[Reader-list] piece by Monbiot

[Nagraj Adve]

The rich can relax. We just need the poor world to cut emissions. By 125%

British and G8 climate strategy just doesn't add up. As soon as serious
curbs are needed it turns into impossible nonsense

    -
      - guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>, Monday 13 July 2009
      21.00 BST

 Well, at least that clears up the mystery. Over the past year I've been
fretting over an intractable contradiction. The government has promised
spectacular cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. It is also pushing through new
roads and runways, approving coal-burning power stations, bailing out car
manufacturers and ditching regulations for low-carbon homes. How can these
policies be reconciled?

We will find out tomorrow, when it publishes a series of papers on carbon
reduction. According to one person who has read the drafts, the new policies
will include buying up to 50% of the reduction from abroad. If this is true,
it means that the UK will not cut its greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050, as
the government promised. It means it will cut them by 40%. Offsetting half
our emissions (which means paying other countries to cut them on our behalf)
makes a mockery of the government's climate change programme.

The figure might have changed between the draft and final documents, but
let's take it at face value for the moment, to see what happens when rich
nations offload their obligations. What I am about to explain is the simple
mathematical reason why any large-scale programme of offsets is unjust,
contradictory and ultimately impossible.

Last week the G8 summit adopted the UK's two key
targets<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/08/g8-climate-carbon-emission-targets>:
it proposed that developed countries should reduce their greenhouse
gases
by 80% by 2050 to prevent more than two degrees of global warming. This
meant that it also adopted the UK's key contradiction, as there is no
connection between these two aims. An 80% cut is very unlikely to prevent
two degrees of warming; in fact it's not even the right measure, as I'll
explain later on. But let's work out what happens if the other rich nations
adopt both the UK's targets and its draft approach to carbon offsets.

Please bear with me on this: the point is an important one. There are some
figures involved, but I'll use only the most basic arithmetic, which anyone
with a calculator can reproduce.

The G8 didn't explain what it meant by "developed countries", but I'll
assume it was referring to the nations listed in Annex
1<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change>of
the Kyoto protocol: those that have promised to limit their greenhouse
gases by 2012. (If it meant the OECD
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD>nations, the results are very
similar.) To keep this simple and consistent,
I'll consider just the carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, as listed
by US Energy Information Administration <http://www.eia.doe.gov/>. It
doesn't publish figures for Monaco and Lichtenstein, but we can forgive
that. The 38 remaining Annex 1 countries produce 15bn tonnes of CO2, or 51%
of global emissions. Were they to do as the UK proposes, cutting this total
by 80% and offsetting half of it, they would have to buy reductions equal to
20% of the world's total carbon production. This means that other countries
would need to cut 42% of their emissions just to absorb our carbon offsets.

But the G8 has also adopted another of the UK's targets: a global cut of 50%
by 2050. Fifty per cent of world production is 14.6bn tonnes. If the Annex 1
countries reduce their emissions by 80% (including offsets), they will trim
global output by 12bn tonnes. The other countries must therefore find
further cuts of 2.6bn tonnes. Added to the offsets they've sold, this means
that their total obligation is 8.6bn tonnes, or 60% of their current
emissions.

So here's the outcome. The rich nations, if they follow the UK's presumed
lead, will cut their carbon pollution by 40%. The poorer nations will cut
their carbon pollution by 60%.

If global justice means anything, the rich countries must make deeper cuts
than the poor. We have the most to cut and can best afford to forgo
opportunities for development. If nations like the UK cannot make deep
reductions, no one can. We could, as I showed in my book Heat, reduce
emissions by 90% without seriously damaging our quality of life. But this
carries a political price. Business must be asked to write off sunk costs,
people must be asked to make minor changes in the way they live. This
country appears to be doing what it has done throughout colonial and
postcolonial history: dumping its political problems overseas, rather than
confronting them at home.

Befuddled yet? I haven't explained the half of it. As the G8 leaders know, a
global cut of 50% offers only a faint to nonexistent chance of meeting their
ultimate objective: preventing more than two degrees of warming. In its
latest summary of climate science, published in 2007, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change <http://www.ipcc.ch/>suggested that a high chance of
preventing more than two degrees of warming requires a global cut of 85% by
2050. In drafting the climate change act, the UK government promised to keep
matching the target to the science. It has already raised its cut from 60%
to 80% by 2050. If it sticks to its promise it will have to raise it again.

Global average CO2 emissions are 4.48 tonnes per person per year. Cutting
the world total by 85% means reducing this to 0.67 tonnes. Average per
capita output in the 38 Annex 1 countries is 10 tonnes; to hit this target
they must cut their emissions by 93.3% by 2050. If the rich persist in
offsetting 50% of this cut, the poorer countries would have to reduce their
emissions by 7bn tonnes to absorb our offsets. To meet a global average of
0.67 tonnes, they would also need to chop their own output by a further
10.8bn tonnes. This means a total cut of 17.8bn tonnes, or 125% of their
current emissions. I hope you have spotted the flaw.

In fact, even the IPCC's proposal has been superseded. Two recent papers in
Nature <http://www.nature.com/> show that the measure that counts is not the
proportion of current emissions
produced<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/jun/18/george-monbiot-carbon-calculator>on
a certain date, but the total
amount of greenhouse gases we
release<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/29/fossil-fuels-trillion-tonnes-burned>.
An 85% cut by 2050 could produce completely different outcomes. If most of
the cut took place at the beginning of the period, our cumulative emissions
would be quite low. If, as the US Waxman- Markey
bill<http://thinkcarbon.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/the-waxman-markey-bill-at-a-glance/>proposes,
it takes place towards the end, they would be much higher. To
deliver a high chance of preventing two degrees of warming, we would need to
cut global emissions by something like 10% by the end of next year and 25%
by 2012. This is a challenge no government is yet prepared to accept.

Carbon offsetting makes sense if you are seeking a global cut of 5% between
now and for ever. It is the cheapest and quickest way of achieving an
insignificant reduction. But as soon as you seek substantial cuts, it
becomes an unfair, impossible nonsense, the equivalent of pulling yourself
off the ground by your whiskers. Yes, let us help poorer nations to reduce
deforestation and clean up pollution. But let us not pretend that it lets us
off the hook.

**