Chosing to Feel Hopeful About the UN Climate Conference

I'm sitting tonight in an airport hotel, preparing for an early morning flight to Mexico to attend COP-16, the follow-on international negotiation to last year's Copenhagen conference.

For weeks the commentary in the press has been gloomy on prospects for progress in Cancun. With the changes in the make up of the legislature in the US, prospects for the negotiations overall are widely viewed as dismal.

It's hard to leave home and family for a giant conference center in a resort city for a meeting that seems already been written off by many. There may not be a global treaty at the end of Cancun but, based on the other UN climate conferences I've attended in the past few years, I think there will be progress on several fronts, no matter what the negotiators themselves accomplish.

Deeper ties will be woven, between individuals and groups, especially civil society organizations who send representatives to share and learn. People from different countries, different sectors, and different age groups will be thrown together for these two weeks, based on their shared search for fair and lasting solutions to climate change. The momentum that these groups continue to build and the network they continue to weave is changing the world, in subtle and not always predictable ways.

Scientific and technical exchange will continue. At the edges of the conferences are dozens of 'side events' where groups talk about the research and policy experiments. What's working in Africa to help farmers adapt to changing weather? What does the latest science say about needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions? What are the latest ideas about how to finance those emissions reductions? Whether the negotiators find any points of a agreement or not, the exchange of ideas will go on, and will lead to new ideas, new collaborations, new experiments.

In the end we do need a global agreement to reduce emissions and the sooner the better. But getting to that agreement is not only a matter of the immediate politics of an agreement. It is also a matter of creating the right conditions, in each country, to allow leaders to lead toward sound climate policy and to allow negotiators to seal a deal to implement it.

Perhaps the negotiations will surprise all of us with a stronger than expected outcome, but if they don't, it makes the rest of the work of Cancun – the learning, the relationship building, the exchange – that much more important. That is the work that prepares the ground for the kind of global agreement we need.

Measuring the gap is an essential (but only a first) step toward steering a system

This morning, a new report was  released by the United Nations Environment Program. It represents about half a year of work by dozens of scientists, including me, who were asked by UNEP to assess the expected global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 if countries fulfill the pledges they made last year in Copenhagen.
 
It was a challenging task for reasons ranging from  lack of clarity about what exactly some pledges meant, to differing historical data sources, to differing projections of future emissions in different parts of the world, and, of course, due to the uncertainties inherent in our imperfect understanding of the climate itself. But given all of the challenges, I think the report does a good job of giving us a snapshot in time of the best scientific answer to a complex question: if we desire to limit temperature increase to 2°C over pre-industrial temperatures, do the Copenhagen Accord pledges go far enough? You can read the report here, if you want all the details, but the bottom line answer is: no, there's a gap between where we are headed and where we need to head. We filled about 60% of the gap, and have another 40% of the way to go.

As someone who has made a career of studying systems, I know that registering a gap is an essential step in self-regulating feedback. Whether it is the drop in blood sugar that sends an animal in search of food, or the increase in body temperature that leads to sweating, all self-regulating systems keep themselves in balance by measuring the gap between where some parameter is and where it needs to be, and reacting to the difference with corrective action.

It could be that the Emissions Gap report is, like the gap detected by a thermostat that turns on a furnace, a signal that spurs self-correcting, balancing action, in this case global resolve to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But, not every gap that can be detected by a system triggers self-corrective feedback. My mentor, the systems analyst, Donella Meadows, once said jokingly about the increase in standardized testing in schools: "trying to improve learning by increasing testing, is like trying to cure a fever by taking your temperature." Measuring a gap, without the determination to act on it, is unlikely to change a system.

The Emissions Gap report is, like a test, or a thermometer, an effort to measure the size of a gap, the amount of deviation of a system from healthy conditions. But the assessment of the gap alone can't bring the system into balance any more than a thermostat can warm a room if it is disconnected from the furnace.

A gap is an essential part of any self-corrective feedback loop, but only a part, a trigger. To create change, there must be something to act on the news of the gap.

So where might we find the rest of the self-corrective feedback loop that seems to be struggling to emerge as humanity grapples with it's overshoot of the planet's limits?

There's nowhere for it to lie, really, except in us. Individual human beings, from environment ministers to ordinary citizens. In the everyday personal choices we make, and more importantly, in our coming together to change the prices of energy, the rewards for efficiency, the design of cities, and the vision of a good life for an individual or a whole society. 

The good news of the emissions gap report is that the gap could be closed, brought to zero, given reasonable assumptions about technological progress and investment and the pace of change.

The hours of thinking, analysis and editing will seem well worth it, if the news of the Emissions Gap helps, in small ways or large ones, to trigger the the systemic self-corrective action we know is needed to keep the climate with in safe bounds.

Carbon Tax Passes, At Least A Voluntary One in My Community

I love the experimental attitude of Cobb Hill, something that I think traces directly back to Cobb Hill co-founder, Donella Meadows, who wrote and spoke often of her belief that no one knows how to create a sustainable world and that therefore we must commit ourselves to experimentation, be willing to make mistakes, and share what we learn along the way.

This experimental spirit showed up in my email box the other day, in the form of a note from my neighbor, Tom, with recommendations for a two-month experiment with a voluntary carbon tax within our community.

The idea was simple. Any family who wanted to participate would keep track of the number of gallons of gasoline consumed for  two months, and commit to paying a 'tax' of $1 per gallon, the proceeds of which would be collected and invested in yet-to-be-determined ways that would enhance the sustainability or fossil-fuel independence of the community.

I signed up (though I gulped when I saw the recommendation that air-miles be 'taxed' as well, knowing that my fall schedule of flights to climate meetings is quite high; the irony of this which is a topic for another post someday!)

There are all sorts of questions about our voluntary tax, pretty much the same ones that play out on the national and international scale.

Fairness:
How do we ensure that the tax is not an unfair burden on those with the lowest incomes?

Priorities;
How to invest the revenues towards our long-term goals?

Specifics:
What about other fuels, like propane for cooking?

If the past ten years at Cobb Hill are any guide we will talk about all these questions and more. We will try things out. The plan will change. It might even be abandoned in the end, and that would be OK with me. The plan itself is not the point. What is important is, as Dana Meadows said,  the willingness to admit that we don't know exactly what to do and then get down to the work of trying things out.

So, stay tuned for the debate, the lessons, and, of course, the answer you might be most interested in:  how big will the Sawin/Rice August/September voluntary carbon tax bill be?

And, who knows, maybe your family or your neighborhood will get sick of waiting for the Senate and decide to  try something similar, yourselves.