A very interesting and sobering article on climate change.

Mary Anne


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 08:35:16 -0800 (PST)
From: Stephen Bezruchka <sabez@...>
To: International Health Program <ihp@...>
Subject: [Ihp] carbon rationing, an inconvenient truth

Those of us interested in international health issues tend to have too much on
the plate to consider the approaching world fever. I remember Oscar Gish
taking me to task about ten years ago for suggesting carbon rationing as a
potential anti-pyretic. Many of us missed the strong stance taken by the UK
government headed by former World Bank economist, Nicholas STern. We in the US
are in denial, and of course get another gold medal in the carbon olympics!
The concept presents one way of redistributing resources, or even can be
considered a form of reparations to those from whom we have taken much. The
article by Mark Lynas in the New Statesman is followed by the URL for the STern
Report, which can be downloaded (executive summary and others, if you don't
want your computer weighed down with the full tome). Stephen

****
Why we must ration the future Cover story Mark Lynas Monday 23rd October 2006
New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/200610230015

You can't bargain with the planet because it doesn't care whether or not
targets are "politically acceptable". So unless we secure a deal determining
how much carbon each nation and each person can emit, we simply will not
survive. By Mark Lynas

The best indication of whether a person truly grasps the scale of the global
climate crisis is not whether they drive a hybrid car or offset their flights,
nor whether they subscribe to the Ecologist or plan to attach a wind turbine to
their house. The most reliable indicator is whether they support carbon
rationing. The received political wisdom is that the general public will recoil
in horror at a scheme whose very name recalls wartime national emergencies and
austerity. Rationing is the opposite of today's consumerist free-for-all, where
economic growth is the highest objective of government policy.

But that is precisely the point. It is because carbon rationing represents a
total break with business as usual that it is the only climate-change policy
that will work. Let me put it simply: if we go on emitting greenhouse gases at
anything like the current rate, most of the surface of the globe will be
rendered uninhabitable within the lifetimes of most readers of this article. We
must reduce our emissions by 90 per cent or so within three or four decades if
we are to have any chance of avoiding this looming catastrophe.

That challenge requires collective, conscious action, involving a planned
transition from a high-carbon economy to a low-carbon one. Just as we did not
hope to win the Second World War by muddling through with a pre-1939 economy,
we cannot hope to face down today's emergency without completely altering our
national priorities. Defeating Hitler was our number-one aim in 1940: it ranked
above health, education, crime and all the other day-to-day concerns of
government, requiring a supreme effort of mobilisation. Defeating global
warming must be our priority today, or we will lose this war, and with it our
very existence as a civilisation.

At an international level, some variant of rationing is nothing less than a
mathematical inevitability. Let us assume that at some stage in the near future
- perhaps after a change of regime in Washington, DC - world governments hammer
out an agreement about what constitutes a "dangerous" level of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere. Today, atmospheric CO2 stands at 380 parts per million by
volume (ppm), a higher level than at any time since the Eocene era (35 to 55
million years ago). According to the modellers, stabilising at 400ppm yields a
three-to-one chance that global temperature increases would level off on this
side of 2
Â
°C, saving us from calamitous rates of sea-level rise and a mass extinction
that would otherwise wipe out more than half of life on earth.

But this 400ppm target means that only 80 billion tonnes more carbon can be
emitted by humanity over the next few decades. This figure is non-negotiable:
you can't bargain with the atmosphere. How the remaining carbon budget is
divided between human beings, however, involves a decision about rationing. The
most likely outcome is that it will be divided among the world's countries on
the basis of their populations - in other words, we will all get an equal
ration.

Equity is inevitable, and not because future world leaders will be
bleeding-heart liberals, but because no developing-world government will ever
accede to an agreement that freezes existing global inequalities. The choice
facing rich-country governments, in other words, is between inequity or
survival. The government of India, for example, will not sign an agreement that
gives its people 20 times less of the remaining budget on a per-person basis
than Americans get, and nor should it be expected to. China will not sign a
document that gives the Chinese only a third of what British people receive.
(Annual per-capita carbon-dioxide emissions are approximately one tonne in
India, 20 tonnes in the United States, ten tonnes in the UK and three tonnes in
China.) Indeed, given the rich world's disproportionate historical
responsibility for causing climate change, developing countries may well demand
a higher ration of the remaining budget than rich countries receive.

This mathematical equation, of a convergence towards equal per-capita carbon
allocations in the context of a contraction of overall global emissions, is the
framework known as contraction and convergence (C&C). Many people -
environmentalists included - have railed against it, but no one has ever been
able to propose a viable alternative. Plenty of other initiatives and proposals
exist (of which the Kyoto Protocol is one) but they all add up to nothing more
than guesswork, with no definable outcome, when set against the remorseless
logical framework of C&C. (The originator of C&C, Aubrey Meyer, was profiled as
one of "ten people who could change the world" in the New Statesman of 17
October 2005.)

If climate change is to be solved, global emissions will have to contract (to
sustainable levels) and converge (towards zero). There is no other way to join
the dots on the graph. The question is whether world leaders will face the
inevitable before it is too late. If we are to hit the 400ppm target, scarcely
a decade remains before we must begin cutting emissions across the whole global
economy. And after that particular climatic window closes, global warming may
spiral quickly out of control.

To say that 400ppm is an ambitious target is a colossal understatement: Sir
David King has advocated 550ppm as the lowest politically achievable target.
Given his role as chief scientific adviser to the government, Sir David is
presumably aware that this represents nothing less than a death sentence for
half the world's population. In advocating it, he is veering dangerously close
to what some campaigners have called "the economics of genocide". It is
irrelevant to the biosphere what any of us considers to be "politically
realistic": it obeys the hard laws of physics and chemistry, not the rather
more flexible laws of economics and politics.

Make carbon allocations tradeable

Domestic carbon rationing is the national corollary of contraction and
convergence. Like the monetary budget within which all governments and
individuals are accustomed to operating, the carbon budget is non-negotiable.
Unlike "green taxes" or any of the other assorted climate policies recently
discussed at party conferences, only a top-down carbon rationing scheme can
deliver a predetermined outcome with any certainty. Whether taxes, for
instance, actually reduce carbon consumption depends on what people are
prepared to pay. Taxes are also important to raise revenue, presenting the
government with a conflict of interest.

Moreover, taxation is simply a hidden way of rationing via the price mechanism
- something likely to be as unpopular as it is unfair. If conspicuous carbon
consumption by the rich goes unchallenged (think of David Beckham's sports
cars), any popular effort on climate change will collapse, just as the war
effort would have been fatally undermined had the royal family been given a
higher food ration in 1940. Instead, the sight of aristocrats and dock workers
all mucking in showed a country united in its determination to defeat Nazism.

One important difference from war time rationing is that future carbon
allocations would need to be tradeable in order to make the system flexible. If
person A really wants to fly to Australia to see his mother, and person B (who
doesn't have a car) is happy to sell him some unused quota, so much the better
- the overall objective of carbon reduction is still achieved (because the
annual national budget declines), but people don't lose their freedom of
action. Moreover, trading gives a financial incentive for low-carbon
innovations: if a new invention needs less of your ration, it will become more
attractive. If having solar panels on your house allows you to cash in your
unused ration, they become not just affordable, but desirable. At a macro
level, business has an incentive to make long-term investment decisions.

For individuals, carbon rationing would operate as a parallel currency: when
purchasing high-carbon goods (petrol for a car, overseas flights) a proportion
of carbon currency would be surrendered at the point of sale. Given that only
half the national carbon output stems from individuals' direct choices, the
other half would probably be auctioned by the government to private business to
cover manufacturing and services. So if you're buying bananas or having a
haircut, the carbon ration will already have been paid for by the company, and
its cost built into the end price for the consumer.

Unlike the ration books of the wartime era, modern rationing could be
electronic, operating on the same principle as debit cards do with a current
account. If a person lacks the carbon credits to cover a purchase, he or she
could buy on the "spot" market at the point of sale, just as pay-as-you-go
mobile-phone users top up their credit in order to make a call.

So will the general public accept rationing? David Miliband, the Environment
Secretary, one of the few senior politicians who seems to "get it" on climate
change, suggests they will, and floated the idea of carbon rationing at a major
speech to the Audit Commission on 19 July. I am told privately that, for the
Conservatives, Oliver Letwin is an "anorak" on the issue, having spent hours
poring over the nuts and bolts of a rationing scheme. Most surprisingly,
whenever I propose carbon rationing at public meetings around the country, it
seems to generate a spontaneous round of applause. Perhaps the public is less
backward on climate change than many politicians like to assume. Perhaps people
also realise that the kind of society carbon rationing would usher in, with
resurgent communities and small-scale agriculture, would actually be highly
beneficial for most of us.

Nevertheless, imposing such a scheme - and imposed it must be, as participation
could not be voluntary - would require political leadership and vision of the
sort that seems to be in scarce supply in today's corridors of power. But such
leadership need not, in the long term, be unpopular. Nor would it be
incompatible with democracy. Who would march in Trafalgar Square against
solving climate change? Probably about as many people as marched against
rationing in 1940: none.

So how would it actually work?
By Sam Alexandroni

Every adult receives an equal carbon allowance (children get less) based on a
yearly budget, which is reduced each year and set by an independent committee.

This allowance is divided into units. These are often referred to as tradeable
energy quotas (TEQs). Every time you buy petrol, pay an electricity bill or
book a flight, a number of units, equivalent to that amount of energy, is
deducted from your TEQ account - in most cases automatically via direct debit.
If you do not have enough units in your account, the price goes up to cover the
shortfall.

TEQs behave like any commodity, fluctuating in price depending on demand and
availability. If too many people use too much carbon, the units become scarce
and the price goes up, making it uneconomical to live far beyond your personal
allowance. This creates a powerful economic incentive to reduce carbon output,
and to profit by selling the excess units.

Only part of the yearly carbon budget is divided among individuals; the rest is
sold to governments and industry at a weekly tender. Each business must manage
its carbon output to remain profitable. For example, a transatlantic flight
might initially account for one-third of a person's carbon allowance, but as
this allowance decreases, aviation would have to become greener or flights more
expensive.

The demand this would create for low-carbon living would produce a ready market
for green technology and new opportunities for industry. The growth in this
sector would balance any economic slowdown elsewhere and lead to a gradual
shift in technology and lifestyle, enabling people to live within their
personal carbon allowance despite yearly reductions.

Rationing by numbers
Research by Sam Alexandroni

10 tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted per person in the UK each year
20 tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted per person in the US each year
3 tonnes the target for maximum annual carbon-dioxide emissions for each person
by 2020
2.4 tonnes annual cost in carbon dioxide of powering the average British home
5.5 tonnes carbon-dioxide cost of a return flight from London to Sydney
25 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted globally each year


URL for the STern Report
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate\
_change/stern_review_report.cfm