When Al Gore speaks to An Inconvenient Truth and how he structures his briefing, he speaks to three "budgets" to work with: time; complexity; and hope. He views that there are limits to how much time people will give to hearing a presentation; that there are limits to how much complexity any specific audience can handle; and hope -- that it is easy to make people who have not thought about Global Warming so despair that they view the situation as impossible. He seeks to leave people with hope for solution.
Tom Athanasiou, of EcoEquity, has taken the step of writing The Inconvenient Truth, Part II. And, well, Athanasiou is not as solicituous of his readers. That hope budget ... perhaps we should speak of the despair budget. But, since you've heard from Gore, time to move forward and give Athanasiou some of your attention.
Thinking of any presentation (and An Inconvenient Truth in particular) in terms of budgets is an interesting exercise. And, considering AIT from perspective this explained my greatest frustrations with AIT:
- That it left too many issues off the table (methane hydrates, acidification of the oceans, potential that plants will become 'woodier' as they evolve to adapt to higher CO2 levels (and woodier reduces edibility and food value), etc); e.g., that it was not complex enough for me (an "educated" consumer/viewer); and,
- That AIT did not call for the sort of quite serious changes for our path forward that are required to avert cataclysmic implications from mounting CO2 levels and Global Warming.
Thus, I was frustrated leaving the (over air conditioned) movie theater after seeing AIT since it was not complex enough for me and, in part of lacking some of the complexity, more "hopeful" than seems warranted by a clear, open-eyed, honest analysis of the scientific analysis and the facts of a changing world.
Well, The Inconveninet Truth, Part II (warning: 20 page pdf) is a far less rosy discussion published in January. I agree with EcoEquity's assessment that "The situation, alas, is actually worse than either Gore’s movie implies." And, I agree with them that we should explore this domain and gone beyond Gore and the political discussion. As Tom Athanasiou writes, "So, this being a new year, let’s move on a bit, to territories no politician can guide us into." Be aware, An Inconvenient Truth II can cause despair (rather than hope) even though it has a path, a difficult path, forward to a better world.
We’ve seen the movie, so we know the first part – we’re in trouble deep. And one of the good things about 2006 is that this ceased to be a public secret. It’s now out in the open. We not only know that the drought is spreading, the ice melting, the waters beginning to rise, but we also know that we know. And this changes everything.
The science is in, and the "skeptics" aren’t what they used to be. They’re still around, of course, but their ranks have thinned, and their funders are feeling the heat. It’s fair to say, I think, that they’ve been reduced to a merely tactical danger. They’re flaks and everyone knows it. Still, this good news comes with bad – their job was to stall, and they did it well. And it’s now late in the game.
AIT II shreds the concept of the Stern Review Report's target of 550 ppm as a reasonable path for confidence about humanity's future through the 21st century and beyond. (Note: ppm refers to the Carbon Dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Civilization developed with a rough level of 280 ppm. Through the industrial age, it has risen from 280 ppm to over 400, most of this in the past 50 years, with an accelerating rate through this period. In a 850,000 year record via ice core records, there is no recording of CO2 prior to recent decades above about the 285 ppm level.)
And the 550 ppm trajectory (which is still occasionally defended by people who claim to be fighting for a viable climate protection regime) can simply not be taken seriously, at least not as defensible mitigation target. It poses a 78-99% risk of exceeding 2ºC and a 28-71% risk of exceeding 3ºC, making it difficult to argue that arguments in favor of 550 ppm are anything more than irresponsible invitations to catastrophe.
This is a significant point, because practical men and women are still advocating targets in this neighborhood. Even the UK’s much praised Stern Review of the economics of climate change does so, though in a manner so circumspect that you have to suspect that its authors are ashamed of their own fatalism. Note, in any case, an argument being made by Joe Romm, the author of the Climate Progress blog and the fine new book Hell and High Water. Romm claims that, in reality, "there is no ‘550 ppm’ stabilization path because 550 would destroy the tundra, and take us to 700+ by 2100 and trigger yet more amplifying feedbacks that would spiral the system out of control. So we stabilize at or below 450, or ruin the planet for hundreds if not thousands of years."
Another note, a framing issue. Is a degree a degree? What does "2 degrees" mean? Well, first off, for Americans challenged by the metric system, that means 3.6 degrees fahrenheit. And, this is roughly a change, going back to Centigrade from a global average of 13 degrees to 15 degress (in other words a more than ten percent change in the average global temperature above freezing.) Skeptics like to use "centigrade" degrees in the United States, since it sounds like less, and don't norm this against the centigrade base. "Two Degrees" refers to over 10% -- actually 15% -- increase in average temperatures above freezing. Does that 15% increase sound like more than "2 degrees" to you?
While AIT II weighs heavily on the despair budget (rather than hope), this is an educated community / group -- yet, I promise that this discussion is likely to educate most as it provides a thoughtful look at the interrelationship between potential US (and other developed world) paths forward and the entire world.
The urgency, then, is only a first inconvenient truth. Gore put it on the screen and we’ve faced it, at least enough to put climate protection finally onto the agenda. Now comes the hard part – winning adequate action, globally and in time. For just as the needed breakthrough is a global one that can only come with U.S. support and even leadership, so too decisive domestic action, a precondition for such leadership, is only possible against a background of global progress. A bit of a knot, this, but there’s no way around it. Because everything depends on breaking the global impasse before it sets into a deadlock. And because, whatever is or is not happening in the U.S., the global climate impasse is deepening.
Which brings us, finally, to "part II" of the inconvenient truth. To the standoff between the rich and developing worlds
And, how the current standoff means that, in an optimistic "BAU" (business as usual) case, the 'southern' (developing) world CO2 emissions put the world far beyond reasonable levels even if there is a major US turnaround. (This does not absolve the United States from responsibility, but it does show clearly that 'tidying up our own yard' doesn't clean up the neighborhood.)
only that domestic reductions can’t possibly be the whole story, not in terms of U.S. obligations within a global climate regime that’s fair enough to be viable.
And the relevance of per-capita metrics is only part of the story. There’s also historical responsibility, another measure by which U.S. emissions are far, far higher than Chinese. And then there are more subtle considerations, peculiar to the globalized economy of manufacture. Like the fact that, every time a corporation imports an ingot or a TV or a toy from China, they import as well the carbon that is "embodied" in it, carbon that no one today, Chinese or American, takes one whit of responsibility for. Terry Tamminen, who was until recently California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's top environmental adviser, was exaggerating when he told a Grist interviewer that: "Why is it that China is building 1,000 megawatts of coal-fired power plants a week? It's to make factories to make plastic flamingos to sell in Wal-Mart".
One thing about the increased efficiency per $ of GDP caculation that confuses me is that part of the energy efficiency and part of the reduced pollution of that calculation is through the export of polluting industrial activity to places like China -- whether for flamingos, Christmas gifts, or recycling steel. But, even so, the internal Chinese consumption is expanding (basically exponentially) and is being fuel principally by inefficient use of fossil fuels.
But, it is nearly impossible to speak to the PRC and say "don't pollute" as they seek to continue their economic miracle and have wealth-creation for thie populace.
The point here is not to "blame" China for the climate crisis, but to point out that despite China’s aggressive commitment to an export-led development model, and despite even its highly-publicized enclaves of urban wealth, it remains a relatively poor country. To see this, it’s only necessary to switch the focus from Gigawatts and emissions to income itself (emissions, after all, are only a by-product of economic activity, not its goal) and to consider the income landscape in a way that reveals its salient features.
Many have argued that a key challenge is to change traditional, financial focused measures. That measures that spoke to environmental standards, to health conditions, educational performance, and otherwise merit as much (if not more) attention as we give each day to the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones.
But, here, the emphasis is even more that we need to have a path that captures not just a driving down of GHG emissions, but does so in a way that enables economic progress within the developing world. The global situation
requires the climate regime to not only drive efficiency and clean technology, but also to enable human development and poverty alleviation, and by so doing gain friends, and momentum, throughout the world.
What would this mean in practice? Here’s the one-line version: The South, which has lost the opportunity to develop along the fossil-intensive path pioneered by the North, must be guaranteed the right to develop in a new way, a way that’s consistent with the imperative of stabilizing the climate system. This, moreover, is not fundamentally an ethical claim, but a realist one. Something like this "greenhouse development right" is needed if we’re to break the global impasse over developmental equity in a climate constrained world.
And this is the real inconvenient truth.
This is far from an accepted viewpoint. And, not one that will necessarily find favor in U.S. political circles. Yet, Athanasiou argues that the United States is the critical point for achieving this new path forward. He argues that
despite a thickening flurry of efforts designed to find ways forward, the international drive for a viable global climate regime is settling into a terrible impasse. This impasse, moreover, will not be broken without active U.S. leadership. That, as any realist will gladly tell you, is still how the world works.
Thus, the problem: before the U.S. can hope to provide such leadership it will have to accept its proper obligations within an international regime that takes due account of not only the scale and severity of the climate threat, but also the realities of unequal development and the imperatives of poverty alleviation. For the U.S. is, above all else, rich. And if the rich world does not provide what Gao Feng, the former head of the Chinese negotiating team once called "the ways and means" to reduce carbon emissions in the developing world, there isn’t going to be a global regime at all.
The focal issue is not actually the climate crisis, but rather the climate crisis as it comes to us on this bitterly divided planet, and the consequent need for the rich nations to fund and otherwise support mitigation efforts in the developing world. This issue has recently been widely recognized. Even the UK’s celebrated Stern Review Report, which worked hard (too hard, actually) to be realistic, made a point of arguing that the rich world would have to pay for decarbonization in the developing world:
"There is no single formula that captures all dimensions of equity, but calculations based on income, per capita emissions and historic responsibility all point to developed countries taking responsibility for emissions reductions of at least 60% from 1990 levels by 2050."
"It’s clear from the context, by the way, that this means "taking responsibility for global emissions reductions." It has to. Because if the rich countries don’t take such responsibility, then, frankly, their domestic clean-energy campaigns will prove largely futile, for the very simple reason that the bulk of new emissions will be coming from the developing world."
Athanasiou does expend much of the despair budget:
"Climate change is now manifestly an emergency, but the dramatic response we need is nowhere on the horizon. Instead, and despite a thickening flurry of efforts designed to find ways forward, the international drive for a viable global climate regime is settling into a terrible impasse."
But, for those of who believe in the United States, who believe this great nation can rise to greatness when required, there is a path past that despair. To repeat, as Athanasiou does in his report (that is greatly worth reading since this discussion only lightly touches its content):
That "impasse, moreover, will not be broken without active U.S. leadership. That, as any realist will gladly tell you, is still how the world works."
The United States can, if it choses, assume a leadership position. We can, as did from World War II through the end of the Cold War, lead the way toward a better world. And, while a "better world", but also a better future for America and Americans.
The question before us (US and all of us) is whether we will lead.
NOTES: