“In one of the more memorable moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama explained why he rejected John McCain’s call to postpone their September debate in Oxford, Mississippi, during the negotiations on the first financial bailout package. “It’s going to be part of the president’s job,” Obama declared, “to be able to deal with more than one thing at once.””
“Something similar can be said about climate policy. A variety of proposals – for public investment, carbon pricing, regulatory standards – are cooking in Washington’s political stew. Sometimes the proponents of specific policies are tempted to oversell their merits, while dismissing other policies as unnecessary or even counterproductive. But if Congress and the Obama administration are going to get smart on climate change, part of their job is to deal with more than one policy at once…”
In an interview with Newsclick, Triple Crisis blogger Martin Khor looks back at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference and discusses opportunities that were missed and the way forward to take negotiations to a positive conclusion.
There is no doubt about it: people are changing the Earth’s climate. The evidencefor what scientists call “anthropogenic climate change” is overwhelming, notwithstanding the obfuscation efforts of the climate change denial industry kept on life-support with infusions of corporate money.
But to say that our emissions of greenhouse gases are causing climate change is not to say that every extra person automatically multiplies the problem. Nor does it imply that population control is the ultimate solution – a view espoused by some on the Malthusian fringe of the environmental movement.
It’s time to stop blaming BP – alone. At least four other oil companies hired the same firm to write their plans for handling spills in the Gulf of Mexico. They ended up with nearly identical plans, complete with thoughtful concern about impacts on walruses. The CEO of ExxonMobil called it “unfortunate” and “embarrassing” that the plan included walruses, which have not been present in the Gulf region for millions of years.
On the other hand, according to U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, the oil industry’s standard plan for Gulf spills never mentions hurricanes or tropical storms, which do appear in the region on an annual basis. This makes perfect sense under only one interpretation: the oil companies were certain that accidents never happen. If there are no oil spills, your spill response plan can talk about unicorns, and no one will be the wiser.
In many places, including Germany, the idea of a Green New Deal continues to be criticized from the well-known conservative angle and, more recently, from a progressive perspective as well. For instance, in a recently published book, “Green Capitalism: Crisis, Climate Change and Unchecked Growth,” the authors — Stephan Kaufmann and Tadzio Müller — equate the Green New Deal with the idea of “Green Capitalism.” Coming from a progressive perspective, they claim that these concepts only provide an ecological basis for perpetuating the existing and highly problematic economic system.
This new critique of the Green New Deal is not valid because it fails to understand that the Green New Deal does not entail a simple “greenwashing” of the existing system. In fact, the project would profoundly transform our economy and society.
“An upside-down faucet, just open and running out.” That’s how an oil-spill expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute describes the massive release of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico that began April 20th at British Petroleum’s Deep Horizon oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. [See live video feed of the spill here.]
The disaster has opened an information faucet, too: every day, more truth about the real costs of fossil fuels is emptying into public view. Desperate efforts to control both spills are underway.
After its 450-ton blowout preventer failed, BP tried burning the oil slick, creating the macabre spectacle of the ocean on fire.
Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department’s Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water. Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames and then sink, causing oil to gush out uncontrollably and befoul the oceans. The odds seemed low, and still do: Aren’t there lots of drilling rigs in use, year after year? Twenty years ago, your elected representatives thought that you’d be happy to have them adopt a very low cap on industry’s liability for oil spill damages.
Nuclear power was never quite free of fears; it was too clearly a spin-off of nuclear weapons to ignore the risk of a very big bang. Yet as its advocates point out, we have had hundreds of reactor-years of experience, with only a few accidents. (And someday when Nevada’s politicians aren’t looking, maybe we can slip all of our nuclear waste into a cave in the desert.) Again, the risks are so low that you’d be happy to learn about a law limiting industry’s liability for accidents, wouldn’t you?
Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration law has galvanized popular protest and reignited demands in many quarters for an overhaul of US immigration policy. For those hoping that Obama’s next big legislative battle would be over climate change, however, the immigration firestorm could not have come at a worse time. Besides eclipsing climate change in public debate, the shadow of Congressional action on immigration scuttled the support of a key Republican, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for a Senate climate bill. Without Lindsey, the climate bill doesn’t have a prayer.
But apart from political minefields, are immigration and climate change such separate policy issues? Not if climate change is understood, as it should be, as a problem requiring urgent action both not only to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions but also to adapt to much more volatile local and regional climatic conditions driven by global warming.
In this video (made for the International Institute for Sustainable Development in 2008) I highlight the lessons of some of my earlier research on global environmental governance (GEG). I suggest that (a) GEG is like herding cats and if you want to herd cats you need to be nice to them; (b) the evolution of GEG is, in fact, a good story – it is not the story of a system that failed, it is the story of a system that has outgrown its design; and (c) better global environmental governance will necessarily require a redefinition of what we mean by “global environmental governance.”
It is increasingly evident that a comprehensive climate change agreement is unlikely at the next climate change meeting (COP 16) in Cancún, Mexico, on December 2010. Finance – that is how much money will be provided, where will it come from, how will it be used, and who will hold the strings of the purse – is one of the main obstacles to agreement, compounded by deep distrust between developing and developed countries. While a comprehensive deal is unlikely, there are financing instruments that could conceivably be agreed upon in Cancún; for example, an International Climate Change Lottery.
The idea of an international goal-driven lottery has been regularly raised since the 1970’s. A good starting point is work by Addison and Chowdhury in 2003 analyzing the prospects of harnessing the world lottery market (worth US$126 billion and generating US$62bn in gross profits) for the purposes of development.