Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Blown by Cheney’s office

‘So let me get this right,’ I said. ‘I am one of less than a handful of people working inside al-Qaeda for Western governments. I have identified senior leaders, was on the inside of plots in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and provided the only intel you have on al-Qaeda’s WMD programme. And in my spare time I tracked networks here in England, a job that’s more urgent now.

‘And MI6 thought my work was so important that you shared it with the CIA, which then took it to the White House, which then gave it to a journalist. Which means you now have one fewer than a handful of agents inside the world’s most dangerous terrorist group.’

…

It was useless. I knew MI6 was not responsible for the leak; there was a bigger play going on. The British liked to show the US they punched above their weight, still brought gold to the table, still knew how to deploy and gather human intelligence better than anyone. In the process, they shared information that was thrown into the roulette wheel of leaks and spin for which the US government was notorious.

Dean, Aimen with Tim Lister and Paul Cruickshank. Nine Lives: My time as the West’s top spy inside al-Qaeda. 2018. p. 322

Hypocrisy back and forth

Blair King (whose blog bio says he has an “Interdisciplinary PhD in Chemistry and Environmental Studies”) is one of the people who had sent a tweet arguing that only people who use few or no fossil fuels can call for decarbonization and who I linked to this rebuttal post. He subsequently wrote his own response to me. I appreciate the substantive quality of what he wrote, but I still disagree with his conclusions.

To begin with, he says:

The reason the charge of hypocrisy is used so often in this debate is because it represents a valid concern. We live in a world full of hypocrites who will say one thing in public and do another in the privacy of their own lives. The problem is that until you have personally tried to go without fossil fuels you can’t really understand how hard it really will be. So a hypocrite is apt to make claims that are not founded on an understanding of the scope of the challenge, usually that doing so will be relatively easy

Fair comment, but I don’t think I understate the cost, difficulty, or challenge of rebuilding of the global energy system, nor automatically assume people in the future will use as much energy as we do today. Saving the biosphere justifies major lifestyle changes.

He goes on to say: “[t]o suggest that we can make massive global political changes without anyone making individual changes represents magical thinking”. That’s not what I have been saying at all. My point is that it’s wrongheaded to argue that only people who don’t use oil can call for decarbonization and further that efforts at addressing climate change through voluntary individual action are hopeless. People will definitely need to make changes, but they won’t for the most part be voluntary and individual. People don’t individually decide what sort of power plants get built, where our raw materials come from, or how any part of our integrated, technological global society functions. A lot of those systems have actually been set up by larger entities like corporations and governments making choices, but so far that decision making doesn’t reflect a determination to control how much fossil fuel gets burned and thus how much climate change gets imposed on the world. Decarbonization requires large scale political change and the relevant criterion for evaluating our individual behaviour is whether it is promoting or impeding that transition.

Dr. King then goes on to talk about sea level, challenging my prior claim that there are “centuries of experience that the sea level is always at more or less the same height”. Oddly, he then includes a chart that directly supports my point. It shows sea level going back to 1880, and shifting from about 125 mm below the zero axis to about 50 mm above. Compared to what is being induced by us melting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the variation he shows is trivial. As described in the sea level rise portion of the U of T divestment brief: “A 2009 Science article examined the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and ice sheet stability. The paper identifies how the last time global CO2 concentrations were at current levels, global temperatures were between 3 ˚C and 6 ˚C hotter and sea levels were ’25 to 40 meters higher than at present’.” Expected sea level rise resulting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use is of the order of 1 m to much more: well outside the scope of what anatomically modern humans have experienced, and certainly way beyond what our present-day seafront infrastructure was built for.

Dr. King doesn’t provide much of a response to my using David MacKay’s book as evidence that there is enough renewable and fission energy available to more than replace our current fossil fuel use. In the same paragraph, he argues that somehow the creation of hydrogen-powered airliners is a critical missing part of decarbonization. First, I don’t assume that people will or should be able to fly anywhere near as much as they currently do. Second, I make clear in my post that decarbonization is a progressive process that needs to begin with the fossil fuel use that’s easiest to eliminate before moving to the harder stuff. If you want to keep using them, planes and rockets need energy dense fuel so they’re both part of the hardest to shift portion of our emissions. I would be happy to see air travel become much rarer and more expensive, and accept that such a shift is probably a necessary part of our overall decarbonization effort.

On raw materials, Dr. King says:

Petrochemicals represent a treasure trove of stored chemical energy that simply cannot be replaced given our current scientific knowledge and energy systems.

I wasn’t saying that replacing fossil fuels will be easy. I have been consistent in saying it’s one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced and it’s far from clear whether we will manage it. That said, there is no basis for saying that fossil fuels are an irreplaceable raw material. If their precursors could be made by plants out of air and sunlight we can do the same thing: quite possibly at a smaller scale than today’s petrochemical-fed industries and at a higher cost, but again I accept that many things in a low carbon future will be rarer and more costly than they are now.

It might affect Dr. King emotionally to know that I have actually done a lot personally to reduce my fossil fuel dependence and contribution to climate change. I have structured my life so that I can do everything essential on foot: easily able to walk to work and to complete necessary errands. At times, I go weeks at a time without even taking public transit. I have never had a driver’s license or owned a car. I last flew in 2007 and the last time I visited my family and hometown was in 2009/10 by Greyhound, which we calculated would be substantially less greenhouse-gas intensive than flying. I live in a single room on a floor shared by three people. I don’t bring this stuff up in response to hypocrisy allegations because I think the whole ‘only someone who doesn’t use fossil fuels can or should call for decarbonization’ is logically unsound. It’s perhaps worth mentioning here in response to Dr. King’s argument that only people who have chosen to greatly reduce their footprint can know what sort of future they are calling for. I think I have such an idea and, if the alternative is imposing the kind of massive threat that we currently are on people in the future and non-human nature, I think those sacrifices and more are not only acceptable but mandatory.

The emotional tone of Dr. Blair’s post is a bit exasperating in that he seems to think that his level of contempt toward the caricature he has developed of me is itself somehow an argument. He and his supporters have gotten into a big huff because I blocked him on twitter. This easily bleeds into the utterly indefensible argument that anyone who you care to talk to has the obligation to listen to you, and to do so on a platform of your choice (brilliantly lampooned by XKCD). As most people now seem to accept, twitter is a pretty awful place made marginally more tolerable by the ability to block people. I routinely encounter climate change deniers and twitter users who don’t even try to respond to substantive arguments but who simply hurl abuse. If I didn’t block them, they would dominate my timeline. Furthermore, I think I have every right to block people whose tweets I don’t want to see: a category that still includes Dr. King and the other twitter users who took a personally interest in the matter of this banning who followed on after him in arguing that blocking him was very, very wrong.

Another basic error in Dr. King’s post shows in the title: “When political scientists do environmental science the results are not always pretty”. The question of what we ought to do in response to climate change certainly requires science to answer. We need to know how much warming will result from how much coal, oil, and gas burning and what consequence a given level of warming will have for humanity and the rest of nature. Actually deciding what to do, however, goes well beyond environmental science to incorporate politics, economics, and most fundamentally ethics. Condemning people in the future for thousands of years to live in a world which we destabilized and degraded through our selfish use of fossil fuels is a profoundly immoral choice. If we’re not going to make it, we need to stop producing new fossil fuel production, transport, export, and use architecture in rich and highly polluting places like Canada and then play a determined and good faith role in spreading climate-safe energy technologies globally. That’s not the “Chinese Communist Party and Russia’s Vladimir Putin” view, as Dr. Blair rather childishly alleges. That’s survival politics in the 21st century. The alternative is not to keep the cozy fossil-dependent world we have now, but see how rich and prosperous we can remain as devastating global change is making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and huge numbers of people start fighting over what’s left.

Open thread: climate lawsuits

People are making use of nearly every possible mechanism to try to cajole, convince, pressure, or force governments into adopting plans that are ambitious enough to avoid dangerous climate change.

One possible avenue of remedy is lawsuits, like when the Urgenda Foundation convinced a Dutch court to require the government to tighten its 2020 emission reduction target.

In October, The Economist reported:

The state of New York filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, claiming that it misled investors about the risk that regulations on climate change posed to its business. The suit alleges that the oil company “built a façade to deceive” how it measured the risk and frequently did not apply the “proxy cost” of carbon, which accounts for expected future events, to its decisions.

There are attractive and unattractive features to using the courts. On the plus side, they may be more open to evidence than politicians, who are generally loathe to do anything that might threaten jobs or economic growth in the near term. The biggest limitation is probably the courts aren’t policy-makers and defer to legislatures to actually design government policy. Also, because both the causes and the effects of climate change are spread across space and time it’s impossible to say that emissions from source X caused consequence Y. Also, since the people harmed are all around the world and largely in the future there is no court that can hear petitions from all of them.

That said, there is cause for hope that lawsuits will be part of an effective path forward and a means to hold governments to account when they want to claim to be climate champions while simultaneously favouring and protecting emitting industries.

Related:

Overcoming fossil dependence and building the world we want

Don’t you hate it when people who use fossil fuel based products for everything from travel to medicine to telecommunications criticize the fossil fuel industry or say that we shouldn’t build big new fossil fuel projects? We have a civilization that depends so much on fossil fuels, and yet these environmentalists want us to stop investing in them and to move to other forms of energy!

I have seen this general objection many times. Here’s a sample:

  • @rigger1977 — You start the march Milan. Throw away all products made from petroleum.
  • @trevormarr1 — Milan, @JustinTrudeau and @RachelNotley please list 10 things you use daily that exist strictly GREEN & will not require any oil/fossil fuel influence in their existence, we can wait! Try not to look like a hypocrite as you waste Canada’s opportunity! Let’s see how GREEN u live?
  • @glen_lees — If there are all these options one would expect that you use zero fossil fuels
  • @MHallFindlay — Personal insults don’t add to the debate. Just curious: When was the last time you flew somewhere or drove a car? Demand is a key component.
  • @CdnLadybug — And do you drive a car, use a cell phone or any products whereby oil products have been used to produce it? ALL forms of energy necessary.
  • @sinclair_pam — You yourself preaching from a fossil fuel device…how will you keep the hysteria alive without social media…brought to you by fossil fuels
  • @jglapski — You used fossil fuels tweeting this hypocrisy.
  • @aybren — So how will you stay warm this winter when you stop using all fossil fuel products?
  • @brucelabongbong — If you hate oil and it’s products……stop using them….simple…..
  • @lamphieryeg — Tell you what, Milan. When you give up fossil fuels, let us know. Till then, see ya.

Yes, environmentalists do want to end investment in fossil fuels and shift instead to other forms of energy. And your hypocrisy objection is a lot less substantial than it may seem.

There are three parts to the counterargument: climate change makes it necessary to move on from fossil fuels, we have alternatives to them as both sources of energy and feedstocks, and system change happens at the political level and not at the level of individual choice.

Let’s begin.

1. Climate change makes it necessary to replace fossil fuel energy

Whenever we burn coal, oil, or gas we add carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere. That greenhouse gas reduces the amount of infrared (longwave) radiation which the Earth emits to space. This is incontrovertibly well established. We can directly observe the reduced outgoing radiation as well as the resulting temperature increase, since energy that isn’t being lost to space inevitably warms the planet system.

Describing all the consequences of warming so far exceeds the sensible scope for any blog post. The authoritative source is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their fifth assessment report covers impacts from sea level rise to loss of glaciers and snowpack, worse extreme weather, more serious wildfires, the acidification of the oceans from CO2 in the atmosphere, adverse effects on agriculture, and adverse impacts on human health. A report I helped write for the University of Toronto goes through many different forms of harm and the evidence for each of them (p. 25–60). All these impacts worsen as the level of CO2 rises.

The consequences to date are bad, but it’s vital to understand that the harm arising from fossil fuel use is delayed. It takes decades for the greenhouse gasses (GHGs) added to the atmosphere to have their full effect. In this sense it’s a bit like the delayed effects of alcohol. If you drink two bottles of wine in 20 minutes you probably won’t feel too drunk at minute 21, but you have set yourself up to be excessively drunk once the wine has entered your blood and brain. However bad climate change’s effects are today, that’s just a taste of what is already coming, and far far worse will be coming if we don’t stop adding GHGs to the atmosphere.

How bad could it get? Since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was negotiated in 1992 a consensus has emerged among scientists and policy-makers that warming the planet by more than 2 ˚C above pre-industrial temperatures would be “dangerous”. Some communities face grave risks at much lower levels of warming as even small amounts of sea level rise and other disruption threaten them. Under a “business as usual” scenario, the IPCC expects global CO2 to rise from the present level of about 400 parts per million (ppm) to over 700 ppm by the end of the century, with a corresponding temperature rise of over 4 ˚C. That doesn’t sound like much in the context of the weather outside or where you set your thermostat, but that kind of climate change is massively beyond anything anatomically modern human beings have experienced in the 300,000 years or so that our species has existed in its current form.

All around the world, human systems have been built to function in the climate where they now exist, based on centuries of experience that the sea level is always at more or less the same height, rivers have a certain volume, certain areas are good for growing crops, etc. Causing warming of well over 2 ˚C would invalidate all those assumptions, producing enormous challenges for human beings everywhere, massive new flows of migration, and almost certainly military conflicts as desperate people from one area are forcibly blocked from moving somewhere else. That’s the kind of world we get for people who are young today if we keep using fossil fuels and, because CO2 remains in the atmosphere for long periods of time, that disruption would continue for thousands of years.

As James Gustave Speth explains:

How serious is the threat to the environment? Here is one measure of the problem: all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world for our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy.

Sticking with fossil fuels is an option, but it’s an option with almost unimaginably horrible consequences. If we care at all about the welfare of those who will live on the Earth after us, we need to do our utmost to stop choking the atmosphere with CO2.

2. We have alternatives for both energy and raw materials

There is actually far more renewable energy available than there is in fossil fuels. That can be worked out intuitively as follows. Even if we used 100% of global fossil fuel production to try to heat the oceans, if the sun stopped warming the Earth they would nonetheless cool and eventually freeze to the bottom. My MIT Physics of Energy reference card says that the solar power incident on Earth is 174 petawatts (million billion watts). A large nuclear reactor has about one gigawatt of output, so the sun constantly striking the planet has energy akin to about 200 million large nuclear reactors (whereas we have actually built about 400 of them). The same card shows that complete fission of 1 kg of uranium 235 would produce 77 terajoules of energy, whereas monthly US electricity consumption is about 1 million terajoules. We can’t actually capture and use all the energy in either of those cases, but those figures can give us some initial hope about energy options aside from fossil fuels.

Cambridge physicist David MacKay released a free book that goes through all of our energy generation options, including fossil fuels with carbon capture, and the end result is that it’s entirely possible to have a global civilization where everyone alive gets as much energy as the average European today without altering the climate. It requires a vast new global energy infrastructure based on some combination of climate-safe options, but we need to keep massively investing in energy regardless of what form we choose. Keeping the global fossil fuel industry going will cost tens of trillions of dollars per decade according to the International Energy Agency. Is it smarter to invest that money in fossil fuel energy which has volatile prices, is unevenly distributed, and which theatens to wreck the habitability of the planet or is it smarter to invest in a post-fossi-fuel decarbonized global economy which can support human prosperity indefinitely?

In addition to pointing out how 85% of global energy use comes from fossil fuels, people who advocate continued investment in the industry point to the importance of fossil fuels as a feedstock, often pointing out how electronics or medical equipment are made using fossil fuels. The main response to that is that we use fossil fuels as feedstocks because the technology to do so is broadly distributed, and fossil fuels are cheap because we ignore most of the costs their use imposes on others. Fossil fuels aren’t made of anything special chemically. We can get carbon and hydrogen from all sorts of carbon-neutral sources. It’s just a question of investing in the right capabilities and breaking our dependence on old feedstocks and processes. We need new ways to make agricultural fertilizer without natural gas, run farming equipment without diesel, manufacture steel without coke, and make low-carbon concrete or concrete substitutes. That doesn’t need to happen all at once, and some fossil fuel uses will be much harder to displace than others, but the sensible thing to do is to start with the cheapest and easiest substitutions and work from there toward the harder ones. That’s a big part of what carbon prices of various sorts are meant to achieve.

3. How change happens

If your town is dumping untreated sewage into a river which then flows past other towns where people use the water for drinking, you might rightly object to the choice your community is making. Is the solution to build a home sewage treatment plant so that your share of the problem goes away? Or is it perhaps to stop urinating and defecating altogether?

In this case, it’s obvious that the only way to meaningfully change the situation is to convince the general public and decision makers to change the system for everyone. Exactly the same dynamic applies to climate change. It may be laudable when individuals work to reduce their personal CO2 footprint, but we all live in a society where fossil fuels are dominant. A slight reduction in demand arising from the voluntary choices of a few concerned people won’t resolve that.

If we want to prevent a global catastrophe arising from fossil fuel use we need to go way beyond what voluntary consumer choice and the operation of markets will do alone. We need top level political change and the replacement of today’s leaders, parties, and policies with new ones that appreciate the seriousness of our problem and who share the determination to overcome it. That’s part of what tweets opposing new fossil fuel projects are meant to achieve, and that’s why it’s rather missing the point to call out the people making them for not having zero personal emissions.

There are huge opportunities to be captured in the transition to global decarbonization. To begin with, we can overcome all the problems caused by fossil fuels. That includes climate change, of course, but there is also the way fossil fuel profits fund unsavoury regimes (another favourite weak twitter argument is that opposing new fossil fuel infrastructure in Canada is akin to professing love for Russia and Saudi Arabia), the air and water pollution, the habitat destruction, and all the problems that arise from fossil fuel price volatility. We can also build a dramatically more equal global energy system, replacing the one where a privileged subset fly constantly and live in massive poorly insulated houses with one where everyone on Earth has what they need to live a safe, dignified, and prosperous life. Getting there might require deep changes in our political and economic systems, and it will likely put an end to activities that are only possible with wasteful and intense fossil fuel use, but moving to an equitable arrangement is surely better for most of those alive today as well as for most of those who will follow us in the future.

Beyond all that, we have a chance to move from the energy system that has been built in the 250 years since the industrial revolution — which relies on resources which are non-renewable and located primarily in a few parts of the world, and which is causing climate change that threatens a planetary catastrophe within our lifetime — to an energy system that relies on the energy constantly bombarding the Earth from the sun, the leftover heat deep inside the planet, and fissionable materials. That new energy system could power human civilization indefinitely, allowing for thousands more years of safe and enjoyable human lives; the continued development of art, culture, medicine, and scientific knowledge; and the preservation of the beauty and sheer existence of the countless species now being driven towards extinction by our fossil fuel use.

Despair and climate research

Kate Neville and Matthew Hoffmann, two of U of T’s most climate-focused political scientists, have a piece online: So, it’s all just too late, right? Studying climate politics in a time of despair.

It’s a good piece, especially on the necessity for and challenges of “real-time research”. When I was still focused on pipelines, I often worried that I was ‘chasing the news’ with the dissertation research. As we proceed deeper and deeper into the unprecedented, as humanity dominates the operation of the planet with more power than understanding or control, the need to do research on ongoing topics will only grow in importance.

The just world assumption

The popular aphorism ‘charity begins at home’ brings both sets of beliefs to the fore in a lucid way. Taken together, these beliefs work to diminish empathy on the part of the population by stressing the existence of deep and non-contingent differences between wealthy citizens and those living in other parts of the world. They also provide support for the ‘just world assumption’ in international life. According to research from experimental psychology, people have a natural propensity to believe that the world is a just place: one in which virtue is rewarded and in which innocent people do not suffer. When events in the world confound this expectation, and action cannot be taken to address this state of affairs, a common response is to blame the victim for his or her misfortune. In the case of extreme poverty, this propensity sometimes leads people to assert that those living in this condition are lazy, immoral or corrupt. Both moral nationalism and the idea of charity reinforce this impression by giving support to the notion that the material order corresponds to a wider moral hierarchy – one in which those who are worthy succeed, and in which those who are not depend upon the charity or goodwill of others.

Gabriel, Iason. On Affluence and Poverty: Morality, Motivation and Practice in a Global Age. (DPhil thesis) 2013 p. 162

Related:

Global wealth disclosure as a step toward redistribution

It’s a fantasy to imagine that today’s governments would confront the wealthy in this way, but it’s nonetheless of some value to think about some of the barriers to major global redistribution and potential means through which they might be surmounted.

As with other major global challenges like nuclear proliferation there is a coordination problem in establishing more redistributive policies. People say that if one country starts taxing wealth, or land, or otherwise working to rebalance income and wealth across their society, those with the most will simply move elsewhere, either physically or legally for tax purposes.

As a preliminary step, there may be some value is simply compelling ‘high net worth’ individuals to disclose their worldwide financial dealings to any country where they want major government benefits, from the protection of their intellectual property to government contracts and support for their businesses. Remember that private property is a fiction that governments choose to uphold, not a fact of the universe or something that individuals can meaningfully assert for themselves. Every major country could agree on a financial disclosure standard that is (a) intended to capture a person’s economic activity all over the world and (b) designed to overcome deliberate obfuscation through corporations, trusts, and other legal mechanisms which can conceal who owns and benefits from what.

Governments have many potential levers to compel compliance, from visa rules to the tax system, and it’s especially plausible that the rich would comply if most appealing jurisdictions to live in acted simultaneously: say, the EU (including poor muddled Britain), the US and Canada, Japan and China, Australia and New Zealand, and a few others to start with. Doubtless such a reporting obligation would drive a flurry of new consulting activity to help rich people avoid it or minimize what they disclose, but it would nonetheless be a step toward transparency and an important reminder that even those with the freedom to travel and live wherever they like ultimately derive much of their wealth from countries with capable bureaucracies and that they aren’t immune from the sovereignty of those states.

Working through and thinking beyond the PhD

Lots on the go — I’ve had a sudden flurry of late year photo bookings, including a three day Canada-UK artificial intelligence conference at the Munk School.

I’m still working on the dissertation of course, continuing with interviews and the literature review while working with my committee to structure the final document.

I’ll be doing less TA work next term to free up time to finish the dissertation.

There’s certainly a lot that’s interesting happening in climate politics. The little-reported but somewhat tactically novel Extinction Rebellion in the UK; UN climate talks in Poland’s coal region; and Alberta getting bitumen sands producers to voluntarily cut back on production to try to raise prices. We’re still nowhere near a politics that integrates the risks arising from unmitigated climate change, or capable of driving emissions reductions fast enough to make something like a 1.5 ˚C or 2 ˚C ceiling remotely possible.

I’m starting to think ahead to work beyond the PhD. During my MPhil I came to understand that climate change is the defining political and civilizational fact of our era. I went to work for the government in hope that I could do some good, but realized that under the leadership of parties like Canada’s Conservatives and Liberals it’s not possible to do the right thing as a civil servant since, for all their platitudes, their policy choices show that they aren’t serious about preventing the worst effects of climate change. I chose to do the PhD because I thought the degree would be useful and that it would provide a freer platform for climate change activism, as it did with the founding of Toronto350.org and the organization of the fossil fuel divestment campaign at U of T.

I really don’t know what’s the best place to go next. It’s hard to judge who is really being effective in changing political conditions to make rapid and effective climate change action possible. It’s possible 350.org’s focus on 100% renewables and alliances with other progressive movements will be fruitful, but it also seems possible that they are making choices that will limit the political constituency they can appeal to. Many activist organizations seem at risk of over-reaching, choosing approaches which appeal to their staffers who are already personally committed to decarbonization, sometimes choosing tactics based on what’s emotionally satisfying rather than what’s part of a strategic plan leading to success. That said, I am ever mindful of the limits of my understanding and ability to foresee what will work. There’s no sense in dismissing emotions as a factor in political change, since our real problem is lack of sufficient motivation and motivation is ultimately emotionally driven.

Politics of narrow nationalist interest miss the underlying national interest in survival

This Canadian news article about political opposition to carbon taxes does a good job of summarizing the barriers to stronger greenhouse gas mitigation policy that people like Doug McAdam and Stephen Gardiner have articulated:

“Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, would be a hard enough sell on its own. But a tax in aid of a vast international plan to save the earth from a scourge that remains imperceptible to most voters, to which Canada has contributed little and against which Canada can have little impact, while countries whose actions would be decisive remain inert? Good luck”

To me it seems like a nice demonstration about Gardiner’s 4th proposition, about the “problematic paradigm” in climate change politics:

“In the environmental discourse, the presence of the perfect moral storm is obscured by the dominance and pervasiveness of an alternative, narrower analysis. According to this account, climate change is a paradigmatically global problem best understood as a prisoner’s dilemma or tragedy of the commons played out between nation states who adequately represent the interests of their citizens in perpetuity. However, such models assume away many of the main issues, and especially the intergenerational aspect of the climate problem. Hence, they are inadequate in this case, and perhaps many others. This point has theoretical as well as practical implications.”

This is the logic of Andrew Coyne’s newspaper article, that citizens in democratic states will use the inaction of others around the world to justify their own limited efforts to reduce domestic fossil fuel consumption, fuel production, and exports. As long as someone else is behaving unethically, we have license to do so too. As George Monbiot and others have explained eloquently, that logic is a suicide pact in the case of climate change. We need to establish an international order where continued fossil fuel dependence is discouraged and even punished, and the emergence of that order likely depends on some good faith first steps from the rich countries like Canada who now say their dirty path to prosperity can’t be followed by the rest of the world. It’s actually true that rising living standards in places including India and China can’t be fossil-fuel-driven as they have been in North America, Japan, and Europe for the most part. Convincing developing countries to take the less tested path of development based on carbon safe energy depends on countries that have already quite counterproductively invested enormously in fossil fuel energy to show that they too will move away from it for the sake of all the human generations that will follow us, and all the species whose welfare depends on how much climate change we cause.

The Paris Agreement, general aspirations versus specific targets

As reported in The Guardian, no major countries actually have commitments compatible with the 1.5 – 2.0 ˚C maximum target in the Paris Agreement: “When taken as benchmark by other countries, the NDCs of India, the EU, the USA and China lead to 2.6 °C, 3.2 °C, 4 °C and over 5.1 °C warmings, respectively.” Canada is among the very worst: “We find that the NDCs of Canada, China and Russia are less ambitious than their CBDR-RC hybrid allocations even under the least ambitious global emissions scenario available, with 5.1 °C of warming in 2100”.

From the beginning people have been skeptical about how serious countries are about the warming targets in the Paris Agreement, with the most optimistic believing that the agreement would be a first step toward gradually adopting compatible targets.

The Nature Communications paper is also quite interesting in its discussion of global equity and climate change, arguing that: “While not all countries use indicators that favour their equity argument in their communication, a common definition of equity is unlikely to be adopted since countries generally tend to support interpretations of distributive justice that best serve their self-interest and justify their negotiating positions”.