Climate Solution Slipping Away?

Preparations for Kyoto Phase 2, to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009, appear to be faltering, and faltering from an insufficient target in any case. See:

• No Leader on Climate Change as Nations Prepare to Meet
• Danish Conservative Prepares for Climate Debate

The scientific assessment is clear (IPCC, go to the Synthesis Report): orchestrating a soft landing on the global warming scenario of a 2-degree C increase or less by the end of the century is a catastrophe, but a multi-century manageable one. The WWI summarizes the IPCC Synthesis report as follows, "A warming of 2 degrees Celsius is clearly not "safe" and would not prevent, with high certainty, dangerous interference with the climate system."1  They go on to say, "Limiting the peak warming to less than 1 degree Celsius will require a multi-century commitment to action."2  Any scenario with a higher increase will be an unmanageable and unrecoverable disaster. The requirements to limit warming to the 2-degree scenario with a high degree of confidence involve the following components:

• limiting peak global CO2 production to 2015 or so (before 2020),
• reducing CO2 emisions 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050,
• capturing and storing 2.5 billion tons of carbon a year (9B tons of CO2) for more than 200 years to draw GHG concentrations down below 300 ppm CO2-equivalent.

This scenario would include the following measures:

• a massive global deployment of renewable energy (beginning yesterday!),
• an accelerated program of radical increases in energy efficiency,
• a limit on the lifetime of existing coal power plants,
• deployment of as yet unproven carbon capture and storage technology after the mid 2020s, if possible,
• extensive transformation to sustainble agriculture and reforestation to increase natural carbon capture.

With this scenario, the following results are highly likely for global temperatures:

• they should peak below 2 degrees C around 2050,
• they should slowly decline to reach present levels between 2250 and 2300 (200 to 250 years from now),
• they should continue to decline to 1990 levels by 2400 (300 years from now).

We face a historically unprecedented global problem, one that is a highly probable catastrophe. We face a collaborative solution that we are unlikely to pursue, but that has a high probability of success. That solution will take three centuries of never-before-seen global collaboration and cooperation. The prize of the improbable success would be the creation of a sustainable global economy and its associated durable economic prosperity and security at higher levels than are possible with our out-moded fossil-fuel burning economy and that would be accessible for 100% of humanity. However, the difficulties of achieving this improbable success are evident in the preparations for Copenhagen 2009.

The only imaginable solution is bringing to a global scale of production and deployment the technologies and processes (production/consumption) of a sustainable economy that eliminate pollution (many already exist now). Without doing this, China and India will burn their soft coal to claim their self-asserted historic right to industrial development and sink the boat -- their and the global economy--within 50+ years even if the modern economies were to freeze and die right now.

Until the world's leaders see and seize this economic opportunity of the sustainability challenge, an opportunity of a new type requiring institutional innovation to enable the required scale and nature of collaboration, they will continue to argue about who is at fault and how much international aid booty should be associated with cooperation. They will continue to discuss and pursue adaptation and mitigation (reducing the rate of increase of harmful things) to an increasingly harsh environment, all the while enabling the increasingly harsh environment that will take its toll with dramatic and tragic reductions in population and increasing economic crises. They will continue to miss the largest historical opportunity for their own and the world's economic development--achieving sustainability within the next 20 years. In crass terms, a veritible gold rush of an opportunity, especially for those ahead of the pack. The delay in implementing a solution of mass mobilization will waste precious time and soon (2-5+ years) push us beyond the brink of recovery!

The economic opportunity of the sustainability challenge is to collaboratively compete like mad to be the producers and achievers of a sustainable economy (to strike gold). The first economies to achieve sustainability will earn the profit premiums of being first and will put in place the strongest defense against the bad effects of climate change that will occur over the next 300 years even as we reverse it by implementing the less than 2-degree C global warming scenario. Collaboratively ensuring all economies go sustainable shortly is the only effective solution and only real opportunity for national and international economic development. Adaptation to and mitigation of the increasingly severe, system's compromising  environmental and economic problems of of our self-destroying out-moded economic and business model won't win the day. Only collaborative innovative transformation to global sustainability will do so. 

The world leaders meeting in Copenhagen in Dec. 2009 to define Kyoto Phase 2 need to assemble and launch the political-economic framework that will enable that mad collaboratively competitive dash to create sustainable national, local, and global economies (strike gold). Unfortunately, the likelihood of a sufficient result is small, but the prize--striking the gold of durable economic prosperity and security at higher levels than possible with the current fossil-fuel-based economy--is huge. Maybe it will be sufficiently motivational.

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1 The World Watch Institute, State of the World 2009, p.19.

2 Ibid, p. 24.