Damned Lies and Carbon Statistics

What a contrast there is between the attention paid to the first Rio conference and the low profile of the 20-year follow-up which comes to a head this week. I have already posted to raise the question of whether the carbon emissions of our politicians are worth the investment, when it seems that so little political progress is going to be made. What can explain the great difference in interest between the two conferences, especially when almost all the indicators of ecological crisis have become far more urgent since 1992?

First, I think we must not forget the huge vote for the UK Green Party in the 1989 European Elections. This indicated to politicians that people do care about the environment, but rather than introduce the hard-edged policies necessary to constrain the corporate economy, the politicians managed expectations and allowed the corporations to take over the green economy even before it was defined.

Secondly, we must not be naive about the vast amount of lobbying and deliberate confusion that has been caused. Today's launch of a report from the Green House thinktank indicates clearly that the claim that our greenhouse gas emissions have been falling since the first Earth Summit is a deception. Two of the most significant sources of CO2 emission are simply left out of the calculations: those caused by air transport and freight shipping; and those embodied in consumer goods we import.
 If you put these and a few other sources of emissions that have been discreetly tidied away back into the picture it looks like this.

It is clear that emissions are continuing to rise. It can't have escaped the notice of Kyoto negotiators that these were the fastest rising sources of emissions, and omitting them from consideration is, as the report notes, rather 'like a chocoholic going on a calorie controlled diet and deciding not to
include chocolate'. The explanation can only be the result of significant, powerful and ultimately destructive lobbying on the part of those who profit from the global trade in goods and the massively increasing amount of air travel.

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Make the Rich Pay for their Emissions

An excellent funding programme from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation into the social impacts of policies to address climate change is beginning to bear fruit. They have created a microsite to make the findings available.

As well as the more conventional investigations into the impact on poorer households of rises in energy bills, a research team based in Bristol and Oxford has produced data about how responsibility for CO2 emissions is shared across the socio-economic classes. Put more bluntly, to what extent can we blame the rich for climate change as well as for inequality?

The primary finding is that:

'Mean average CO2 emissions are strongly correlated with income: households within the highest equivalised income decile have mean total CO2 emissions more than twice that of households within the lowest equivalised income decile. Emissions from private road travel and aviation account for a high proportion of this differential: aviation emissions of the highest income decile are more than six times that of the lowest income decile.'

In other words, the concerns that are often raised about alienating those who fly to Ibiza for a summer holiday by introducing aviation taxes are quite misplaced. It is the rich who jet around the world for conferences and business meetings who are most responsible for aviation-related CO2 emissions.

The figure represents mean annual emission of carbon dioxide from all sources across the income deciles. As we move from the lowest 10% to the wealthiest 10% there is a clear increase, class by class, in the amount of CO2 emissions that are produced. More importantly, a larger proportions of the emissions of the richer people in our society are transport related.

The policies implications are clear. Using household energy bills as the focus of increasing the cost of carbon is not only regressive but will also be ineffective:
'if household carbon reduction policies addressed all transport emissions as well as those from household fuel use, there would be far fewer low-income/high-carbon households, and policies which placed a cost on carbon itself would be likely to be more progressive.'
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Gilts and Boars

Now that our national strategy of using finance to energise the economy has been seen so spectacularly to fail, the favoured option of the pro-capitalist, pro-globalisation ideologues is to follow the export-led growth model. Hence our Business Secretary Vince Cable, together with the Prime Minister and several other cabinet members, has headed off to China to advertise what real products we have to sell. The wares as advertised are a motley collection with a resonance of the Sunday-morning car-boot sale. Much of what is on offer, from randy pigs to shit treatment, is distinctly unglamorous. We can only assume that there are major arms deals behind the scenes to justify the cost in sparse sterling and carbon emissions.

Vince Cable has drawn attention to three items which make it intensely challenging to take seriously the Coalition's claim to be the greenest ever government: Jaguar cars, tourism, and education. The environmental impact of encouraging China to consume more in these three areas is deeply disturbing. Latest World Bank Figures show that only 22 people in every 1,000 in China own a car, compared with 463 in the UK. To you this is a relief; to Jaguar it is the biggest market opportunity in the world. You can almost hear them salivating.

In my own sector, education, the encouragement of Chinese students to learn in the UK represents an alternative to supporting our own students in higher education. But the environmental consequences are equally stark. Each return flight a Chinese student takes creates around 5600 kg of CO2, some five times the annual limit under the Contraction and Convergence framework that the Liberal Democrats apparently support. Many of our students travel home and back more than once in a year.

The composition of the trade delegation is also unsurprising. According to the Washington Examiner, the businessmen on the trip include executives from Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Tesco, Barclays bank and Diageo. This is a recovery strategy designed by corporations to serve corporations. Little help here for the struggling small business in a provincial town.

China's dominance in material production is recent; its contribution to spiritual wisdom is ancient and still valuable. Here, in the words of Lao Tzu, Cameron might acquire some strategic guidance:

'When rulers take action to serve their own interests,
Their people become rebellious;'

Verse 75, Tao Te Ching


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Good Cop or Bad Cop?

So what are we to make of the failure of the meeting that was billed as our last chance to save ourselves as a species? The conference was a demonstration of the gap between media spin and political substance in the modern world. Nothing demonstrated this better than the impotence of the man who many of the world's disempowered have viewed as somebody who could wield power to make a difference. From rhetorical bravura to rhetorical bravado, in one short speech Obama demonstrated that, like every other US President, he is utterly controlled by the economic actors who dominate his domestic politics.

The clue to what was going on was given by the separation, in the wake of Obama's arrival, of emissions reductions from the transfer of cash to larger but less diplomatically savvy countries that were once part of the patronisingly titled 'third world'. 'We haven't managed to agree on emissions', went the spin, 'but the other main issue has been resolved'. The creation of US dollars from thin air is not, and never was the purpose of Copenhagen. As followers of this blog will know, creating money in this way is actually driving economic growth and environmental destruction. Worse still, this deal does not offer the bulk of the money until after 2020, by which time it will be much too late to make the cuts necessary to ensure a habitable environment for humankind on planet earth.

The most galling aspect of the conference was to have to accept lectures from the US about leadership in climate change. As the table makes clear, Obama would do well to adopt a position of humility rather than the arrogance he showed at Copenhagen. The numbers make clear who the main culprits are in terms of CO2 per capita, the only just way of measuring emissions. These figures should be the real focus of our attention, and until every number in the second column of that table stands at 1 or less then we are in very deep trouble.
Note: Data are for total greenhouse gas emissions, reported as equivalent to the impact of CO2. Gases included are: CO2, CH4, N2O, PFCs, HFCs, SF6.
Source: World Resources Institute, Washington DC: http://cait.wri.org.

This gives a sense of the scale of reductions in carbon emissions we are talking about. Not giving more money to Brazil or South Africa, not cutting by 9% or 17% or 23%, but completely changing our lifestyle so that we end the 200 years of oil-fuelled over-consumption and return to a balanced relationship with the earth that is the source of all our wealth.

Obama's purpose in travelling to Copenhagen was to sidestep the main issue of actually reducing emissions and shift the debate to an area he could control, i.e. the production of worthless pieces of paper by the US mint, and an issue where he could take the moral high ground, i.e. the regime of inspection. He has also provided himself with a media opportunity that will give him some leverage in taking a bill of sorts through the Senate.

The EU and Japan, who have been acting with a moderate degree of commitment on this issue, have been left sidelined by a degenerate superpower and a group of wannabee nations who ought to know better. Leadership is still possible, although a negotiated settlement may not be. The way ahead is clear: an agreement between the developed nations who are prepared to make cuts and the poorer countries of the world. The contraction and convergence model can be made to work first in a club of nations, with transfers of technology to be exchanged for our excess emissions during our period of transition to a low-carbon economy. Tweet