climate change » TripleCrisis

Spotlight Durban: Climate change gets personal

Elizabeth A. Stanton, part of a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

It’s that time of year again.

This week marks the start of the 17^th annual United Nations climate change conference, or Conference of Parties (COP). Held this year in Durban, South Africa, COP17 will bring together hundreds of official delegates along with thousands of demonstrators and other unofficial observers. It’s always possible that COP17 will reach an international agreement on a viable climate policy (17^th time’s the charm!), but the complete lack of consensus seems likely to derail negotiations.

Climate change impacts each nation differently, and each nation would have very different costs from lowering emissions to safe levels. This diversity of impacts complicates climate policy negotiations and makes it very challenging for rich and poor nations to find common ground. But the broad range of climate impacts expected around the world has another critical effect on negotiations, one that receives very little media coverage or scholarly analysis: there is an enormous range of likely climate impacts not just between countries, but within them.

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Spotlight Durban: Occupy Durban

Patrick Bond

There they fell during 2011, one after the other in past-their-prime domino descent: Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from Tunis, Hosni Mubarak from Cairo, Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Muammar Gaddafi from Tripoli, Georgios Papandreou from Athens, Silvio Berlusconi from Rome, US football guru and sex-crime cover-upper Joe Paterno from Penn State University – with media baron Rupert Murdoch, soccer supremo Sepp Blatter, Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad and Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh looking decidedly shaky, too.

However, let’s be frank: in many cases the courageous push by the 99% against these 1% personalities only dislodged the venal creatures, not the system, so replacements crawled right back in.

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Spotlight Durban: Taking Development and Emission Reduction Seriously

Elizabeth A. Stanton

As negotiators come together in Durban, South Africa, to discuss the fate of international climate policy, the balance between poverty reduction and emissions reduction is sure to be one of the most contentious issues. Economic growth in developing countries is likely to mean growing per capita emissions, though the increase can be limited by investment in low-carbon technologies. Climate policies will require diverting some spending away from other priorities, though policy can be designed so this burden does not fall on low-income countries. The twin goals of preventing dangerous climate change and fostering development don’t have to be incompatible. If economic development is swept under the table, however, they surely will be.

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What’s New in Climate Economics

Frank Ackerman

Economic analysis has become increasingly central to the climate policy debate, but the models and assumptions of climate economics often lag far behind the latest developments in this fast-moving field. That’s why Elizabeth Stanton and I have written Climate Economics: The State of the Art, an in-depth review of new developments in climate economics and science since the Stern Review (2006) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007), with more than 500 citations to the recent research literature.

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Response to Frank Ackerman

Richard Tol, guest blogger

Over the last 20 years, I have developed (and later co-developed) an integrated assessment model of climate change called FUND. Model code and documentation used to be available to anyone on request. It can now be freely downloaded. Reproducibility and transparency are cornerstones of scientific inquiry.

Some modelers prefer to keep their code private. There are a number of reasons for this. One reason is the potential for abuse. Someone may borrow your model, do something inappropriate or silly with it, and use the results to embarrass you.

I have borrowed other people’s models. I have found bugs in their codes, or what seemed to be bugs. I always discuss this with the modeler in question. If there really was an error – more often it is a misunderstanding on the part of the outsider – I left it to the modeler to correct this and whatever results that were affected.

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For whom the blog Tols

Frank Ackerman

Is it true that there’s no such thing as bad publicity? If so, we’re in luck. The paper that Elizabeth A. Stanton and I wrote on the social cost of carbon has been discussed on the Bishop Hill blog, a leading forum for British climate skeptics – and in comments on that blog and on Twitter by Richard Tol.

Bishop Hill cites us as estimating that the social cost of carbon – the monetary value of the present and future damage caused by emitting one ton of carbon dioxide – could be $1,000 or more. Tol calls this estimate “complete nonsense,” and Bishop Hill refers to the increase from the U.S. government’s $21 estimate to $1,000 and higher as “fairly jawdropping.”

Feel free to pick your jaw back up; we never said that the social cost of carbon is $1,000. We did say that the value should reflect important climate uncertainties, and that our modeling of those uncertainties produced a range of possible values from $28 to almost $900 for emissions today, or from $64 to about $1,500 for emissions in 2050.

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Macroeconomic Policies and the Costs of Climate Change

Alejandro Nadal (also available in Portuguese)

Stabilizing concentrations of greenhouse gasses (GHG) in the atmosphere, and adapting to the impact of climate change, have significant economic costs. Can these costs be met under the macroeconomic policy posture currently embraced by most countries? This is an important question given the massive scale of resources that are involved in a sustained time horizon.

In spite of the global economic and financial crisis, most advanced capitalist countries still adopt a view of macroeconomic polices dominated by the overarching objectives of price stability and fiscal discipline. In fact, this is what is guiding today the policy response to the crisis in Europe and the United States. In the developing world, the picture is a bit more complicated, but it is fair to say that most countries still define their macroeconomic priorities in terms that closely resemble the dogmas of neoliberalism.

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Why the Green New Deal is a Response to the European Debt Crisis

Gerhard Schick

The global economic crisis has not been overcome; its character has merely changed. For us parliamentarians, its most tangible characteristic is the smoldering debt crisis in some Euro countries. Similar to the crisis in the banking sector, the European government debt crisis is typical of a large-scale financial crisis, the “Second Great Depression,” and managing it has to be addressed in this context. If it were only an uncontrolled government debt accumulation in Europe, then it would now be appropriate to simply apply debt brakes to manage the public debt, and to work with stronger sanction options. But would this have prevented the problems in Ireland or Spain? No. The financial crises in Spain and Ireland have absolutely nothing to do with government irresponsibly incurring debt. The government debt only increased when the government had to react to the excessive indebtedness of the private households and banks that it had previously permitted.

The conservative reinterpretation of the debt crisis as a purely governmental debt crisis due to excessive government spending is politically smart but factually incorrect. Drastic austerity programs alone are therefore not very useful in overcoming the crisis. On the contrary, the current crisis policy aggravates the crisis in many areas.

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Coal ash regulation would create 28,000 jobs

Frank Ackerman

Does environmental protection destroy jobs? That may be the strongest argument that the pro-pollution lobby has going for it. No one wants to endorse dirty air and water in so many words, but hey, we’re just trying to save jobs at a time when millions are out of work. In one of the latest reincarnations of this idea, the electric utility industry claims that regulating the disposal of coal ash could eliminate up to 316,000 jobs.

Ever sensitive to industry’s needs and wishes, Republicans in the House of Representatives have drafted a bill to ban federal regulation of coal ash, H.R. 2273. It’s expected to reach the floor of the House for a vote this week. Lobbyists supporting H.R. 2273 helpfully point out that it will stop the destruction of 316,000 jobs.

A quick reality check: regulating coal ash disposal means using earth-moving equipment, which doesn’t drive itself, constructing new facilities which don’t build themselves, and so on. Close your eyes and try to picture this, and you may see some workers on the premises. Environmental regulation generally creates jobs, including lots of blue-collar jobs in construction and manufacturing.

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Low carbon economy: a reality check

Sunita Narain

As an environmentalist who looks for answers, I am clear that there is a huge amount of buzz about low carbon economy and there is an equal amount of confusion about what this means. Nobody wants to accept that in the current economic model, the technology pathway is constrained. There is just so much any country can do to reduce its emissions, without changing the way it does business or the business of business itself. This is the crisis and challenge of climate change. This is why the world is struggling to find an agreement on an issue, which is both obvious and serious.

India is no different from the rest of the world. In fact it is at the bottom of the development trajectory – it has a long way to go to meet its growth needs and the way ahead will only add to pollution. This is inevitable. It will need the ecological space to increase its emissions.

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