Did COP26 Work?

If you look at the recent global climate change Glasgow conference through the lens of negotiation, a great deal of work produced a measurable outcome. John Kerry tried to sell this line. Ian Bremmer agrees (mostly) that COP26 represents a corner turned where the world begins to take some collective action on greenhouse gasses.

But when looking at the science of warming global temperatures, industrial output, and the latest models, COP26 seems weak and inadequate.

Consider this fresh take by writer Nathaniel Rich, who sees that summits and big negotiations with world leaders aren’t where the action happens.

The daily news report is solid. We get a fairly good sense of what’s happening. I think there’s less attention drawn to the fact that these meetings, just like every other climate conference that’s preceded it over the last 30-some years, are more or less symbolic. They’re covered often in the press as if it’s the negotiation of armistice or an arms agreement when in fact they’re much closer to diplomatic meetings between heads of state to express shared principles to say that we believe in human rights, say.

Interview with Brooke Gladstone, On the Media

Also, sees a change in messaging from activists–who tend to be young and represent an entirely new demographic. They take a “moral approach” that is more personal and honest, according to Rich.  He notes, “They don’t really bother to get into those bad faith debates and they move straight past that into, “I am being harmed, you have failed.” It’s a different register, it’s angry, it’s personal, it’s emotional.” And even just in the time from Obama to Biden, it seems to be working.

When a Teen Talks: Greta Thunberg on Climate at UNGA

Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

“How dare you…”

Undoubtedly Greta Thunberg speaking at the UN General Assembly Climate Summit today was something new. It’s not new for teens (or “Youth” in diplomacy-speak) to address the austere body. In fact, various foras exist for young persons to speak on pressing global issues. But Thunberg’s tone–and specifically, the rhetorical tactic of her speech–are causing waves.

Was it an effective speech?

Her age does matter because it affords Thunberg a unique position in which to make her case for climate action–and to criticize her elders. As Robinson Meyers writes in The Atlantic on “Why Greta Wins”:

And this is the way to understand Thunberg that paints her as neither a saint nor a demon but that still captures her appeal. Thunberg epitomizes, in a person, the unique moral position of being a teenager. She can see the world through an “adult” moral lens, and so she knows that the world is a heartbreakingly flawed place. But unlike an actual adult, she bears almost no conscious blame for this dismal state. Thunberg seems to gesture at this when referring to herself as a “child,” which she does often in speeches.

When I spoke with her, I asked whether she felt this dual position: the burden of awareness mixed with the lack of blame. “Yes, definitely,” she said. “Because we are so young, our perspective on the world, our perception of the world is so—is so, like, blank. We don’t have that much experience. We don’t say, Oh, we cannot change this because it’s always been this way, which a lot of old people say. We definitely need that new perspective to see the world.”

Pure Rage

In what Umair Irfan references in Vox as a “rhetoric of international shame” Thunberg seems to speak based on science rather than emotional appeals–even as she uses emotion to deliver the message.

That she delivers her message with such direct, uninflected matter-of-factness is another aspect of her disarming rhetorical power. Unlike alarmist activist groups like Extinction Rebellion, she cannot be accused of hyperbolic license in her presentation of the state of the science — they say the U.N. understates the crisis; she takes its reports at face value. Unlike policy-makers like Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders, and those working on Green New Deal legislation, she cannot be faulted for pushing “too fast,” however necessary change may be, because she is not advocating any particular policy at all, merely describing the problem as scientists do and showcasing the failure of leaders to do much, yet, about it — a failure anyone with eyes can plainly see. And unlike climate celebrities like Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio, she cannot be attacked as a hypocrite, because she is already living an exemplary low-carbon life — abjuring plane travel, going vegan, denouncing consumerism.

David Wallace-Wells, New York Mag Intelligencer, “It’s Greta’s World.“

Looking at the COP21 Negotiations

Some key takeaways from the negotiations that concluded yesterday in Paris, called “the world’s greatest diplomatic success” by the Guardian, “a big, big deal” by This Week, and “the treaty that dare not speak its  name” by National Review.

The Document

• The final agreement includes at least seven key elements, as parsed by NYT reporters, namely temperature increase, forests, financing, transparency, fossil-fuel reserves, loss/damage, and 5 year contributions. (Analysts are still breaking down the full implications post hoc, but this brief by Michael Levi of CFR is helpful.)
• In true diplomatic form, one word (“shall” instead of “should”) nearly derailed the entire process.
• If you haven’t explored how these negotiations work before, you need to know that brackets “[” and “]” are an essential tool in the negotiations, and part of the game. For the full post-game analysis, including samples of the language as it evolved through the past weeks–see Deconstructing Paris–an essential blog.

 

The Players

• President Obama has demonstrated that his critics may be correct–he does have a master plan and can achieve it–and demonstrated his global diplomacy mastery in Paris.
• And a key negotiator-in-chief behind Paris, Christiana Figueres, is a Colombian who heads the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat; her strategy is explored in the New Yorker profile last August.
• Bill Gates stepped up to marshall a new coalition from Silicon Valley–but also reaching out to India–and led to a $2B investment in R&D for clean energy.

 

The Process

• Indaba, a negotiation strategy of the Zulu and Xhosa peoples of southern Africa may have played a role in fostering large-group consensus. It involves gathering red lines from all interested parties–thus speeding up the process to agreement.
• An article published in Nature used game theory to explore a possible negotiated outcome. Were they right?
• The agreement is not binding. Does that matter?
• Jargon, vocabulary, or technical know-how. Whatever you call it, here are the terms to know.
• Sometimes skilled negotiations don’t work–because negotiators are influenced by their psychology and can prioritize fairness over a rational offer–and ultimately walk away from a deal. (David Victor, Lab of Law and International Regulation, UCSD)

 

Civil Society

• Two New Zealanders created  #COP21Tracker, the worlds largest Google Doc (?) to follow the diplomatic negotiation process
• @ParisAgreement also provided helpful analysis, in 140 characters or less, of course
• Follow a rag tag group of students on the Duke to Paris Facebook page as they try to make sense of the process

An Interview with Bill Gates on the Future of Energy – The Atlantic

Do high-stakes international negotiations work?

What does a very smart and committed person like Bill Gates think about them? In the upcoming Paris UN Climate Change Conference in December 2015  member states are expected to achieve consensus–even though major breakthroughs are not guaranteed–on a path forward to address this challenge facing the global commons.

Here is what Gates said an interview today in The Atlantic:

It’s good to have people making commitments. It’s really good. But if you really look at those commitments—which are not binding, but even if you say they will all be achieved—they fall dramatically short of the reductions required to reduce CO2 emissions enough to prevent a scenario where global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius. I mean, these commitments won’t even be a third of what you need.And one of the interesting things about this problem is, if you have a country that says, “Okay, we’re going to get on a pathway for an 80 percent reduction in CO2 by 2050,” it might make a commitment that “Hey, by 2030, we’ll be at 30 percent reduction.” But that first 30 percent is dramatically, dramatically easier than getting to 80 percent. So everything that’s hard has been saved for post-2030—and even these 2030 commitments aren’t enough. And many of them won’t be achieved.

Source: An Interview with Bill Gates on the Future of Energy – The Atlantic

Soft Skills Meet Science: How “Worldviews” Shape Science Policy Debates

Shouldn’t science be able to resolve the climate change issue? Apparently not. And for anyone interested in the communication issues under the hood it is important to understand why raw intelligence cannot account for disagreements.  Dan Kahan at Yale, working with Donald Braman, is on it, as featured in the Chronicle Review. They found that measuring individuals on an egalitarian-hierarchal and indvidualism-communitarian scales helped to create four possible “worldviews” that explain conflicting takes on a myriad of issues.

Senior legal scholars immediately objected, the start of a long line of smart people affronted by Kahan’s findings. Their protests boil down to a gut reaction: “This couldn’t possibly apply to me!” There are many exemplars of the genre, with The New York Times’s Paul Krugman providing an excellent case this year, skewing Kahan’s work to fit his belief that Democrats value science more than Republicans do. Few people can admit that they let their cultural values trump facts. Could you? “We get a lot from our communities,” Braman says. “They help us think through problems.” This was Douglas’s basic insight, and it explains why campaigners have spent decades arguing over cultural fault lines. The notion that truth can’t resolve a factual debate—it’s threatening.

Douglas, however, was also troubled, and evasive on what questions might elicit worldviews, a vagueness, Braman says, that also “allowed her to apply the theory to whatever she wanted.” Douglas (who died in 2007) told them she had not meant to describe fixed personality traits; to her, worldviews were fluid. At work, you may behave like a hierarchical individualist, but in your softball league, you may turn communitarian. The work is fine, she eventually told Kahan, but it’s not cultural theory as she intended it. They should get a new name.

via Seeking a Climate Change – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Getting Serious at the Table

What can realistically be accomplished during the coming climate change negotiations?

The reality is that 300 years of economic growth in the industrialized countries have been fueled by the combustion of fossil fuels — coal, petroleum and natural gas. We still depend on these. And the large emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico and South Africa are rapidly putting in place new infrastructure that is also dependent on burning fossil fuels.

Two points are important to understand if we’re going to be serious about attacking this problem.

One, it will be costly. An economic assessment might be “difficult, but not impossible.” And two, things become more challenging when we move from the economics to the politics.

Doing what is necessary to achieve the United Nations’ target for reducing emissions would reduce economic growth by about 0.06 percent annually from now through 2100, according to the I.P.C.C. That sounds trivial, but by the end of the century it means a 5 percent loss of worldwide economic activity per year.

via Climate Realities – NYTimes.com.

The end of the world as we know It?

Could unsustainable resource exploitation combined with unequal wealth distribution be the end of modern society?  A new NASA Goddard Space Flight Center study suggests the possibility, using simulations of civilizational survivability.  Could this be how “our” world ends–with a bang instead of a wimper?

The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business – and consumers – to recognise that ‘business as usual’ cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately.

Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies – by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance – have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a ‘perfect storm’ within about fifteen years. But these ‘business as usual’ forecasts could be very conservative.

via Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? | Nafeez Ahmed | theguardian.com.

For more, Jared Diamond has written a book on the subject, chock full of examples of historical indicators that reveal how past civilizations have ended.  Key factors include human impact on the environment, climate change,  changing alliances, and dysfunctional political and cultural practices.

Negotiation Drags On at COP19 in Warsaw

Doesn’t China have an obligation to reduce its greenhouse emissions? Ongoing (and thus far, contentious) negotiations in Warsaw this week reveal the PRC’s “you first” approach–a policy approach that is explored in this Dot Earth interview with Zou Ji, deputy director of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy:

For the other aspect, its international responsibility, my understanding is China will take its responsibilities as a large developing country, but certainly subject to its capabilities, also on an equitable basis. China will make the decision not only with the understanding of its own situation …but also the overall design of the global responsibility system, including looking at the share of burden or benefits in the process from other countries – for example the United States, Europe, Japan.

In these aspects China continues to keep the idea of common but differentiated responsibilities [background], very frankly.… China insists in the position to make the framework [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] the political and legal basis for the global regime and we do not see the necessity or need to rewrite or interpret the convention. There have been a lot of changes in the past years, but our observation is for the basis of the convention, its principles and supporting scientific facts, there have been no significant changes.

via A Closer Look at China’s ‘You First’ Stance in Climate Treaty Talks – NYTimes.com.

Other updates from 19th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Warsaw:

• Why one group calls a coalition of Australia, Canada and Japan the “climate saboteurs“
• Full coverage, including live blogging from The Guardian and the G77 + China (132 countries) “walkout” during talks about “loss and damage”
• Follow the negotiations blow-by-blow @Twitter #cop19 climate

Bulgaria’s Air Is Dirtiest in Europe, Study Finds, Followed by Poland – NYTimes.com

Wood burning, slow modernization, and Soviet era mismanagement are to blame:

But Bulgaria is hardly alone in having air quality challenges. While Bulgarian cities lead in the concentration of particulates, Poland is a frequent runner-up, and cities in northern Italy lead in ozone, according to separate data provided by the agency.

Over all, in the 10 years measured by the report — from 2002 to 2011 — air pollutants are generally on the decline in Europe. But particulates and ozone remain a problem. An increase in the percentage of urban populations in Europe being exposed to levels of particulate matter from 2010 to 2011 suggested some backsliding, the report said. The development was attributed to dry spells in the period, which slow the dispersal of particulates. But it also could reveal a growing reliance on wood burning for home heating in some countries during the financial crisis, the agency said.

via Bulgaria’s Air Is Dirtiest in Europe, Study Finds, Followed by Poland – NYTimes.com.

Policy Options on Global Carbon?

How can you solve the problem of a shared, common interest in reducing global carbon?

The idea he was defending was that scientists should specify a worldwide cap on global emissions of greenhouse gases — “a carbon cap” — that would apply if countries were serious about staying below an internationally agreed upper limit on global warming. It was just a single paragraph, but it had huge implications, and everyone in the room knew it. If it were adopted, it would make starkly clear how far the world remains from having any meaningful policy to tackle climate change.

“It was inconveniently simple,” Dr. Knutti would say a few days later.

via How to Slice a Global Carbon Pie? – NYTimes.com.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attempts a solution–with negotation on language and paragraphs rampant–as we would expect for such a diplomatic policymaking exercise.