[Cedric Knight]

I broadly agree with John Harte. I am worried about emphasis (by Glyn Prins and others, not to mention recent COP talks) on “adaptation” for many reasons. Not least of these reasons is that other species don’t know they’re supposed to adapt! IPCC AR5 WG2 seems to confirm ~50% species loss at 3°C rises and above, although points out it’s the speed of the transition as well as its final size that is important; mangroves swamps and coral reefs may be first to collapse.

Also “adaptation” to climate change is almost inseparable from other development issues around health and agriculture, and doesn’t really affect moral obligations of rich countries to poorer ones. However, the capacity to generate clean energy, transport and cooking by investing in low-carbon infrastructure now could be a mitigation effort that also has massive development (and incidentally, population) benefits and allows much of the world to leapfrog the obsolete dirty infrastructure of Europe and the US.

Geoengineering is certainly taken less seriously than adaptation for good reasons, including the expense and potential for knock-on effects. Not all geoengineering solutions fail to address ocean acidification, but most of those also look impractical. Seeding algae and diatoms with iron should increase carbonate deposition, but doesn’t look effective; circulating deep ocean water is supposed to have similar effect but again would be desperate. However, I’d hate to think scepticism about geoengineering put engineers off looking at solutions: you could argue that reforesting the Sahel, or soil stabilisation, or huge concentrated solar power projects in similar regions are interventionist “geoengineering” in some sense, but they would also be broadly positive mitigation efforts that work in roughly the opposite direction to burning coal, oil, gas and forest.

Incidentally, I don’t really like using the word “mitigation” as it is confusing to many people – I find myself talking about “mitigating the effects of climate change” and confusing myself. I’d rather we talked about “emissions reduction”, afforestation etc to make it clear what measures are needed.

Suposedly, economists are trying to minimise the total cost of “mitigation”/emission measures + adaptation + residual damage. They generally try to do this through Intergrated Assessment Models, the most famous of which is PAGE09. There are obvious massive problems with this, principally as regards putting an economic value on adaptation and damage covered in IPCC WG2, which really only looks at loss of trade, and doesn’t put any value on lost ecosystem services. Economists cannot decide that; it can only be decided politically and ethically.

Some commentators, such as contrarian Bjorn Lomborg, have simply read off figures from WG2 and WG3 to suggest optimal intervention is minimal, not much more than we’re doing now. It’s fair for John Harte to describe this short-sightedness as a “myth”, but of course we should still continue to research and find better ways for the general public to understand these economic calculations.

I do agree (with JT) that industrial agriculture generally produces large quantities of CO2, CH4 and NOx, and reducing amount of food production is likely to be necessary to reduce climate risks to manageable levels. However, besides reducing number of mouths to feed, reducing overconsumption, food wastage, meat consumption and nitrate usage also help this dimension. Similarly, we don’t particularly need to use lime and cement – can we look at organic resins for construction instead? These areas do require large government investment, incentives and social changes, but given those should not require a traumatic population collapse.

In the long term, population reduction, for various resource reasons as well as climate change, is probably inevitable one way or another. However, just like people who want to solve climate change through their favoured radical economic change (eg Naomi Klein), or a spiritual awakening, it’s just too slow. Climate change isn’t itself going to limit population until massive changes are already committed. Human life expectancy of 70 is greater than the life expectancy of carbon-burning infrastructure, which is long enough, and ocean heat content also builds over decades. There’s are many buffers, lags, inertias and lead times to worry about already without getting political consensus over things that aren’t going to start having effect for at least a generation. Societies change slowly, and we need to slow warming now to give a chance for any political, ecological, ethical or economic realisation to sink in.

Kevin Anderson suggests 4 °C above pre-industrial is incompatible with human civilization (and Joseph Tainter and Ronald Wright make the principle of global collapse look plausible). I don’t know, but I do know it would be an ecological disaster, and that the IEA and others have us on that course by 2100. “So we have to mitigate” says John Harte.

OK, here’s my suggestion – nothing new, but I want to push it:

1) Continue with Kyoto/Durban mechanisms around emissions, but with a much more ambitious cap, distributed mostly according to capability, and augmented by bilateral agreements. Kyoto is controversial, partly because it doesn’t seem to have achieved anything, because the CDM has trouble defining “additionality”, partly because its complexity benefits mostly financial interests and actually for many other reasons. But it still has forward momentum from vested interests, Berners-Lee and Clark in _The Burning Question_ suggest a cap is necessary to avoid economic rebound effects. It’s not “the only game in town” as is claimed by any means, but I believe it has at least developed some means of quantifying emissions and can be steered by other policy and social responses to produce economic responses.

2) Besides the various agreements to reduce emissions, incentives need to be introduced in fossil fuel extraction. James Hansen as well as many conservatives favour national “fee and dividend” schemes that would benefit the majority of the population financially – these then need a border adjustment tax on imported fuels or goods, which apparently is permissible under existing WTO rules, which should be clarified. In the UK I believe the Climate Change Levy (effectively a carbon tax on businesses) has begun to make progress. My idea is that the combination of a price intervention at the extraction stage and another at the emissions stage could be mutually reinforcing.

3) Market-based solutions, merely giving a price signal to people about which are more unsustainable goods, is insufficient. People make their choices for complex reasons, and price is insufficient to change social norms. There needs to be far more education about ecological consequences of personal and corporate decisions. The EU energy efficiency label supposedly helps consumers make choices, but only has marginal effect. Once there is increased awareness of ecological as well as financial costs of product lifecycles (running costs), there should be increased popular pressure to ban certain carbon-costly practices, with perhaps pictures of drought-stricken fields on inefficient products, and some banned altogether to encourage better design.

4) The above should also steer private investment, but as Stern described climate change as the biggest market failure in history, governments should be freed and encouraged to also directly requisition resources and invest in green industries domestically and worldwide. Not just renewable generation, but sustainable agriculture and housing. As in a war effort, governments may also need to invest in domestic (explicit and transparent) propaganda to change social attitudes. They’ve done it for smoking tobacco, now they need to do it for combustion generally.

5) Emissions reduction must be seen as a central component to international development. There will also be a need for increased disaster and famine relief, but maybe the Green Climate Fund will ultimately help fulfil this need.

6) Population control policies are more likely to be acceptable and work once we can see ourselves facing global problems, and that’s more likely when it’s harder for those with power to insulate themselves against them, in other words in a more equal world.

7) This is not an exhaustive list, and continual review looking for ecological hazards is needed.

That may sound too prescriptive, but my question is how we multiply the political will to get there, in my estimation by a factor of ten from what we have now.

[Cedric Knight]

Just some waffly thoughts: I think both the definitions by Graham Pyke and Eric Zencey of “sustainability” work, although there have been some objections about maintaining present activities that are themselves unsustainable in the long-term. I wonder: Can we have a quantifiable definition of the sustainability of a society or a particular practice? E.g. How long can we continue to use rare earth elements at the current rate? How much ecological damage are we doing by burning coal, though, even though there are centuries’ worth of coal in the ground? What if we exhaust one source of capital without great ecological or social disaster and move to a different technology that exhausts another – do we then also need to include the known sustainability of that?

For most people sustainability is going to be somewhere between how long a practice can continue without impacting itself, and a stricter definition of how long it can continue without causing harms elsewhere. The kayak analogy works only because it’s all of us in one kayak deciding to avoid the rapids.

I’m not surprised at a the reaction of John Taves’s given an association of this site with population concerns. Clearly population is a factor in environmental degradation, but it’s not the only one. I see why people tend to neo-Malthuthian worries about geometric or exponential growth, but I’m not sure what we can do about it beyond encourage the “demographic transition” that is supposedly already underway, with increased access to family planning, sex education, sexual equality (I note the Ehrlichs point out this is still not achieved in Sweden) and life chances for women. In fact, to maintain a steady-state impact of our species on all others, population could rise with increasing technological efficiency, or fall if we want increased economic growth, so long as the total production of waste or exploitation of resources does not exceed the productive capacity of the Earth (“planetary boundaries”). Similarly, there may be shifts between say “built capital” (infrastructure?) and other forms of capital which are cyclical but do not necessarily endanger long-term stability because we have a plan to turn the kayak around before we get to the rapids.

I don’t quite understand JT’s argument about replacement rate. If we define replacement rate in terms fertility of adult women where child mortality is low, then replacement rate is slightly higher than 2.0 children per woman. Yes, if it’s higher than this then child mortality or adult mortality will ultimately need to rise, but that is what it means to be beyond the short-term replacement rate. It’s slightly sexist, but one could say that there are masculine and feminine ways of achieving a neo-Malthusian equilibrium: the worse way is to exploit all resources, go to war over them and kill each other or die of starvation; the other way is to consciously decide on family size.

[Author]

Posts