Just what do we need from Copenhagen?

The UN’s Copenhagen climate summit planned for this December is widely acknowledged to be our last good chance of keeping global warming under 2 degrees, and therefore of avoiding runaway warming. Its therefore worthwhile reviewing just what should be asked of our politicians leading up to the event.

The majority of the warming is driven by CO² and methane emissions. The latest figure from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii which has been monitoring CO² since 1957 is 388ppm (July 2009), and it has been increasing at about 2.3ppm per year, with 400ppm considered a safe limit even though it represents a 25% chance of exceeding the 2 degree target.

We are already at a level that is likely to produce a total warming of 2 degrees, and so the simple answer is that we need global cuts of 60-80% and we need them now. This has virtually no chance of happening and so we are going to overshoot, and attempt to pull back emissions before warming gets too bad. Again quite obviously, this is like playing chicken with a semitrailer while riding a pushbike, and to have any chance at all of working we must make cuts as dramatic as possible. We definitely need global emissions to peak within 5 years.

The scheme world leaders are adopting to share out emissions cuts is called contraction and convergence which ends up with each person in the globe allowed to emit the same amount of CO² at the end of the period (normally 2050). Therefore developing countries could continue to increase emissions until they are at that level. Note that this takes no notice of historical emissions which were due to the developed countries. As the world population is projected to rise almost 50% to 9 billion by 2050 each person’s slice of the pie will reduce over that period.

Its very easy for politicians to set targets for 2050, by which time they will be long gone, but 2020 targets are much trickier as they actually require real action within the term of the current government. Thus you tend to see ambitious targets for 2050 and weak ones for 2020.

The Kyoto protocol was intended to reduce developed countries emissions by 5.2% over 1990 levels by 2008-2012 and is widely considered to be very undemanding, so it is concerning that many of the Kyoto countries are nowhere near meeting their obligations. Spain, Portugal, Canada, Greece, New Zealand and Ireland are just some of the worst, and Australia would have no chance of meeting our 8% increase without the land use change provision, which seems very susceptible to manipulation. Furthermore Kyoto allows countries that have not reduced their emissions to buy credits from (usually) schemes in developing countries that reduce emissions. Many of these schemes also seem rather dubious and are unlikely to result in significant emissions reductions.

So we need considerably tougher targets than Kyoto while avoiding the problems which beset that treaty. We have the technology we need, though it needs to be scaled up, commercialised and the costs need to be considerably reduced. So far governments have mainly avoided thinking about the technological requirements and focused on setting a price on carbon, and hoping the market will do the rest. They conveniently ignore the sorry tale of what happened in Europe when this was tried. Simply put the market “gamed” the system, found the loopholes and maximised profits while minimising costs. That after all is what companies are set up to do.

The existing energy companies are massively dependent on fossil fuels and have very little expertise or interest in renewable energy. They are therefore not likely to change unless they see they have no choice in the matter, and the new rules must be as simple as possible to avoid loopholes. This unfortunately is a matter for individual countries to address, and the industry friendly political systems in most of the western world make it very difficult to accomplish rapid change.

The other major problem in any international agreement results from each government trying to support their balance of trade, which again leads to various exceptions where the rules become unclear and subject to political pressure from the major companies.

Though it is still considered very gauche to mention it, population growth is a very major factor affecting future emissions, especially as development increases the per capita energy use. A recent study shows that having a child far outweighs all of the energy saving activities currently popular.

A successful Copenhagen agreement would in my view deliver the following:-

• Reductions of about 40% by 2020 from a 1990 base for developed counties.
• A simple system that penalises heavy emitters and rewards reductions, without the complexity that rewards financial engineering.
• At least 80% of reductions (ideally more) should be achieved within each country rather than being outsourced.
• A fair way of calculating emissions due to exports. For example roughly 30% of China’s emissions are caused by exports. These should be at least partly counted against the importing country, though this will be difficult without opening up further loopholes. While I can’t find any good numbers on this for Australia I suspect we are also significantly affected.
• A significant amount of money should be made available to developing countries to assist in reducing emissions. Forestry schemes in particular could be very valuable, but again they need to represent lasting change and be verifiable.
• Developing countries whose emissions rise above the per capita cap (on a reducing scale towards the 2050 target) should be required to make some cuts to emissions. Ideally there should be incentives offered for developing countries who keep population growth under projected levels.
• UN Reviews should be conducted during the period (for example in 2015 and 2018) and some penalties (probably tariff related) imposed if countries are not making progress, with harsh international trade penalties applied to those that don’t meet their reductions by 2020.