up ?500 billion to save its banking system and has then convinced many other countries to do the same, there may be a chance our leaders will actually act in this visionary way. But don't hold your breath. And Nicholas Stern, being an economist of, I believe, a fairly conventional mindset, sees growth as fundamental to the world's economic system - some of the proposals here on Monetary Reform and Beyond GDP might spark is interest if his attention can be captured.

Anyway, here's the link to the article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/23/commentanddebate-energy-environment-climate-change

[precycled]

Have added a comment to Lord Stern's article...

My copy of the Stern Review proposes 'stabilising' CO2e levels at up to 550ppm, when the current level is around 430ppm. Since polar ice is already melting like mad it would seem that Jim Hansen's proposal that there is already too much GHGs in the air is more realistic. Any plan to 'stabilise' GHG concentrations at any level above the current level looks to me like a recipe for violently unstable runaway positive feedbacks in which the entire human experience would vanish into folly.

So we need to be careful to avoid moving the goal posts to suit preconceptions about what is practical or achievable. Keep the goal posts where they need to be (extraction of GHGs by net negative emissions) and then think how to achieve it. This would sharpen up our thinking and reveal broad new horizons of opportunities. For example we would see that reducing deforestation is futile compared to the proper goal of reversing historical loss of nature. We would see that the starting point for a new economic model is not carbon constraints on the old model but switching to a new model which works not by causing and tolerating problems but by reversing them.

This approach of paradigm switching ensures that we attempt change on the necessary scale, rather than wasting further decades haggling about emissions caps that don't happen, carbon trading that excuses airport expansions and new nuclear power that perpetuates high waste, high toxicity and high energy dependence. Paradoxically it could be easier to create a new resource-making economy than to cap the old waste-making model. This is because politicians do not trust that capped business-as-usual can provide growth. However by stimulating the massive investments needed to really attempt to reverse all major global problems then anyone can see that the spending will be sufficient to propel growth. That is growth of money flows of course, not the decoupled flows of materials.

Anyone interested can see how this could be achieved rapidly in the 'climate briefing' on my UNEP pages http://www.climateneutral.unep.org/cnn_members.aspx?m=195. This summarises simple economic tools recently published in the NATO Science Programme.

James Greyson www.blindspot.org.uk

[ok0523]

Emissions do need to be drastically cut and this is an obvious way to do it. Less obvious is how the same market failure is responsible for all aspects of unsustainability. A global deal to set mandatory limits on emissions would be a way to tell markets they have failed with carbon but to let them off with everything else. Carbon-limited capitalism is not equivalent to sustainable capitalism.  Whilst some problems may get better, others would get worse - notably conflict, destruction of nature and nuclear waste

[precycled]

Thank you ok0523 - an inspired comment. Illustrates very well how the obvious action is not always the right one. We can try to learn from civilisations which have collapsed in the past from ecological decay. Presumably they also pursued the most obvious paths  - which led them right off the edge of the evolutionary cliff.

The paradox is that less obvious but more effective paths are open, we just don't see them.
James Greyson www.blindspot.org.uk

[Rory]

I am glad that adopters are supporting contraction and convergence simultaneous policies.  I completely agree with a carbon tax. It seems completely logical to me to put the financial pain where the problem is being generated so that the incentive to reduce the pain is maximised. An added benefit from the tax monies gained in this way should be to use them to promote green living by zeo rating green goods etc.

[imike24]

ok

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