By Laurie Goering | Fri., May 28, 3:04 PM | Comments ( 1 )
To most effectively combat climate change, the world should quit trying to build a new global binding treaty to reduce emissions, dump carbon trading and relax its obsession with cutting carbon dioxide, says Oxford University climate change expert Steve Rayner.
Instead, it should pass small carbon taxes worldwide, move forward with the controversial Copenhagen Accord passed last December, and remarkably - work to bring the 1.6 billion people now without power onto the grid.
Pushing to bring clean power to the world's poorest would require a surge in funding for the development and deployment of alternative energy technology and energy efficiency measures, and that could drive a rapid transition away from fossil fuels that would make life better for all of us, argues Rayner, director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford's Said Business School and one of the authors of the Hartwell Paper, which aims to set a new course for climate policy.
"People are more incentivized by positive benefits than avoiding pain," he said. "The targets and timetables approach (of a globally binding climate treaty) is all about pain."
He added he doesn't believe "we have a hope in hell of reaching the kinds of targets people are talking about" anyway in a proposed treaty, given the current political stalemate and failure of the Kyoto Protocol to bring big emissions reductions.
"At the moment, we're running around in circles, committing ourselves with greater vigour to targets and timetables we can't meet," the academic said. "We need to establish a new direction of travel and then start doing things to increase our velocity."
SUPPORT FOR ENERGY INVESTORS
Could a rapid transition in the world's energy system really happen? Rayner thinks so, if the key problems of how to store generated power and create grids to carry it where it's needed are solved.
"Right now we have bits of kit but we don't have integrated systems that can enable things like wind turbines and solar cells to substitute for very reliable fossil fuels," he said.
But with the United States and China each spending about $80 billion on military research and development, while energy research gets just a tenth of that, a change in research priorities could drive a dramatic energy shift.
"If we were to get the necessary investment in the three D's - development, demonstration and deployment - then we could bring down the price very quickly," Rayner said.
"Just look how quickly China has become a world leader in wind turbine technology. If we were to create the conditions, we could have a very rapid transition in the global energy system."
One way to push that investment and ensure governments don't have to foot the whole bill would be for governments to guarantee private investors a minimum rate of return on energy technology to help encourage long-term investment, said Rayner, who was a lead author on two of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports.
NEW DIRECTION
Driving a shift in energy systems is just one of the priorities of the Hartwell Paper, a report released this month by 14 international experts in climate change, policy, science and economics and aimed at finding "a new direction for climate change policy after the failure of the Copenhagen conference."
The authors argue that focusing on forest preservation and reducing some lesser-known but particularly powerful drivers of warming - including soot, aerosols, tropospheric ozone (urban air pollutants) and methane - could produce more effective greenhouse gas cuts than targeting carbon dioxide.
These non-CO2 contributors account for about 40 percent of the gases producing global warming, the authors say. Soot, which can blacken glaciers and hasten their melting, has a warming effect 600 times stronger than carbon dioxide and accounts for 5-10 percent of overall warming, the study notes.
It also contributes to serious lung problems around the world, which means people other than climate campaigners should be interested in reducing it, the authors say.
Much of the problem with the current U.N. negotiations stems from attempts to build a new global climate treaty by using approaches that have worked for other problems but aren't appropriate for this one, Rayner says.
APPROACHES THAT DON'T WORK
The Kyoto Protocol, for instance, was based largely on a plan to protect the ozone layer by reducing problematic gases in the atmosphere. That worked, but only because it dealt with a small number of gases that were easily substituted and produced by a limited number of companies and countries.
Efforts to negotiate mutually verifiable reductions in greenhouses gases are based rather on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which made sense for government-controlled nuclear weapons but "is hard to do with greenhouse gases", Rayner argues.
Finally there's the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's sulphur trading program, aimed at reducing acid rain, which has been a model for efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions through carbon trading.
The sulphur system existed under one national legal system, but with carbon trading, "if a country like Russia sells a lot of allowances to the U.S. and subsequently says it can't meet its reduction commitments, what are we going to do? Invade Russia? Put up sanctions? Of course not," said Rayner.
Another problem is that "climate change has become so core a problem that everything is hung on it. Is it a greenhouse gas problem? A development problem? A human health problem? An economic problem?" added Rayner, an adviser to the UK Climate Impacts Programme, a government-funded effort to coordinate scientific research on climate change.
"We need to 'decompose' climate, not load everything on the climate bandwagon so you break the axle and thing is wrecked. If we separate the issues they're much more tractable," he said.
REWORKING ADAPTATION AID
The paper urges applying more common sense to funding for adaptation to climate change, which the authors believe is crucial.
As now envisioned, international climate aid can be used to pay for the percentage of a problem attributable to human-caused climate change the extra height a sea wall might need, for instance but not for the seawall itself.
"We think this is absolutely insane," Rayner said. "It makes no sense to pay for the extra half-metre of sea walls if we're not already building the three metres we need today."
He believes the Copenhagen Accord, struck in December by a handful of major carbon emitting countries and subsequently backed by more than 100 other nations, is "in one sense a step in the right direction" toward curbing global warming, largely because it focuses on the "fewer than 20 countries that are responsible for most of the emissions".
The problem for Rayner is that "while we're still holding out for this global treaty idea, will the effort be put into (the accord) to make it work? I think until we dump the idea of a universally binding set of targets and timetables, we won't get a serious effort on the Copenhagen Accord."
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