Is Norway Divesting--or not?

Given the magnitude of the global energy sector, things are not always what they seem. Take Norway, and its sovereign wealth fund, the proceeds of its windfall oil boom, invested soberly to benefit Norwegians for generations to come. It's the largest sovereign fund in the world, amounting to a whopping 1.3% of ALL equity shares worldwide--a market-mover for sure.  In the Scandinavian tradition Norway, despite its current right-center government, stands for progressivism and a certain global responsibility, so it was not surprising when its pension fund managers announced last February, with much fanfare, that they were divesting from coal, that is, withdrawing $9-10 billion in stock holdings in some 50 large coal companies. The previous fall, Greenpeace Norway and two other environmental groups had published a carefully researched report showing that the sovereign fund was heavily invested in coal companies, and drew up a list of such public corporations it wanted the fund to withdraw from.

Alas, when the three groups looked back at the results of this 'divestment' this spring, what they saw was not what they hoped: in a follow-up report, they noted that the fund had largely reinvested in coal-related companies, many of them electric companies burning coal, instead of mining companies that produce it. The environmentalists cried foul, and on Wednesday the Norwegian parliament prepared to instruct the sovereign fund managers to try again. Once again, this new law was met with great applause in the Guardian, from Bill McKibben, and in general from a divestment movement that has accelerated rapidly since last winter. This Norwegian divestment 2.0 is seen as a major step with the possibility of drawing other large investors with it, as it pulls down the value of coal industry stocks. The change in context--the maturity of the movement which may be able to leverage this new Norwegian step in ways that weren't possible even in February--also known as a shift in 'market psychology' or 'mood,' may indeed be big news in the way Norway's first divestment effort wasn't.

Or maybe not. The shifting field of capital investments, of conglomerates with divisions that cover all bases of the energy field, makes it hard to know what divestment is real or 'fake'--as Norway's critics accused. But the growing prominence of the movement, in advance of the Paris agreements, may indeed make coal companies less able to maintain their reckless level of exploitation. The effective loss of value may translate as diminished working capital. But I still suspect that where there is a market for coal, there will be an incentive to produce it--not with Norway's capital but with someone else's. Helping India, China, and the other big coal users to replace their consumption of coal will be the long-term solution. But the frontal attack on its production--if such a thing turns out to be possible--may indeed advance that cause.

India's Climate Conundrum

Optimistically-inclined readers may want to skip this extensive, appalling report in yesterday's Guardian on the state of energy conversion in India. India is on the verge of being the world's most populous country. It will soon surpass the United States and rival China as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Under its powerful nationalist BJP government it intends to reinstitute 10% per year economic growth, powered mainly by domestically-produced dirty coal. And it makes no promises or apologies to the global climate movement.

One third of India's 1.3 billion inhabitants still lack electricity. Even with projected growth rates that are staggeringly ambitious--one new coal mine per month from now till 2020, says their coal minister--India will still emit less than a third of the greenhouse gases per capita in 2030 as will the US and China, according to their 'convergence' agreement to achieve something like parity. India's position is that eliminating poverty is its overwhelming priority--wealthier nations can address the climate problem. As Prime Minister Modi insists, India has a "right to growth," and it will make no international promises that infringe on that right.

India's environmental minister has also asserted that "clean air is our birthright," though the photo of Delhi, above, might call that into question. Nonetheless there are attempts to replace the oldest, dirtiest coal-burning plants--whose environmental consequences are truly nightmarish--with more modern cleaner ones. Requirements to reforest devastated mining sites are taking hold. Carbon capture technologies may be especially important in reducing India's impact on global atmospheric carbon.

India also has enormous potential for solar--solar intensity makes panels three times more productive there than in northern Europe--and a rapid increase in solar production, from 3 GW to 100 GW in the next 7 years, is also part of its national growth plan. The perfect correlation of seasonal needs--irrigation, cooling--with dry, sunny weather adds to the potential, as does the usefulness of rooftop solar in a country whose national infrastructure is underdeveloped as India's is. Nonetheless, given India's non-negotiable growth policies, the addition of solar to coal is a both/and, not an either/or proposition.

India's current refusal to make any international commitments, given its size and growth projections, threatens to derail the whole enterprise of the Paris COP21 conference. The coal it intends to mine and burn between now and 2040 would by itself exceed the 'carbon budget' the IPCC report considers permissible for restraining temperature rise to 2C. And yet India's government understands its vulnerability to climate change and environmental depredation--Delhi already has the world's worst air quality, and the environmental immiseration of whole regions is well-documented. Clearly this contradiction won't be resolved by the Paris meetings in December, but will a mechanism be put in place for steering India--and smaller less-developed countries with similar dilemmas--towards eventual resolutions? The acceleration of solar power and carbon capture may be the only hope to keep India's growth from pushing climate change into the catastrophic zone. Technical and financial assistance, forbearance, and solidarity--the Paris conference will need these in abundance if India, with its exceptional needs and demands, is to be brought gradually into the global consensus.

Greenwashing the Paris Conference?

It is one of the many paradoxes that haunt the climate struggle: the COP21 needs to assemble 25,000 delegates from 195 nations to hash out an agreement. That assemblage costs money, maybe 170 million Euros. Who can pay? Not the host French government, already under pressure to reduce its fiscal debt. So who has that kind of cash? Big corporations. And that's who will be sponsoring the climate conference (here, in French). Which corporations?

• EDF, the French energy giant, heavily involved in overseas coal production (who will supply electric car recharging stations)
• Paribas, the French bank most associated with fossil-fuel investments
• AirFrance, flagship of one of the worst polluting industries
• Renault Nissan, auto manufacturer (and supplier of electric cars for the conference)
• Suez Environnement, the waste management subsidiary of utility and energy giant GDF Suez (will manage waste disposal for the conference)
• LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate (Dior, champagne, cognac)
• ERDF, an EU-sponsored regional development firm

In sum, major players in the existing energy-and-growth economy are choosing to direct their corporate philanthropy to COP21. Change of heart? Or just a chance to fend off criticism with this largely symbolic identification with the climate movement? Is this a bad thing? Not if one imagines that serious energy transformation can occur without displacing the corporate powers that created the current (disaster-bound) regime. Otherwise, yes: the appropriation of the Paris conference by the very sectors--finance, industry, transportation, etc.--it needs to confront is not good news. Greenwashing is obfuscation. It may help pay some short-term bills, but it makes the overall task that much harder.

What Will Work?

I've been thinking about the global warming problem for many years, reading more intensively for the past year or so, and paying greater attention in the five months I've been writing this blog. Does that make me an expert on this devilishly complicated subject? Hardly. But I have learned a lot, and I want to take a few minutes to sum up how the problem looks to me right now. What are some of the many ideas out there for resolving the worsening climate change problem, and what prospects do they offer?

• Keep It In the Ground, Divestment, Government Regulation and other attempts to restrict the supply of fossil fuels. Dissuasion of petroleum giants by advocacy campaigns, divestment, shareholder motions and such has the value of publicizing the powerful role of these corporations in driving us forward to disaster. Such campaigns have no force to stop them--indeed, exploration of new reserves seems to be taking an upswing, despite everything we know. Still, the drama of divestment has great educational value, and shareholder campaigns and such at least have the value of speaking truth--in opposition to the rank disinformation of the industry and its propagandists. Nonetheless, where there is demand, supply will follow in our demand-based economy.
• Restriction of demand. Of more immediate value are regulations, such as those promulgated by Obama and the EPA, to restrict coal-burning power plants. Such regulations are unlikely to restrict natural gas consumption, and may even promote it as an alternative to coal or oil for short-term gain. Automotive restrictions (e.g. fuel efficiency) may help reduce oil consumption, as could a host of other regulatory measures: efficient home construction, for example, 'smart growth' planning, public transit, local sourcing--many traditional 'ecological' policies will have the effect of reducing the most excessive fuel consumption, or direct it to less harmful modes. Voluntary conservation has never been a winning policy strategy though, and in a political democracy regulation of consumption meets strong resistance, particularly in a climate like the US one, fraught with anti-government denialism.
• Market adjustments of energy costs. Here is where I think the greatest possibilities lie. Carbon taxes or exchanges are making their way, first because of the clear logic--such measures are simply accounting for externalized costs, which are beginning to be visible in the form of storm damage, vanishing reefs, rising sea levels, and droughts. Furthermore, these policies operate within the existing structure of 'free' markets, and are not unlike other familiar adjustments, such as taxes on gasoline or tobacco, with their considerable socialized costs. The Massachusetts legislature is considering a carbon tax proposal, such as parts of California, British Columbia, and other jurisdictions already have. This may be the simplest way to accelerate the use of renewables, particularly solar, which seems to be reaching a competitive price point but still needs to meet the challenge of vast increases in scale. Of course, subsidies and supports are another welcome form of market adjustment--the tax advantages for home installation of solar panels, with the right to sell unused energy to the grid, is an immediate example, though energy interests in Massachusetts are already trying to eliminate the state's brief experiment with this on cost grounds.
• National vs. International solutions. All attempts to adjust energy markets at the regional or national level meet with the objection of compromised competitivity. On the other hand, those are the effective jurisdictions where policy can be made and enforced. This problem has led to decades of inertia. What seems necessary is broad global agreement to enforce roughly comparable national policies, everywhere. That's the concept behind the COP21 meeting in Paris this year: to solicit national plans (INDCs), compare them for fairness (measured against each nation's capabilities, economic and political as well as logistical), and to aggregate their effects to see whether a relatively 'safe' atmospheric condition (defined as a 2 degree C temperature increase) can be achieved, or whether more drastic measures need to be taken. Whether the agreement in Paris will be achieved, whether it will be in any sense enforceable, and whether the appropriate follow-up and inevitable tightening of policies can be put in place are the big challenges of that initiative. But as former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd argues in today's NY Times, such an effort remains our last best hope.
• Techo-fixes. These abound, from various proposed methods of carbon capture to saturating the atmosphere with reflective particles to reduce solar radiation to 'salting' the oceans with carbon-attractive iron. Capturing carbon emissions from coal-burning power plants--which will surely continue to operate massively in China, India, and elsewhere for decades to come--is a technology which  seems feasible but expensive, and experiments are underway in China to explore its possibilities. Market absorption of costs would not be as large a problem if carbon surcharges were universally in place. On the other hand, atmospheric and oceanic manipulations on a meaningfully large scale are terrifying, with no real way to do a controlled experiment before we perhaps destroy our environment while trying to save it. The familiar Faustian paradigm--or Frankenstein effect--would discourage me from hoping to see solutions in this quarter. More 'organic' solutions such as massive reforestation--which may be happening anyway in temperate latitudes, but needs massive support in the tropical rainforests where it offers the greatest potential, would be a more rational way to encourage carbon sinks.  
• Transfers of technology and funding. The international climate movement has foundered from the beginning on the problem of unequal responsibility (early industrializers like the UK and the US put most of the greenhouse gases out there in the first place) and unequal means of remediation (how much can Bangladesh or Mali really pony up to mitigate or adapt?). Poorer countries need help to convert their economies--and to survive the inevitable consequences of climate change. Even newly rich countries like China can legitimately claim johnny-come-lately status, and India is a special case: massively threatening as it prepares to increase its energy consumption, largely by burning coal, and poor enough that significant transformation will need to come from international sources. Add the fact of colonization--India and many others of the world's poorest GHG emitters have been masters of their fates only briefly in modern times--and the logic of the Green Climate Fund becomes completely inevitable. Funding it, however, to the tune of $100 billion per year in NEW funds (not reallocated existing ones) is an enormous political challenge--ask Senator Inhofe, or even candidate Clinton, now much the US should be contributing, and you'll see the problem.

Those are some quick thoughts on a vast problem, which has generated a vast literature. You who are reading this probably have your own thoughts about problems and solutions--I urge you to click on the 'comment' button and share them. 

Saudi Solar

As a footnote to the Business Climate Summit that ended in Paris yesterday (see previous post):

Saudi Arabia's oil minister, Ali Al-Naimi, announced that Saudi Arabia was intensifying its investments in renewable energy, particularly solar, and hopes the kingdom will be fossil-free in its expanding consumption of energy by as early as 2040. Since 2012 at least the Saudi government has been expressing interest in developing solar for a post-petroleum economy, at the same time as its energy consumption, particularly of its own oil, rises steadily, but Al-Naimi's announcement yesterday suggested an accelerated program of solar investment. Quatar, with considerably less renewable energy in place, has announced similar though more modest plans.

Is this good news? Yes, as are all transfers from carbon-based to renewable energy. But the Saudis and Qataris have no plans to produce less oil and gas--they merely hope to export more of it, particularly as falling prices have driven down profits, motivating them to increase production for export. On some level this is a shell game (the con, not the giant oil corporation): until global markets everywhere resist the lowered oil and gas prices and expand production of renewables, gestures such as the Saudis' will have limited value. Saudi policy for leaving its vast reserves safely in the ground calls for large compensatory payments. Maybe a prosperous solar sector will reduce Saudi demands for adaptation funds, which will be needed by less wealthy nations.

In any case, yesterday's announcement suggested a shift in momentum from one of the world's major energy players--not decisive in itself, but an interesting sign.

Is Big Business the Solution?

In reporting yesterday on the flurry of diplomatic activity in advance of the COP21 climate conference I perhaps should have noted another international gathering: the Business and Climate Summit taking place today and tomorrow at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Big business leaders from all over will converge to share a "Vision of a Low-Carbon Society"--but what will they do to help bring it about?

In an op-ed in yesterday's Guardian French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and UNFCCC executive Christiana Figueres attempted to answer that question, but I'm not sure their answers were perfectly convincing. Yes, corporations can and will have already developed plans to reduce their energy consumption--within the limits of what production requires. And they have declared their interest in using renewable energy and "supporting sustainable development"--but surely their shareholders will insist that these feel-good objectives will only happen in the context of a maximized bottom line.

What is perhaps truer is that corporations are more alert now to investment opportunities in alternative energy and related technologies--but only if public initiatives establish markets for them by increasing the cost of fossil fuels (through carbon taxes and exchanges). Likewise corporations can, as Fabius and Figueres note, factor in the costs of climate risk and adaptation--but only if those costs are made real, either by public mandate or by actual disasters. Concretely, why should Royal Shell or Gazprom write down the cost of their fossil reserves unless some public entity makes those reserves unburnable? What interest would they have to initiate the accounting for such enormous losses on their own?

Symptomatic of this impasse is the op-ed in yesterday's Monde (here, in French) by two well-meaning executives, Jean-Pascal Tricoire of Schneider-Electrique and Pierre-André Chalendar of Saint-Gobain, the former a global electricity company, the latter a giant construction supply firm. Both are involved in climate-related trade associations, both declare their interest in decarbonizing the global economy. How? By declaring that energy efficiency is compatible with growth. By encouraging limits on energy consumption (but is that compatible with growth?). And by calling for higher prices on carbon-based energy, which they claim is the policy of their trade associations. Really?

Finally Tricoire and Chalendar acknowledge that only government can reform the energy markets that will allow profit-seeking corporations such as theirs to implement the policies they call for. Unilateral moves to pay more for energy are not to be expected. They, like the rest of us, look to the UNFCCC process in Paris to establish those regulatory parameters within which they can seek to decarbonize their enterprises. Can business play some role? Yes, by supporting the government initiatives that will made sustainable energy more competitive, and allow private markets to adjust. Is it a good sign that conglomerate corporate executives are standing up to support those goals? Of course. Will the Business and Climate Summit alter the energy landscape? Not by itself--but it may, as it intends,  add to the momentum for the real action in Paris, 200 days from now.

Diplomats Fiddle While Planet Burns?

Are the world's political leaders starting to accept the 'last chance' logic that argues for major substantive agreement at the Paris conference in December? Diplomacy is a shifty business, where appearance counts for more than reality, but there is a real flurry of activity out there, which may be putting some actual deals in place before the Paris COP becomes a Götterdämmerung. Here's a quick round-up of current initiatives:

• G7: the energy ministers finished talks in Hamburg last week in preparation for the June meeting of the world's largest capitalist economies, where two of the protagonists--President Hollande and Chancellor Merkel--are promising substantial commitments. Merkel, who will chair the G7, has pledged action on the $100 billion annual Green Climate Fund to help developing countries adapt and mitigate, while Hollande declared his support for legally binding agreements in Paris--a sticking point for the US, among others. Within the G7 itself, Canada and Japan--along with the US--are seen as the recalcitrants, in need of 'peer pressure' from their more enlightened European counterparts. 
• Meanwhile ministers from 35 nations are meeting in Berlin today at the 6th Petersberg Climate Dialogue, hosted by Chancellor Merkel. At the session, a pre-meeting for the Paris COP-21 conference, Merkel affirmed her support for strong carbon pricing measures.
• Plans are taking shape for the 3rd International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa in July. This meeting is seen as a way to build pressure for the wealthier nations to direct new development funds to the Green Climate Fund proposed in Copenhagen 6 years ago but not yet properly funded. 
• The Addis Ababa meeting will prepare for  a UN-sponsored conference on Sustainable Development to be held in New York in September. The intention is to renew the Millennium Development Goals, drafted by the international community in 2000 with little reference to the climate issue, in a framework which will peg development to climate-related goals, both for mitigation and adaptation.
• And the Paris conference itself? National proposals (INDCs) have been overdue for several weeks now. Liechtenstein and Andorra have come through with proposals for major reductions in their absolutely minuscule greenhouse gas emissions, as has Gabon, the first African nation to submit a plan, whose national carbon market, though small, at least represents an admirable prototype. Of the larger economies, since Russia's duplicitous proposal to count its forests as a carbon-reduction system, only Canada has arrived on the scene, with plans to reduce the methane leakage from its deplorable tar sands production fields. Canada's overall plan got a 'substandard' rating from the World Resources Institute.Will the large and significant economies use the remaining months to improve their attitudes?  

In short, the production of hot air in international forums is increasing steeply, while actual commitments are still sluggish. Will the former encourage the latter? That is really the Big Question for our time.

Monkeying with the Planet

William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of economics at Yale and one of the most durable and respected students of the economics of climate change, has just published an article in the New York Review of Books, dated June 4, that merits the attention of anyone interested in the climate issue. Nordhaus is reviewing a new book called Climate Shock by two equally eminent academic economists, Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman, subtitled The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet, and in the technical terms of such analysis, the consequences are dire indeed: the authors postulate, among other effects, a 30% decline in global output over a brief time, an economic disaster of unimaginable severity. Nordhaus focuses on several particular issues within the larger framework, and I want to summarize his most salient points:

1) The authors,using statistical probability analysis, focus on 'tail' effects rather than the more predictable losses--often calculated at 5%/year--due to expected changes in rainfall, sea level, and other already visible factors. Tail effects--the term refers to the outlying parts of a bell curve distribution--are by their nature unpredictable. The authors don't pretend to describe them but rate the likelihood at 10% that mean temperatures will rise 6 degrees Celsius this century, and that some dire unforeseen events will produce "the end of the human adventure on this planet as we now know it." Imagine the 'trigger points' or negative feedback loops many have pointed to, or intensifying weather events, sudden collapse of the antarctic ice shelf ... or some other large event no one has thought of yet. These distinguished economists postulate--for reasons not really explained in Nordhaus's review--that the chance of such an occurrence is 10%, not  a certainty but not great odds either.

2) So why, in the face of the unprecedented global threat has the response of the world's nations and peoples been so ineffectual over the three decades we have been pretty sure of the problem? Nordhaus lists many reasons--scientific complexity, political expediency, and so on--but, economist that he is, he homes in on the 'freerider' problem: in effect, the nations and their policy makers are unwilling to make large sacrificial investments on behalf of the whole earth when others, 'freeriders,' would benefit without making the same sacrifices. He attributes the inertia of policymakers to this problem, which he considers virtually insoluble.  Interestingly, Nordhaus ignores the UNFCCC process and the Paris conference it is leading up to, even though the 'peer pressure' mechanism built into that process is intended to give incentives to national governments by making public their own proposals along with those of others, so that the relative 'fairness' of each national plan can be viewed. Will it work? Clearly there are bugs as the plans start to accumulate (I'll discuss these details in a future post). But Nordhaus dismisses the UNFCCC voluntary plan because he has something more muscular in mind--which I'll turn to in a moment.

3) A third salient point addressed in the book and the review is the possibility of 'geoengineering' as a silver-bullet solution in the absence of more measured but unobtainable ones. The primary silver-bullet the authors address is the fanciful proposal to load the stratosphere with tiny mirror-like particles to reflect away a portion of the solar radiation entering the atmosphere, and thus lower global temperatures. Nordhaus and the authors point out the obvious: the potential for disaster in such an experimental procedure is enormous, as is the possibility that geoengineering would lead to climate warfare. What is perhaps most notable is the increasing mention of such schemes--and there are others afoot--which have the merit of being relatively cheap, while leaving in place the hugely profitable energy sectors as we know them. Fending off such Frankenstein-like temptations will become an increasing part of the climate issue, as this book begins to make clear.

In response to the bleak picture of Climate Shock, Nordhaus, after reviewing the global policy failures from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen, has one positive suggestion, which he calls the "Climate Club." This would be a voluntary association of nations--like a membership club--who determine to undertake together the hugely expensive business of market-reduction of greenhouse gas, increasing by 10 or 20 times the cost of carbon emissions, and thus forcing rapid conversion from fossil fuels to renewables. Club members would agree to follow these draconian steps, but also agree to punish those nations who fail to join the club with drastic tariffs, thus excluding those rogue states from trade within the Club. The Club in effect becomes a stick to beat non-compliant nations into compliance, an enforcement tool to overcome the pernicious freerider factor. In effect, it's the UNFCCC plan with stricter policies and stringent enforcement.

Is Nordhaus's Climate Club politically feasible? At the moment it's hard to imagine. But so are those 'tail' effects. Might some version of a tail effect concentrate our attention, and thus pique our interest in the Climate Club solution, before all is lost? That seems to be Nordhaus's wager, and it's worth considering.

Arctic Species Suicide

Thanks to Bill McKibben (once again) for making clear, in an op-ed in today's Times, just how big a disaster is Obama's decision to proceed with oil drilling in the Arctic. One reason is the enormous environmental risk incurred by drilling in this remote, stormy sea rich in wildlife and perhaps impossible to 'restore' after the inevitable spills. The Times suggests caution in its editorial, which itemizes a series of inept failures that have characterized early stages of the project.

But the incredible truth is that the Times and President Obama have completely missed the essential point, forcefully summed up by McKibben: no new exploitation of oil, arctic or tar sand, or coal, or any other fossil fuel makes ANY SENSE AT ALL in relation to our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero. This is not primarily a 'clean environment' issue--it's about survival. By framing the discussion around safety concerns, clean-up safeguards, risk management, and so forth, the Times, and President Obama, and of course Shell Oil are effectively denying, as McKibben says, that science has real consequences.

So how should we understand this extraordinary decision by the President? Obama as we know is a pragmatist. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt: he believes climate change is serious, greenhouse gases need to be reduced, renewables developed, coal replaced. But he knows that the push-back from Congress, from global corporations, from a dubious electorate, and financial interests who can't fathom the writing down of trillions of dollars in assets--he knows that all these forces are too powerful to oppose. So he continues with half-measures via executive order. He makes vague promises regarding the future, knowing he will have no say in energy policy beyond next year. And he supports a slightly reformed version of arctic drilling, with some safeguards against the threat of spills, but no barrier at all against the over-consumption of oil that continued exploration all but guarantees.

What does this mean? It makes clear that Naomi Klein and others are right: the climate change problem can't be resolved within the forcefield of our existing political and economic structures. The fight for a livable atmosphere must lead us to the struggle for a sustainable social order, not the one we have now--where Shell Oil can command policy decisions that are ultimately insane--but a cooperative system oriented to the needs of the most vulnerable. We must insist that the Paris conference speak for the poor, the islanders on the verge of inundation, the refugees from floods, storms, and desertification. Those are the voices President Obama doesn't hear. Those are the voices we need to empower.

Surviving in the Anthropocene

As I mentioned in my last post, and in a few previous ones, I have been reflecting on philosopher Dale Jamieson's masterful analysis of the Climate Change dilemma in his Reason in a Dark Time. Rather than review the lengthy argument of the book--which examines the historical, economic, ethical, scientific, and political complexities of addressing the climate issue over the past 30 years--I want to reflect on Jamieson's concluding thoughts, beginning with the notion that "our lives [are] worth living ... in accordance with our values." He calls those values "green virtues", and notes that while they "are not an algorithm for solving the problems of the Anthropocene, [...] they can provide guidance for living gracefully in a changing world while helping to restore in us a sense of agency." (p. 200) In short, we--and our descendants, forever--will have to live with the enormous challenges consequent to Climate Change, but we can still act meaningfully, ethically, with purpose.

How? Jamieson proposes a seven-fold list of policy priorities that we humans, and our governments, and perhaps the UNFCCC super-government can usefully pursue to at least limit the most dire consequences of the changes we have wrought.  Here they are:

• Include climate adaptation in the plans for economic development, particularly in the poorer developing nations, who stand to be the greatest victims, and the most blameless--and the most in need of funds for this purpose from the wealthy--and most culpable--nations;
• encourage the development of carbon sinks, most particularly tropical forests (but not the sci-fi-like geo-engineering schemes hubristicly proposed in some quarters);
• price energy at its true cost;
• tax carbon and/or set up working global carbon exchanges with serious limits on total allowances;
• force adoption of existing technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rather than wait for the vagaries of market adoption;
• expand research, particularly primary scientific research, in the complex fields that relate to climate; and finally
•  plan to live in the Anthropocene: that is, understand how our relationship to nature has changed, how little of 'nature' rests outside human influence, and thus what an enormous responsibility we have to this no-longer-natural environment we have irrevocably altered.

While Jamieson offers further conclusions, and leaves much to discuss in arriving at these prescriptions, I want to look more closely at that last Big Idea: to embrace the Anthropocene. This notion was apparently coined about 15 years ago by Noble-laureate chemist and climate scientist Paul Crutzen, who updates and discusses his intentions in this more recent article from Yale University's journal Environment360. Crutzen asserts that by leaving aside anachronistic notions of nature independent of us humans, by acknowledging our responsibility in creating our environment, we can better learn to take our stewardship of the earth more seriously, in three specific ways. 1) We can abandon what he calls "hyper-consumption" in favor of modest, need-centered growth. 2) We can direct scientific research toward meeting the "needs of the poorest" and creating what he calls a "durable bio-economy." And finally, 3) we can develop our culture to support what he calls, quoting Alexander von Humboldt, a "world organism," a mutually sustaining and non-competitive world system for keeping our anthropogenic environment in balance.

I'm still learning to think in terms of the Anthropocene, with its enormous implications, and perhaps you are too. I want to cite one recent discussion, in the Left journal Jacobin, whose author, Andreas Malm, takes Crutzen and others to task for naturalizing the current deplorable state of the earth and its climate by attributing this condition to 'us', to the 'natural' fact of human preponderance, which is how he understands the term 'Anthropocene.' It's not 'us,' Malm insists--it's the capitalist world system and its tiny cadre of super-beneficiaries in the .1% who are wrecking our environment and refuse to stop. He cites the analysis of Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything to underscore his point--and he has a point. The system of exploitation we live in is not inevitable--though it can surely be understood as a, or rather as the human project. But, as Crutzen doesn't say, we will never achieve the responsible stewardship thrust upon us in the Anthropocene until we tame the impulse for hyper-growth, hyper-consumption, profit at all costs. The conceptualization of the Anthropocene--despite Malm's critique--is not the problem; rather, its domination by irresponsible profit-seeking corporations is, and we will never fulfill Crutzen's vision, or Jamieson's, of a responsible Anthropocene until we free ourselves from the domination of ExxonMobil and Shell, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and all the rest.

Boston's Undersea Airport

I have been meaning for several weeks to write a more substantive review of philosopher Dale Jamieson's important book Reason in a Dark Time. Jamieson examines with exceptional rigor the history of climate change policy, and the scientific, economic, and ethical complexities of it as a policy issue, all in an effort to explain how it is that the global polity and its leaders have so thoroughly failed to address this mother of all public policy issues. The book is illuminating, but also therapeutic: though we may all feel guilty, as I do, for our collective failure, and its implications for those who will come after us, Jamieson lets us see a certain inevitability to this course of events, which is in real ways bigger than us all.

One of the uses of Jamieson's discussion is his professional attentiveness to choosing terms carefully. For example, he makes a careful distinction between two sorts of prevention: abatement, which would mean eliminating some measure of greenhouse gas pollution, and mitigation, which would reduce its impacts, by increasing forest lands to absorb more carbon, for example. Both of these measures are to be distinguished from adaptation, which presumes effects of climate change--higher temperatures, raised sea levels, displaced rainfall--and seeks to address those effects--by building sea walls, for example, or relocating populations. While policy makers have discussed, ineffectually, various means of abatement and mitigation, setting ambitious goals but failing to meet them, adaptation has been a touchy subject. Marshall Islanders don't want to hear about adaptation, which in their case means extinction or relocation, and taxpayers in Miami or Boston aren't keen either on adding huge public works projects to their budgets.

In that framework, then, it is interesting to consider last Monday's publication, by MassPort, of its climate change plan for Boston's Logan Airport, a large regional facility perched precariously at sea level in Boston harbor, facing the North Atlantic and clearly endangered by the rising oceans and increasingly severe storms that appear to be built into its future. Some highlights:

• Goals for abatement are impressive: 40% less greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 (over 2012 levels, rather than the more standard 1990 benchmark), and 80% reduction by 2050--a very ambitious program. How to achieve it? Well, airplanes, which emit a lot of pollutants, are much fuller now than 15 years ago, so Logan sends out more passengers on fewer flights, which has led to an 8% emissions reduction since 2002. That neat trick can't be reproduced indefinitely, however, and emissions have already gone UP more than 5% from 2012-13. DOWN 40% in the next 5 years is hard to imagine, and down another 40% by 2050 is harder still--unless air travel is seriously curtailed,or some entirely new (hydrogen-based?) power source is developed.
• There's a second way to measure the airport's carbon footprint--the energy the airport itself consumes--and here the goal of 25% reduction by 2020 may be less fanciful: greener buildings, installation of solar panels, and gas-powered buses are known ways to reduce energy consumption. But these abatements are all serving an inherently profligate technology--air travel--an 'inconvenient truth' MassPort is in no position to address.
• Meanwhile, given the inexorable fact of emissions and energy consumption, what about mitigation? That's what environmental groups like the Audubon Society are asking, but the report contains no answers. Carbon capture? Still experimental, though China is working to develop practical models. Tropical rainforest protection? Exotic and expensive, but if every airline ticket contained a surcharge for forest protection, air travel would externalize less of its hidden costs to the planet, and forests would be permitted to do their work of mitigation (instead of being cut down to produce beef for McDonalds ...).
• But the real work of the plan--as opposed to these somewhat fanciful aspirational goals for abatement--concerns adaptation: Logan will soon have gates and dikes to channel overflows, and pumps to clear submerged runways. "Critical equipment" in buildings will be elevated. All this to address rising sea levels of 2-6 feet (though many projections imagine levels twice or three times that high by century's end), and storm surges like Sandy (which narrowly missed taking out not just Logan but much of downtown Boston).

In short, Massport is taking small steps toward prevention (and announcing much larger goals with no real plan to meet them). But it is also preparing to operate an airport that will someday, maybe soon, be below sea level--Schiphol west--in a landscape that may look like Holland's. That's a sobering thought the report glosses over, but the rest of us might think about. 

Another Stern Warning

Lord Stern is at it again. Former Chief Economist for the World Bank, an economic policy academic whose appointments have included Oxford and the London School of Economics, MIT, the École Polytechnique and the Collège de France, the People's University of China and the Indian Statistical Institute, recent president of the British Academy and current chair of Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change, Lord Stern made waves with his 2006 report, commissioned by the Blair government and widely regarded as the most significant call to arms on climate from within any major government. The Stern Review predicted economic consequences due to climate change equal to 5% per year of world GDP, and recommended investments of 2% of GDP--an unheard of number in the trillions--as a reasonable level of response to the problem.

Now Lord Stern, through the Grantham Institute, has published a report that examines the proposals offered up so far by the world's governments as they prepare for the December Paris Climate Conference. The numbers, Lord Stern tells us, are not so good. Using the formal filings of the EU and 7 other nations, along with the announced goals of China and the US, Stern's assessment is that the aggregated UNFCCC process will not yield policy changes in line with its goal to keep temperatures from rising no more than 2 degrees C. This is not particularly new news, but when the conclusions come from perhaps the leading authority in the world on the economics of climate policy, it's worth noticing.

Of more interest is the politics of Lord Stern's new report. As reported in today's Guardian, the point of the report is to get this bad news on the table now, well in advance of the official assessment the UNFCCC will itself make in November. As Stern's co-author Bob Ward notes, a similarly negative prognosis coming from the UN just before the conference could "cast a shadow" on it, whereas coming in May, this "summing," as the Brits say, could encourage the Paris conferees to create a "mechanism for raising ambition after the summit, while also encouraging countries to go further in their INDCs [i.e. individual national plans]." Prophylactic therapy, in other words, before the malady is full-blown.

In short, the Grantham's report is intended to drive the UNFCCC movement through and past the Paris moment, which will be equivocal at best, so that it retains and gains momentum among the world's nations for policy change. This in contrast to the Copenhagen conference in 2009, which was the occasion for widespread despair and little progress. So thank you, Lord Stern--we needed that, especially those of us who live in countries still mired in various stages of denial. No, the little bitsy changes that are happening will not spare us steep, intolerable temperature increases with horrendous climate consequences, but yes, if Paris becomes a launch pad for more dramatic policy initiatives, we might still make effective progress towards averting the worst.