If you read only one book on climate change - its past and future, politics and solutions - read this one. This is the global picture and the key to a global solution.
Tom Spencer, Professor of Global Governance, University of Surrey and President, GLOBE International 1994-99
Dear Aubrey,
Many thanks for your letter of 8 May 2001 and the copy of C&C The Global Solution to Climate Change. I have to say that I think that it is brilliant. It reads like a novel. I particularly liked your interpretation of the Tao Te Ching. And the policy analysis is of course as sharp as ever. Also your analysis of how the climate negotiations leading up to and beyond Kyoto went off track is spot on.
With best regards,
Jonathon Loh Conservation Policy Department WWF International
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Man-made climate change is probably the most serious environmental threat we face. This book offers interesting and useful ideas exploring the concept of 'Contraction and Convergence' as one way to address the global climate challenge.
Michael Meacher, UK Minister for Environment
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INDISPUTABLY ESSENTIAL READING
Review by Mayer Hillman published in the March issue of Town and Country Planning
(Journal of the TCPA)
To be or not to be. That is the question posed for mankind in the face of awesome predictions of the consequences of accelerating climate change caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from our profligate energy-intensive lifestyles and the fact that they remain in the atmosphere for several generations. The stark choice presented in this concise book is a continuing '... combination of naked economic and military power and climate disasters' with 'some unscriptable allocation of carbon entitlements (to limit the disasters) with uncalculable costs'. Or it is 'a sharing (of these entitlements) between people globally, equitably and sustainably' in order to deliver a clean and green form of prosperity which does not seriously prejudice the future of the planet.
As is pointed out, if the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to a relatively safe level is more important than the pursuit of economic growth - a point of departure that I presume nearly all readers of Town and Country Planning accept - then it is clear that a framework for action is needed within which the reduction can be achieved.
This book profoundly and lucidly spells out this framework which its author, Aubrey Meyer, founder and director of the Global Commons Institute (GCI), logically calls 'Contraction and Convergence'. It requires the reduction to be completed within a timetable determined by scientific evidence whilst at the same time programming the reduction towards an end-state of equal per capita emissions. He argues convincingly that this is the only way of avoiding ecological catastrophe.
In addition to a devastating critique of the failure of economics to treat with the subject of the welfare of all mankind and the global environment, he provides a fascinating history of the process by which a transition has been made in the space of ten years from what was at first ridiculed as a totally unrealistic and impractical solution to a centre stage proposition at the heart of current climate change negotiations.
The effectiveness of his argument is reflected in the growing consensus that 'Contraction and Convergence' may indeed be the only realistic route to ecological salvation. For instance, last summer, the Royal Commission on Environment and Pollution and Jan Pronk, the Netherlands Environment Minister and Chairman of the Hague Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, supported the case for an international agreement based on the principle. In his environment speech in the City of London in the autumn, Prime Minister Blair acknowledged that the massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions must be achieved on 'an equitable basis'. A month later, in the Hague, President Chirac stated that 'France proposes that we set as our ultimate objective the convergence of per capita emissions'. It is extraordinary that acknowledgement by these two world leaders and others of the relevance of the concept of equity to the subject, with its seismic implications for the future of economic growth, was not reported in the media. Nevertheless, the message is now reaching an ever-widening audience. Only a few weeks ago in this country, the Loss Prevention Council, the Building Research Establishment, and the Chartered Insurance Institute, have published reports on the problem that climate change poses for the insurance industry. All of them have joined in advocating 'Contraction and Convergence'.
It is clear that urgent changes are called for not only in the policies and practices of government, industry and the business community generally, but also in our own lifestyles. If these are to be conducted according to principles of conscience and survival, our responsibilities on this portentous issue cannot continue to be side-stepped or ignored. I can think of no better investment of time and no more effective means of jolting people out of their complacency on the ramifications of global warming than to read this remarkable book.
Mayer Hillman Senior Fellow Emeritus, Policy Studies Institute February 2001
Aubrey Meyer, Contraction and Convergence: The Global Solution to Climate Change, published by Green Books on behalf of the Schumacher Society. ISBN 1 870098 94 3. £5. |
| A Just Solution to Global Warming
Human-induced climate change is the greatest environmental threat today. Rising to this terrible challenge means overturning the global apartheid between rich and poor. For example, the United States, with a twentieth of the world's population, usurps a quarter of the global atmosphere to dump its pollution. Such inequity motivates this book's author - Aubrey Meyer, a musician who grew up in South Africa. In 1990 he helped found the Global Commons Institute to promote a simple and powerful concept that may yet break the deadlock of climate negotiations.
Simply put, everyone in the world has an equal right to emit greenhouse gas emissions. First, take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figure of 60 per cent cuts to stabilise global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by 21 00. Second, calculate the level of pollution each nation should be allowed on the basis of population. The book's eye-catching graphics illustrate past emissions and future allocation by country, achieving per capita equality by 2030. Emissions thereafter fall to reach safe levels by 2100. There will still he climate damage, but disaster should be averted.
This 'Contraction and Convergence'(C&C) framework has gathered the support of a majority of countries, including China and India. It may he the only approach that developing countries are willing to accept. That, in turn, may one day tempt a post-Bush US back into the fold of the Kyoto protocol. However, Meyer warns that the 'sub-global framework' of the protocol, with its 'guesswork' of market mechanisms and inadequate cuts, could prove worse than useless because the public would be lulled into a false sense of security that something is at last being done. The crux of the matter is whether grassroots support for equity will defeat the powerful elite interests that profit from the status quo: accepting C&C would require that the developed world eschews dirty economic growth for good.
David Cromwell |
Dear Aubrey,
I have now had a chance to read your books on Contraction and Convergence.
Thank you for sending them to me. Both are extremely well written and persuasive and I am delighted to find more support than I expected for the rights-based approach.
Thank you for the notable role you have played in promoting C&C.
With regards,
Moni Malhoutra
Secretary General Rajiv Gandhi Foundation New Delhi INDIA - 110 001 |
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| A THEORY WHOSE TIME HAS COME
Over the last decade, nothing in Green politics has given me as much pleasure as the rise of my friend Aubrey Meyer's campaign to rescue the planet from escalating climate change and bone-headed politics.
From its beginnings as a wholly implausible one-person pressure group, his organisation Global Commons Institute has developed into the Only Game in Town for damping down climate change.
I have watched and been impressed as Aubrey, with help from a small group of GCI colleagues - most of them Green Party activists - mastered the complex number-crunching and communications technology needed to run a campaign of this type.
I have watched and been amazed as Aubrey developed a network of contacts and influential supporters within the science community and international diplomacy, and made intervention after key intervention, at venues all over the world, in the ongoing climate change negotiations.
I have watched with disbelief as Aubrey broke the growing hold of the economics profession over the climate change negotiating process, by exposing for what it is the theory that human lives in the Third World should be deemed to have substantially less value than lives in the over-developed nations.
- GCI's success has been based on an unswerving adherence to the scientific and geopolitical realities, viz:
- A minimum 60% reduction in 1990 CO2 emission rates is needed to stabilise climate change.
- Developed countries, particularly the US, are the source of the problem and consequently the places where most of the changes need to be made.
- Developed countries, particularly the US, will only be willing to enter into a process which applies equally to all countries.
- Third World countries will only be willing to enter into such a process if they can feel confident that the inequities inherent in existing international arrangements will not be perpetuated in the new system.
All this leads with inexorable logic and childlike simplicity to the GCI solution of Contraction and Convergence - every nation signs up to play its defined part in achieving a global reduction of 60% in CO2 emissions, over a period of time, based on the principle of equal per capita entitlements to emit what CO2 can be emitted.
Aubrey's strength has been to cling to the logic and simplicity through successive giant waves of political cynicism and academic put-down, asking again and again the question: "If not this, then what?" The only lasting answer that has ever come back has been: "Something will probably turn up"!
When it became clear that Contraction and Convergence had become the Only Game in Town, it seemed like an enormous success, but one wondered what would happen next. It has now been the Only Game in Town for so long that it must be on the verge of becoming mainstream thinking. When that happens the attendant political implications will be incalculable. And what's more, we will continue to enjoy a planet on which mammals can still live and politics can still be done.
This, then, is the book of the GCI campaign. Read it and learn, and marvel!
Dave Bradney, Member, Ceredigion Green Party, 24.6.01 |
CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS
James Bruges sees the immense potential in Contraction and Convergence.
Contraction & Convergence, Aubrey Meyer, Schumacher Briefings, Green Books, Totnes, 2000, £5.00
?The wilful destruction, with foreknowledge, of entire countries and cultures represents an unspeakable crime against humanity." The President of Nauru said this as he contemplated the obliteration of his Pacific island state due to rising sea levels. Climate change is serious, and poor nations are suffering disproportionately.
Withdrawal of the United States from the Kyoto process need not prevent governments representing the vast majority of the world's population from implementing policies that address the crisis.
Aubrey Meyer, of the Global Commons Institute, describes an equitable framework that is inclusive of all countries, called Contraction & Convergence. It was widely discussed and well received at the November 2000 negotiations in The Hague. Building on Meyer's Contraction & Convergence framework, the economist Richard Douthwaite is now proposing an economic framework to keep human activity within the environmental limits of the planet. Once these two frameworks have been implemented by the majority nations, it would be in the interests of others, including the US, to participate, whether or not they had taken part in the negotiations.
Contraction & Convergence separates principles from all the confusing detail into which the 1997 Kyoto protocol has sunk. It establishes rules by which the game should be played, rather than calling for arbitrary deals. Meyer declares, passionately, that we are dealing with nothing less than the survival of humanity. And he insists that the ordering of human affairs must be based on equity. When thinking about the negotiations and the clarity Meyer brings to them, I find it helpful to use the image of a tree its trunk formed of core principles from which the branching discussions grow. There are bound to he arguments over detail but these are twigs and leaves that should not harm the main structure. Meyer's core principles, the trunk, are survival and equity.
For survival, greenhouse gas emissions must reduce (contraction): but how quickly? The Economist magazine takes a relaxed view that "it is a hundred-year problem" so don't do anything to upset the economy just yet. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, in its report dated June 2000, says that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is approaching the highest it has ever been in forty million years so we cannot predict what will follow; in other words, concentrations are already too high to be safe and we should cut emissions as quickly as possible.
Equity must he the guiding principle for agreement on how reductions will be made. The carbon cycle was in balance before human intervention. All land areas were net emitters of carbon dioxide and only the oceans were net absorbers. What has changed is the increase in emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution. It is only these emissions that are relevant to the negotiations.
If we set on one side the damage already done by countries that have grown rich bringing us to the present crisis, a huge concession to ask of poor nations, the only fair approach to rationing the future use of fossil fuel is through equity an equal-per-capita allocation (based on 1990 population figures). Negotiations that do not take everyone into account on the basis of equal rights are like a tree with a rotten heart doomed to collapse.
The first branch is that convergence from unequal use to equal per-capita allocations will take time industrial economics could not survive a sudden massive reduction in their use of oil and gas. So a convergence period will be necessary. Thirty years has been suggested but it may need to be much less.
A second branch: it will be virtually impossible for some societies to reduce their emissions adequately, whereas others are at present within their allocation. So allocations should be traded, but only if the total of all emissions is within the reducing target. Each country would be issued with Standard Emission Rights (SERS) coupons by the International Monetary Fund XIMF) for this purpose. Industrial nations will want to cut their emissions as quickly as possible in order to reduce the number of coupons they need to buy from those with coupons to spare. Poor nations will want to reduce the growth in their use of fossil fuel so that they have coupons to sell.
China, India and most African countries endorsed the policy of equal-per-capita allocation at The Hague. President Chirac specifically stated that this is France's goal. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has said "the UK should he prepared to accept the contraction and convergence principle as the basis for international agreement." If world affairs were democratic, this would now be an adopted policy.
Some commentators accept the logic of equal-per-capita allocations but question whether the US will ever sign an agreement based on equity it is only commercial incentive that will bring the US on board. The majority nations should recognize this as a fact of life and change the financial architecture of the world. This sounds ambitious but it is just a question of revisiting the Bretton Woods agreement.
So the third branch is about monetary reform. At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, John Maynard Keynes argued for an international currency, independent of national currencies, but the United States overruled him. The Majority Nations should now establish an international currency for trade across boundaries.
A fourth branch (which relates to monetary reform): adequate reductions will not be achieved unless the monetary system rewards those who reduce their emissions. In 1944 currencies were based on gold. The gold standard was subsequently abandoned in 1971 so currencies are now free-floating and unstable, a highly unsatisfactory situation. The new international currency should be linked to carbon, or the emission of carbon. It would be issued in proportion to standard emission rights. Douthwaite calls it the 'emissions based currency unit'(ebcu).
A fifth branch: developing nations should take the initiative (and Europe would probably join in). They have great power most of the world's commodity resource is located in them, India does most of America's accountancy overnight, and these nations could drag the rest of the world into climate chaos if they adopted our coal and oil technologies. But they also have the incentive to make changes emissions-trading would cause money to flow to them from rich nations as of right not as aid, and monetary reform would enable them to use the dollars sitting idly in their banks.
An export tax, levied in proportion to the amount a country exceeds its emissions allocation, would establish a fund to encourage carbon sequestration. Contraction & Convergence allows the Kyoto protocol to be taken forward; it meets the reasonable US requirement that all nations should be involved; and it supersedes the protocol's arbitrary allocations that favour historically high polluters. If the policy is linked to monetary reform, it will be in the interest of all nations, including the US, to participate.
Contraction & Convergence addresses the two great issues of our time climate change and inequality. It would provide the incentive for all nations to reduce emissions. And it would result in a progressive tendency towards equality between nations, thus relieving poverty, encouraging trade and removing many causes for conflict. Hopefully it will be centrestage at Bonn.
James Bruges is author of The Little Earth Book (Alastair Sawday Publishing, £4.99)
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