Contraction and Convergence News

In 2004 the Executive of the UNFCCC said 'C&C is inevitably required to achieve UNFCCC-Compliance'.

Greenhouse Development Rights - however well intentioned, its a recipe for conflict and chaos.

A story of now completely indefensible irresponsibility. Non Government vacillation lies behind more Climate Chaos and Confusion, while the UNFCCC's call for 'increased ambition' just attracts more of the Government Incrementalism that adds up to disaster.

The Bottom Line is that: - "C&C is still the most rational, sensible and widely accepted proposal in the UNFCCC process." Hielkema and Hampton and numerous others and here.

However, after a decade of NGOs seeking to 'improve on C&C' since COP-6 in 2000, 'EcoEquity's Greenhouse Development Rights Framework [GDR] Proposal was put out by the Stockholm Environment Institute in 2008 and supported by Environment and Development NGOs for this very purpose.

The 'improvement' was to call for 'negative-emissions-entitlements' for Developed Countries, rather than C&C with 'accelerated convergence' as argued and advocated by GCI for nearly two decades.

For this 'improvement' to work politically, we all would need to secure the agreement of the US Senate and its international allies to agree this. The US would not even agree to the Kyoto Protocol, so the GDR idea while intensifying the blame-game and so perhaps appealing to some Develolping Countries, in reality simply inflames an existing disagreement.

After twenty years of some people raining silly remarks on C&C, you develop skin thicker and smoother than a duck's back. Here are some Booby Prizes awarded because some people either can't or won't do the maths, join the dots or otherwise make their minds up about how to proceed in what is now an inceasingly critical situation.

Mouse-touch 'names' to open and close the comments.

Michael Zammit Cutajar - Ex UNFCCC Executive

"C&C is too logical." A prize for the silliest comment about C&C goes to Michael Zammit Cuajar who said that. Just how illogical does he think we should be? [Think about it]. Michael was a Dep CEO at UNFCCC for some years.

Damian Carrington - Environment Editor of the Guardian

"Just one question, what are emissions entitlements?" Another prize goes to Damian Carrington an Environment Editor the Guardian Newspaper in the UK. He commissioned an article on C&C for publication before COP-17 in Durban [December 2011] saying he was interested in C&C as a way of breaking the impasse at COP-17. On acceptance of the text for publication this veteran asked this question . . . "Just one question, what are emissions entitlements?" [Ur, its what you need to trade emissions guv . . . and when he was told, he refused to publish the article].

Fiona Harvey - Environment Editor of the Guardian

"If life were simple, it might be possible to work out a formula for dividing up the cuts needed among the countries, according to emissions per head of population." After COP-17 in Durban [December 2011] this person held hands with Damian Carrington in the Guardian to say that. This is called 'dis-inventing the steering wheel'. Whoops, bit of 3-point parking problem there . . . right-hand down a bit Fiona.

Bill Nordhaus - Economics Prof at YALE

If you don't like the 'numeraire' in my Global Cost Benefit of Climate Change being in Dollars, you can have it in 'Spotted-Owl-Equivalents'." Prof Nordhaus was predictably cross when GCI got him thrown out of IPCC WG3 for the Second Assessment in 1993/5 for suggesting that more 'shopping malls and air-conditioning' were the solutions to Global Warming. He was to have been the lead author but when I told all the African delegates at IPCC/UNFCC what his veiws were, they marched on the offices of the Executive and demanded that he be removed. He was [and was replaced by David Pearce].

Nordhaus responded with that 'numeraire-jab', but he would never answer the question why, if a Spotted Owl equalled a spotted owl, a human didn't equal a human. This is what his acolytes calculated would follow as the world warmed to their Global Cost-Benefit Analysis, where discarding up to 14 dead poor people was cost-effective to save one rich person.

Prof Nordhaus didn't agree that the numeraire of UNFCCC-compliance was 'carbon-per-person-per-unit-time subject to that limit rather than money [or spotted-owl inequivalents], but this value-of-life battle unfolded to become a complete humiliation for economists and many of those humilated by this are now civil servants entrenched in Whitehall with long and bitter memories.

Whatever - the object lesson for economists is 'never accuse a musician of not being able to count, because that's all we do - count'.

Nick Maybe - A Director of E3G

"Contraction and Convergence is dead!" claimed this Director of E3G. Aren't we all mate! [Sob - Requiescat in pace]. Mr 'Maybe' is a friend of Mr 'Delay' at the UK 'Carbon Trust . . . who is a friend of . . . .

Tom Burke - Another Director of E3G

Ma Pronto! Et Lux Perpetua: - "C&C doesn't work in the real world. It is simply result of everything we do." Is that an oxymoror? Figure it out. He hasn't fooled anyone except himself. Mr 'Burke' is a friend of Mr 'Delay', who is a friend of Mr 'Maybe', who is a friend of . . . .

John Ashton - Yet another Director of E3G

"Any conceivable solution involves [at least crude] C&C, yet at its heart lurks a contestable ideological assumption." John Ashton's comment is about 'belief systems' and not about logic. On the other hand, the Chair of the All Party Group in the UK Parliament on Climate Change said, "C&C is An Incontestable Truth." Who suffers from 'belief systematitis' here?

Mr Ashton is a friend of Mr 'Burke' who is a friend of Mr 'Delay', who is a friend of Mr 'Maybe', who is a friend of . . . . scatter John Ash [t]on Wounded Knee . . . . John Ash is a Former Chair of AOSIS from that oil-dependency in Trinidad and Tobago. However, he has now been replaced by the incisive Karl Hood of Grenada - Do all islands rise - or sink - with the tide?.

John Lanchberry - of the RSPB

"The imperative for the G8 should be simply to start the international negotiations on the international climate change regime post-2012. These negotiations should begin with no preconditions regarding organising principles, such as contraction and convergence, or delivery mechanisms, such as emissions trading. To be effective in the longer term, the G8 must focus on restarting the negotiations and not be distracted by side issues." Though the view of the UNFCCC exec is that C&C is 'inevitably required' for UNFCCC-compliance, John Lanchberry of Royal Society for the Protection of Birds [RSPB] gave this 'evidence' to the Environmental Audit Committee 2004 [in writing and by spoken word, several times]. RSPB were adamantly opposed to wind-farms too. The reason was that birds fly into them and are made into 'bird-soup'. Lanchberry's windbag argument is to restart 'brain soup' at the UNFCCC negotiations.

Sir Nicholas Lord Stern - A UK Government Economist and a member of the UK Government delegation at COP-14 Poznan

One of the stupidest and most tragically time-wasting bits of epaulette-waving rhetoric came from this person. In the American Economics Review he declared that, â��Contraction & Convergence is like Rights to Kill.â�� This was his little 'pay-back' to GCI for being forced by his publisher [CUP], HM Treasury and HMSO to source C&C to GCI. He had initially refused to do this in the prominent arguments against C&C that he made in his famous 'Review'. In 2008 he went on camera at COP-14 as a member of the UK Government Delegation in Poznan stating that, "Developed Countries should have negative emissions entitlements with immediate effect". He stated to camera that he didn't want these views known. One can only imagine that this was because this remark was just another U-Turn in the Economics of Genocide.

George Monbiot, Oliver Tickell and Mark Lynas - Advocates of the so-called 'Kyoto-2' propositon

K-2 is the proposition of the quite reasonable Oliver Tickell.
Cutting out the UNFCCC process altogether, K-2 argues [quite unrealistically] that

the world's fossil fuel production assetts [oil, coal & gas] should be siezed by a coalition of the world's central banks
then permits for production of fossil fuels should be auctioned back to the producers by these banks
the proceeds of these auctions [he says several trillions annually] should be redistributed to the world's deserving causes.

United behind this, but completely split over the virtues of nuclear power, the pro-nuclear two of these three - George Monbiot and Mark Lynas - then started an aggressive campaign to support the anti nuclear author of K-2 - Oliver Tickell.

Time has proved however that, like all spoilt teenagers, they veer from feeding off to then attacking everything they touch, so it is only a matter of time before they do this to K-2 and probably start supporting nuclearised floating of islands and Richard Branson's space tourism.

In his 2006 book 'Heat', George Monbiot opined: -

"Contraction and Convergence [C&C] was devised by, a man called Aubrey Meyer. He is one of those extraordinary people whose lack of relevant qualifications appears to work in his favour: he's a concert. viola player. Meyer was able to leap over the more constrained proposals of the professionals and produce an idea that was simple, based on science and fair."

This was a little trite but I informed Mr Monbiot that this was not an appropriate remark. He disbelievingly insisted that the remark was intended as a 'compliment'. I told him that it was neither the triteness nor the 'compliment' that were the point. The point was that the remark generously - but quite inaccurately - presumed that he [Mr Monbiot] had the competence to determine who and what qualifications are relevant to this debate.

Considering the number of public volte face [sometimes accompanied by hand-wringing apologies] from being

a rabble-rouser at meetings of the Socialist Workers Party,
with Mark Lynas, a voluble protagonist for carbon-rationing and C&C [The Age of Stupid]
a PR agent for the World's Central Banks
a denouncer of IPCC climate scientists and most recently
a fervent advocate of nuclear power

it seems to me that Mr Monbiot should slow down to mature a little and take more responsibility for stabilising his own opinions, before seeking to form or deride the opinions of others.

Rt Hon Ed Miliband - DECC Minister [2009] - Screws up COP-15 and then blames the Chinese in The Guardian

First prize goes to Ed Milliband for what was probably the stupidest peformance of all time in October 2009. He was the Minister at the UK Department of Environment and Climate Change [DECC]. He oversaw the introduction into law of the UK Climate-Act in 2008. This prescribed a global convergence-rate to equal per capita shares globally that completed by 2050. This was inside a global emissions contraction rate that peaked in 2016 and declined to zero emissions by the end of the Century. Miliband gave evidence to the Environmental Audit Select Committee [EAC] in October 2009, more than a year after the Climate Act had been in force and on the eve of taking the rates of C&C in the UK Climate-Act to COP-15 in Copenhagen in December 2009. This prescription became known as the 'Danish Draft' and it was put forward by a group of Governments led by the UK, who claimed it would avoid exceeding an overal temperature rise of two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial.

The EAC Chairman asked him, "Will C&C feature in the negotiations at COP-15?"

"I think probably not is the answer," replied Mr Miliband. He went on, "I do not think that will form the basis of an agreement. I think that there is a sort of attractive justice element to the contraction and convergence idea. The complexity of it, though, is what is the point at which convergence takes place and what do we say about different countries' levels of growth at that point, GDP, how should we adjust for different weather conditions and all that?

He appeared to be completely unaware that a convergence date of 2050 had already been turned into UK Law with UK Climate Act, an act largely scripted by DECC and the Climate Change Committee. He was also apparently unaware that the Chinese Government had proposed immediate convergence of emissions entitlements in July 2009.

But Mr Miliband then went further than that. He came home from the fiasco at COP-15 that he and DECC largely caused with their prescription, and using the Guardian newspaper, publicly accused the Chinese Government of having wrecked the COP-15 negotiations, because they had rejected DECC's convergence rate.

The obvious scientific and political falsity of the UK Government's claims to satisfy the demands of equity and urgency with this prescription more than explain why the whole thing was rejected outright by Developing Country Governments.

Mark Lynas [Advisor to the President of the those lowest-lying islands, the Maldives]

After that fiasco at COP-15 in Copenhagen in 2009 and the more recent one at COP-17 in Durban in 2011, Mark Lynas now writes, " George [Monbiot] us girls must stick together. C&C or some variant of it might have been in with a chance for serious consideration ten years ago, had it not been for Meyer's consistently offensive advocacy style. He has done more damage to C&C than any other person alive. Still, too late for that nowâ�� the world has moved on, and as I said on twitter I havenâ��t heard it mentioned for years by any delegate or NGO or media in any negotiation in any place. So I think itâ��s properly off the agenda for all negotiators now probably forever."

With the COP-17 result and Mark Lynas's increasingly deranged insights, it seems to be the islands that are off the agenda - not-to-mention off the map - forever now. Would it were otherwise. However Lynas celebrated COP-17 as 'A Major Step Forward though the Maldives are now reported as preparing to evacuate to Australia because of this. It would seem they have not chosen to nuclearize and/or float their islands.

Mark Lynas' judgement is fully in keeping with his ignorant insights in 2009. And after COP-15 he wrote to confirm that he was happy to stand firm with Ed Miliband in his confusion about what really happened at COP-15. It is all regurgitated again in his recent and absurd book "The God Species" [sic - but quite as idiotically erudite as the author in The Dawkins Delusion]. This is not surprising considering the role they had in helping to ensure the failure of that event. Saying he was 'a witness in the room' at COP-15, Lynas denounced the Chinese Government in the Guardian for creating this failure. This was the day before the inestimable Minister Mr Miliband did the same thing.

Both were blind and deaf to the fact that six months before COP-15 the Chinese Government had proposed C&C with a faster convergence date than the 2050 prescribed by the UK and others Governments and Al Gore. Both therefore completely failed to understand [they still do] why the Chinese Government was saying no to the prescription of 2050 in the so-called Danish Draft.