Crawling from the Wreckage (5 page)

The
IPCC
‘s experts now believe that merely raising the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 30 percent over the pre-industrial level of 270 parts per million has already produced major changes in sea
ice, glaciers, droughts, floods, ecosystems and ocean acidification. They have redone their calculations on the amount of warming to be expected from doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—the level we will reach by 2050, if we stay on our present course—while taking into account positive feedback effects that they had not previously allowed for. The results are disturbing, to say the least.

The
IPCC
‘s new estimates for global warming during the twenty-first century range from a minimum of 2 degrees to a maximum of 5.8 degrees Celsius. The planet has not been that hot since the start of the Eocene era fifty-five million years ago, when a huge release of carbon gases of uncertain, perhaps volcanic origin, drove global temperatures up for two hundred thousand years.

Natural processes eventually sequestered most of the carbon and restored a normal climate, but during the long hot spell the equatorial regions and most of the mid-latitudes, where the bulk of the world’s population now lives, were barren semi-deserts.

These revised estimates, in other words, are very bad news for most countries. If you are Spanish or Brazilian or Thai—or American, for that matter—most or all of your country is going to turn into a desert, unless we all cut carbon dioxide emissions radically starting yesterday. Indeed, at least two-thirds of the world’s existing farmland would become sterile, and billions would have to move or risk dying.

These estimates will have no immediate impact in the United States, where disbelief in climate change is still strong. President Bush’s principal adviser on these matters, James Connaughton, recently expressed the view that we may be able to double the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, perhaps even triple or quadruple it, without changing the climate. (Physics and chemistry work differently on his planet.) But elsewhere, most governments are paying close attention to the implications of all this.

Within the scenario of general climate catastrophe, some countries come out relatively unharmed, mainly because they are in the high latitudes. Unfairly, they are mostly the older industrialized countries that bear the largest share of the responsibility for setting the disaster in motion: Canada, Britain, Germany, Russia and Japan. Some of them, with long land borders, can expect to be overwhelmed by more numerous refugees from the south, if this disaster actually comes to pass. But Britain is an island—a very crowded island with little room for refugees.

The British government makes lots of mistakes, but there is no government in the world that puts as much effort into modelling long-term scenarios and thinking them through. I would be astonished if there were not some cell in London that spends much of its time imagining the future consequences of extreme climate change and feeding its conclusions to its political masters.

The first duty of British politicians is to protect the British people. If the worst comes to pass, that could well involve a capability to stop too many refugees from swamping Lifeboat Britain. In a world where nuclear weapons would almost certainly be more widespread than they are now, a credible British nuclear deterrent would be an indispensable part of such a policy, and I’ll bet next month’s mortgage that exactly that argument got made last year somewhere in Whitehall.

So, apologies to John Reid for not taking him seriously enough. And apologies to the rest of you for ruining your breakfast.

The boy finally got it. Took him a while, though
.

What followed, in terms of the public debate, was a couple of years in which we began to explore the political implications of climate change. Suddenly it looked like it was going to take over the whole agenda, both domestically and internationally, for the indefinite future. Some very interesting ideas came up, but then the global warming file was shelved in order to deal with the global economic meltdown
.

Here’s the plan. Everybody in the country will get the same allowance for how much carbon dioxide they can emit each year, and every time they buy some product that involves carbon dioxide emissions—filling their car, paying their utility bills, buying an airline ticket—carbon points are deducted from their credit or debit cards. Like Air Miles, only in reverse.

So if you ride a bike everywhere, insulate your home, and don’t travel much, you can sell your unused points back to the system. However, if you use up your allowance before the end of the year, you will have to buy extra points from the system.

This is no lunatic proposal from the eco-radical fringe. It is the brainchild of Britain’s environment secretary, David Miliband, who hopes to launch a pilot program soon, with the goal of moving to a comprehensive national scheme of carbon rationing within five years.

Ever since a delegation of scientists persuaded prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a scientist herself, to start taking climate change seriously back in the late 1980s, British governments of both parties have been in the forefront on the issue, but Miliband’s initiative breaks new ground. It has, he says, “a simplicity and beauty that would reward carbon thrift.”

A huge share of total emissions is driven by the decisions of individual consumers. Miliband thinks that the least intrusive, most efficient way of shaping those decisions is to track everybody’s use of goods and services that produce a lot of greenhouse gases, and to reward the thrifty while imposing higher costs on the profligate. The world’s carbon emissions have to stop growing within ten to fifteen years, he says, and Britain must cut its total carbon emissions by 60 percent in the next thirty or forty years.

“We are in a dangerous place now,” Miliband told the
Guardian
on December 11, “and it is going to be very difficult to get into a less dangerous place. The science is getting worse faster than the politics is getting better. People know the technology exists to get a lot of this done … but there is a huge chasm of mistrust between countries about how to do this … The developing countries won’t take on any carbon reduction targets until they believe the countries that have caused the problem do so.”

The science certainly is “getting worse,” in the sense that every new forecast is worse than the one before. The most recent assessment of the state of the Arctic by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose full fourth report is due next year, was published last week in the journal
Geophysical Research Letters
, because its forecast was so alarming.

If current trends persist, the scientists reported, the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in the summertime by 2040, not in 2080, as previous forecasts suggested. That’s just thirty-three years from now. Then, at that point, the dark ocean surface will absorb much more heat than the reflective ice did, another element of feedback kicks in, and the speed of warming increases again.

Those in the know are very frightened, but there is still that “huge chasm of mistrust.” The developing countries, which are only now beginning to emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, look at the mountain of past
emissions produced by the developed countries, and they want the rich countries to cut back very deeply—deeply enough to leave the developing countries some room to raise their consumption, without dooming us all to runaway climate change.

That’s where the long-range target of 60 percent emission cuts for Britain comes from. Britain only produces 2 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, so a 60 percent cut in Britain alone is still only a drop in the bucket, but the aim is to set an example: see, we can do this without impoverishing ourselves, so other developed countries can too. And if they succeed, then a deal to control the growth of emissions in the developing countries is within reach.

So individual carbon credit accounts for all, and if you want to do things that produce more carbon dioxide than your annual allowance, you pay for it. The frugal and the poor can sell their unused credits back into the system—and every year or so, as the average carbon efficiency of transport or food production or power generation improves a little bit, the size of the free personal carbon allowance is reduced a little bit. This, I suspect, is the shape of things to come.

Maybe, but not quite yet. Miliband’s proposal elicited no enthusiasm from any quarter, and was never discussed again. It is going to be a very long haul—maybe too long, given how fast things are moving. The Arctic Ocean is now generally expected to be largely ice-free at the end of the summer melt season within ten to twenty years, with the most pessimistic prediction saying 2013
.

The United States is off the hook: last year China overtook it to become the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. “The tall tree attracts the wind,” and from now on China will be the main target of the criticism that used to be directed at the United States for its refusal to accept binding limits on its greenhouse-gas emissions.

What’s particularly striking is the speed with which China has surged into the lead. In 2005, China’s carbon dioxide emissions were 2 percent
lower than those of the U.S.; in 2006, they were 8 percent higher. While China has four times the population, the average Chinese is nothing like a quarter as rich as the average American. In fact, the vast majority of Chinese don’t even own cars. So why does China produce so much carbon dioxide?

One reason is cement. The pace of building in China is so intense that the country produces 44 percent of the world’s cement (the U.S. produces 4 percent), and cement production is a major source of greenhouse gases. The main culprit, however, is coal, which accounts for 70 percent of China’s energy consumption.

China already burns more than twice as much coal as the U.S., and almost as much as everybody else in the world combined. In the race to keep up with soaring energy demand, it is building 550 new coal-fired power stations (they are currently opening at the rate of two a week), and nobody has the time to experiment with “clean-burning” coal technologies that are still new, even in the West. The result? China’s emissions will continue to race ahead of everybody else’s.

How can they let this happen? Don’t they understand that emissions growing at this pace will pitch the world into runaway climate change, and that they will be among the worst sufferers if that happens? Well, yes and no. The Chinese public mostly does not understand where this is leading because there has been little discussion of climate change in their media, but also because their attention is focused closer to home.

“China’s position today is similar to that of the U.S. or Europe during the seventies, when people first started to be concerned about pollution and the destruction of ecosystems,” explained climate change expert Li Zou of Renmin University of China in Beijing. “We have only just started being concerned about local environmental issues. When we become richer and richer … people will have more time and more resources to pay attention to something not directly linked to themselves.”

But climate change
will
affect the lives of ordinary Chinese people, and the government and the experts know it. One government study last year predicted a 37 percent fall in crop yields within the next fifty years if current trends persist. Since we may assume that climate change will have comparable effects elsewhere, and that even a rich China will be unable to make up the shortfall by importing food, that prediction implies mass starvation. Don’t they care?

Of course they care. But they are in a high-stakes poker game and they cannot afford to blink. There will have to be a global agreement on curbing greenhouse-gas emissions within the next five to ten years; if not, the world will face runaway climate change. But countries like China and India must get special terms or their hopes of a prosperous future are doomed.

Put yourself in China’s shoes. Five hundred years ago, average incomes in Europe, India and China were about the same. Then the Europeans got the jump on everybody else technologically, grew unimaginably rich and powerful, and conquered practically the whole world. They also industrialized, and for two hundred years it was their industries, their cities, their vehicles that poured excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Now the rich countries are concerned about the consequences. Now they are even willing to curb their emissions (though some rich countries less so than others)—but they can easily afford to because they are already rich and bound to remain so. If China imposes the same kind of curbs on its emissions, then it will not become a country where most people are prosperous and secure in this generation, or perhaps ever. The same goes for India and all the other once-poor countries that are now experiencing very rapid economic growth. So, the deal must be that they get to keep on growing fast, and the rich countries take the strain.

There are two main ways for the developed countries to take the strain. One is to cut their own emissions very deeply, leaving room for the developing countries to expand theirs. The other way is to pay directly for cuts in the emissions of the developing countries: pay them to adopt clean-burning coal technologies; pay them to build renewable energy sources; pay them not to cut the rainforests down. Pay them quite a lot, in fact, because otherwise we will all suffer.

The developing countries will never get that deal unless they demonstrate that they are unwilling to curb emissions without it. Their refusal to cut emissions until they get that deal may seem selfish or blind, but they understand what kind of game they’re in. It’s not poker; it’s a game of chicken.

Given my own lack of belief, it’s remarkable how much I have written about religion over the years. I wrote this piece when Pope John Paul II died in 2005, and it is, in its own way, confessional
.