Consultant Dan
10 December 2010
My critique of the Cancun UNFCCC climate negotiations
I have been following the UN’s climate negotiations for twenty years and want to contribute to the debate by asking, do we need a completely different approach?
Please let me know what you think of this essay , which was printed yesterday on The Drum (The ABC’s opinion site).
A shorter version is in the print (p.19) and online editions of the Age.
I gladly acknowledge those people who have generously shared their expertise and stimulated my thinking on climate law and international politics over the years: Danny Kennedy, Dr Deborah Z Cass, Professor Gerry Simpson, Senator Christine Milne, Fiona McLeod SC, John Hepburn, Professor Philippe Sands QC, Jane E Treleavan, Justice Alan Goldberg AO, Julian Burnside QC, Brian Walters SC, Philip Freeman, Emma Carmody and Paul Connor.
Do you think I am making a sound case? Is it too risky to undermine the UNFCCC and try something new? Is energy security a better basis for international law than climate risk?
Please contribute to the development of this thinking, by leaving your comments below.
Thanks Elaine for coming by.
Firstly, what are your opinions? I’m interested to know what readers of my blog think.
Secondly, thanks for bringing up Popper. He’s used wrongly by Denialists but I have always found the concept of falsifiability a useful incremental contribution to the conversation about the credibility of scientific knowledge.
Thirdly, in the early 1990s I felt the need to debate climatology but since then I have moved on to more pressing questions. If you have something scientifically credible to say about climate science, you will be able to get it in a reputable journal. Just out of interest, do you have anything credible to say?
Dan, I’m not a scientist but have a Degree in Philosophy where debate – or rather Platonic Dialectic – is an essential part of that Discipline. – as well as in science. Even Einstein had his detractors! This was reinforced by my study of Kant (which I insisted be included in the curriculum when invited to enrol in an Honours Degree). Those studies included the History of Science where I encountered Popper. It was also instrumental in my membership of the Founding Executive of the Australasian Association of Philosophy for Children which is now taught in many schools throughout Australia. It’s essential aim is to produce a forum for discussion – or debate – and to learn to look at all views without preconceived opinions and/or prejudices. Epistomology – or the study of how we acquire knowledge – was the essential driving force of Kant..
As for environmentalism, my interest in that began many years ago when my son married the daughter of (recently decesed) Dr Sydney Baggs of whom you have probably heard. He was a University Lecturer in Landscape Architecture.who introduced the concept of Underground Housing to Australia. – now carried on by his son David. Together our families were planning to set up a sustainable community on the North Coast. I never questioned, but indeed embraced the environmentalist position. About a year ago I was referred to the “other side”. So you might say I am in the same position as you in the 90’s – interested in any “debate” between the two views. But I have been dismayed by the tone of the “conversation” (as you term it). From what I have read it hardly merits the term “debate”. One must always begin with a Premise – not just an assumption, which seems to me to be case in your response when you appear to “assume” by my reference to Popper’s falsifiability dictum that that automatically identifies me with the climate change “Denialists”. I would however be interested to know in what way you think they use Popper’s concept “wrongly”..
Regards,
Elaine.
PS. What has happened to all the other Comments on your Blog on this subject? It seems to me that the recent phenomenon of Blogs is an ideal way to carry on “debates” – although I realize they can also be filled with dubious content.
It sounds like you’ve done some ethical living and quality thinking. Good on you.
I want more comments! There have been some emails which are so stupid that posting them would make me look like Einstein by comparison.
Popper is misused by those who reduce the complexity of science to the falsification goal/ process. Sciences change how they proceed over time and at any one time there are very different methods being used across different disciplines, for example routine procedure (genetics), thought experiments (early quantum mechanics, relativity), paradigm shift or revolution (Copernicus), etc.
I think that if you try to define the scientific method you end up at Feyerabend’s position, that “anything goes”. That’s why I’m not interested in philosophy of scientific method any more. I think its a relatively barren intellectual pursuit.
What is more problematic is when people claim that Popper grants the authority to prevent precautionary action on climate change because it proves that the method of contemporary science is wrong! I can’t imagine old Popper being at all impressed by Denialists who claim epistemological fiat to disqualify environmentalism.
As for Kant, I only read a tiny bit of his writing, but my hunch is that if he were alive today, he would be a bit of a Bob Brown fan.
Dan, As a long-time student (and shorter-time practitioner) of international law and politics I read your essay with interest. Keen to discuss it with you in person when we next catch-up, but thought I’d leave a few initial comments.
I think the question you’re interested in not so much whether treaties are “binding”, but whether they are “enforceable” – that is, the adequacy of the enforcement mechanisms established under international climate treaties to enforce the substantive norms/rules in those treaties. Plainly, the enforcement mechanisms of the UNFCCC and Kyoto are totally inadequate.
Your solution seems to me to be to beef-up the enforcement mechanisms – more international institutions, courts and processes presiding over a global clean energy economy.
I’m more sceptical about the capacity (and legitimacy) of international institutions to perform these tasks and about the ability of states to agree on their establishment. It’s taken more than 15 years of UN climate negotiations to get us to the very modest deal in Cancun. How much longer will it take to establish even grander international institutions?
I think the better question is about how to change political interests and values at the national (and state/local) level in key countries (remembering close to 80% of the world’s emissions come from the top 20 emitters) and building smaller, more flexible coalitions of the willing on specific climate/energy-related issues among countries that are genuinely committed to the hard work of mitigation. In other words, it has to be bottom-up (based on democratic will), not top-down (coercive).
I’d also question the relevance of the Vienna Congress link. I’m not sure how much relevance agreements between the warring great powers of Europe has to a world of climate change and Wikileaks.
You could say my view of how political change will/must occur on climate is more in line with CoalitionFilm – http://coalitionofthewilling.org.uk/ – than a Green Vienna Congress.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts soon!
Fergus
Thanks for your comments Fergus. As you know, I think you are doing very valuable thinking on climate justice and action.
You’re right – I have conflated enforceable and binding, which isn’t legally accurate. You’re also right that Vienna, 1814 brought together a very different system of states than the UN in 2010!
Coalition of the Willing, which you refer to, is great and in line with smart strategies that have been successful for other organisations such as the Post Carbon Institute and its relocalisation work. There is more value in local resilience organising than in ‘engaging’ the UNFCC, that is for sure.
I am (unjustifiably?) optimistic about states finding a way to be self-interested about energy security in ways that aid the transition to a post-carbon economics.
I think we should be ambitious about convincing the passive, consumerist majority that renewable energy can do baseload and urban transport, is resilient to external impacts and cheaper in the (not so long) long-run than oil, coal and gas. This will be enough to get the State to take action in international law.
Its always annoyed me that the GATT/WTO was superior to the Rio agreements when it should have been the other way around. Perhaps I’m looking back to that sell-out moment, 1990-1992, but I still maintain that we should at least raise the climate question properly within trade treaties and see what can be achieved.
If we can create a wall to protect clean energy investment in domestic economies, this can do the bulk of the transition to zero emissions in the OECD, without an international climate agreement.
You should write a response and get it published on ClimateSpectator or in the Age. This is an interesting and worthy debate to be having.
Thanks Dan
Regrettably, reading your article didn’t get me any closer to what you meant in practice to “the use of force itself”.
I sketched out what you might have had in mind (over at BNC) but it might be useful to clarifym, since the enforceability of agreements seems foundational to your paper.
By way of background to my own position, I see myself as someone who is very keen on robust, ubiquitous, equitable and timely (i.e. early) action on mitigation of CO2 emissions and the development of geoengineering plans (active and passive) for the medium term, based on the probability that we will need to buy some time to allow new and cleaner technologies to be rolled out.
Despite being on the far left and a strong supporter of the Greens on most matters I am sceptical of the contribution that technologies typically grouped under the heading “renewables” can make to abatement (on schedule, technical and cost-benefit grounds) and regard nuclear power as being an indispensible part of the low carbon-footprint technology picture. I see no prospect of renewables replacing hydrocarbon combustion on anything like the scale required.
It’s also unlikely that rapidly industrialising states (which will almost certainly be the major source of new emissions) will choose renewables. Here, the choice will be between conventional hydrocarbons and nuclear power. Given that I could not in good conscience oppose them seeking to having acces to the energy per capita I think minimally acceptable, I know which option I’d prefer them to follow. We should support them in choosing nuclear power, ensuring that what they construct is at first world standards of safety and maintenance.
Best
Fran
I am not proposing to speculate in any detail about how enforcement would work. At this stage my intention is to make clear to people that when aspects of current climate law are described as ‘binding’ this should not be interpreted to mean ‘enforceable’ – see Fergus Green’s comment above.
This hopefully draws people into thinking about whether they want to rely on a global gentleman’s agreement for the future of the planet. You will have noted that the German Government is taking climate security to the UN Security Council, on behalf of a block of small island states.
I’m confident enough that nuclear power will not become a major electricity source that I judge my time is best spent helping renewable energy and energy conservation.
The nuclear industry will only be judged to be viable if and when it solves the big outstanding issues: long-term waste, medium-term waste, cost benefit, operational pollution, construction time, health, carbon footprint, terrorism vulnerability, radiological proliferation risk, nuclear proliferation risk.
Thanks for your response Dan.
You say,/i>:
At this stage my intention is to make clear to people that when aspects of current climate law are described as ‘binding’ this should not be interpreted to mean ‘enforceable’
I see. I’d have thought that very few agreements are in practice “enforceable” if by this term one means adherence to the rules. Even when ostensible miscreants are small states and those with an interest in enforcement are large powerful states, compliance is the exception rather than the rule. States, unlike individuals with a particular jurisdiction cannot be jailed or even sanctioned effectively without harm being visited on those we’d sooner not harm. Of course, when the miscreants are large states and/or on the security council then even the appearance of sanction becomes impossible.
The closest thing to enforcement one can hope for are treaties with independent verification and sanctions provisions available under the auspices of various trade arrangements. AIUI, Cancun does provide verification measures, which are a start.
I’m confident enough that nuclear power will not become a major electricity source that I judge my time is best spent helping renewable energy and energy conservation.
It is already a major source, accounting for about 16% of the world’s stationary energy supply. The Chinese intend to increase their nuclear capacity sharply over the next decade, to some extent at the expense of coal. If that existing 16% were shut down and the future expansion (and the replacement) based on combusting HC, emissions control would be radically setback.
I accept that you see renewables and conservation as a better target for your efforts, but the reality is that neither of these options can transform the world economy into a low carbon-emitting system on any timeline that would be of use to humanity in this century or the next. In extremis, your approach could result in a marginal reduction in the rate of emissions aggregation at very great cost per unit of mitigation. To each their own of course, but I don’t see that as time well spent.
The nuclear industry will only be judged to be viable if and when it solves the big outstanding issues: long-term waste, medium-term waste, cost benefit, operational pollution, construction time, health, carbon footprint, terrorism vulnerability, radiological proliferation risk, nuclear proliferation risk.
You list these as if they were significant issues, but of course, they aren’t. The management problems with each of these are utterly trivial, both in absolute and relative terms. Waste (more accurately, once used nuclear fuel) is tiny in volume and perfectly stable. Nuclear power remains the cheapest of all the low-carbon methods of generating electricity at equal availability with the systems they’d replace — gas, coal and oil. It also has a smaller ecological footprint (measured by the demand for steel, copper, concrete, fresh water and land) than geothermal, wind, solar and tidal at industrial scale performance. This will be especially true when fast spectrum reactors become the norm. The plants themselves release no pollution beyond the perimeters of the sites. Construction times are largely a product of political and cultural rather than technical or engineering factors. There’s no engineering reason why a plant erected on a brownfields site (i.e as a direct replacement of an existing coal or gas plant) could not be erected and begin operation within three years of approval. This is how matters are proceeding in China.
Nuclear plants are, these days, designed with multiple passive safety systems ensuring that abnormal readings in plant systems will force precautionary shutdown. They are built to withstand attack from aircraft while maintaining “failsafe” operation. This means they are safe when the system shuts down. Terrorists wanting to effect mass casualty attacks have far softer targets than nuclear plants.
The fact of the matter on proliferation is that having nuclear plants has never helped any country acquire nuclear weapons. Each of the nuclear weapons holding states ahs pursued this technology quite separately from nuclear power. Neither Pakistan nor Israel actually have a nuclear power industry. Libya gave up its nuclear weapons. The DPRK likewise had a plan to acquire these weapons regardless of whether they had nuclear power.
I doubt that I will change your mind on these matters of course. Yet you are clearly a serious person who shares the passion all rational people have to mitigate human damage to ecosystem services and biodiversity. Would you agree that at the very least, an open debate about the best way to decarbonise which didn’t exclude nuclear power as an option should be held?
Thanks for coming by again.
Thanks for your work, Dan. I’ll keep my comment brief here, and if you’re interested, we can follow up. Basically, I think your argument is a little moot. You assume that the powers that be have an interest in doing the right thing and preserving the biological integrity and physical safety of a healthy climate. One would like to think so. And so you then go about describing how this should best be structured. But there is no lack of workable structures in the minds of environmental activists. The problem is that large national powers have no interest in heeding any of them, or doing anything substantial to curb climate change, and no better plan will change their minds. They are presently owned and operated almost completely by large corporations that have a simple, fairly short-term profit motive, and one way or another are based on continued vast-scale resource exploitation and unlimited pollution. If activists keep insisting that the problem is procedural, we will continue to get nowhere. If all concerned citizens (and there are many of us) instead began to radically change their lifestyles (buy less, drive less, particularly don’t patronize corporations), widely spread the feasibility and joy of much less impactful community living, and, also crucially, demand that politicians begin to represent the interests of the citizenry of the world through widespread direct action, then some real change will begin to emerge. Until we’re ready to step up our involvement and give up the strategist’s or philosophers chair and take to the streets, nothing significant is going to change. The hour is far too late for naively working within the system! The sooner we realize this, the better chance we have of preserving something close to the relatively stable and biologically rich world we have now, and avoiding not just environmental perils, but likely military horrors and political repression that will go along with it. Arguments about things like nuclear energy are a dangerous distraction from what we need to be focused on, and are only advocated by those who don’t have enough vision to realize that giant, dangerous, publically subsidized, corporate infrastructure projects are the problem, not the solution. We already produce far more energy than we need, and those of us in rich countries overuse to an insane amount by any reasonable accounting. It’s time we broke the public discourse lie that a wasteful life is desirable or feasible (let alone “not negotiable”) and set new terms of debate. Please consider what it will take to help create a widespread grassroots social movement that actually demands that the goals and motivations of our public institutions fundamentally change. And if they don’t, to abandon them and create new ones that will. Remember, this issue concerns all of us on this earth unlike any issue before, and public opinion has often changed dramatically when presented with real vision and courage. Please lend your skills and talents to this most crucial of movements at this time of crisis, and of opportunity.
Thanks for your work, Dan. I’ll keep my comment brief here, and if you’re interested, we can follow up. Basically, I think your argument is a little moot. You assume that the powers that be have an interest in doing the right thing and preserving the biological integrity and physical safety of a healthy climate. One would like to think so. And so you then go about describing how this should best be structured. But there is no lack of workable structures in the minds of environmental activists. The problem is that large national powers have no interest in heeding any of them, or doing anything substantial to curb climate change, and no better plan will change their minds. They are presently owned and operated almost completely by large corporations that have a simple, fairly short-term profit motive, and one way or another are based on continued vast-scale resource exploitation and unlimited pollution. If activists keep insisting that the problem is procedural, we will continue to get nowhere. If all concerned citizens (and there are many of us) instead began to radically change their lifestyles (buy less, drive less, particularly don’t patronize corporations), widely spread the feasibility and joy of much less impactful community living, and, also crucially, demand that politicians begin to represent the interests of the citizenry of the world through widespread direct action, then some real change will begin to emerge. Until we’re ready to step up our involvement and give up the strategist’s or philosophers chair and take to the streets, nothing significant is going to change. The hour is far too late for naively working within the system! The sooner we realize this, the better chance we have of preserving something close to the relatively stable and biologically rich world we have now, and avoiding not just environmental perils, but likely military horrors and political repression that will go along with it. Arguments about things like nuclear energy are a dangerous distraction from what we need to be focused on, and are only advocated by those who don’t have enough vision to realize that giant, dangerous, publically subsidized, corporate infrastructure projects are the problem, not the solution. We already produce far more energy than we need, and those of us in rich countries overuse to an insane amount by any reasonable accounting. It’s time we broke the public discourse lie that a wasteful life is desirable or feasible (let alone “not negotiable”) and set new terms of debate. Please consider what it will take to help create a widespread grassroots social movement that actually demands that the goals and motivations of our public institutions fundamentally change. And if they don’t, to abandon them and create new ones that will. Remember, this issue concerns all of us on this earth unlike any issue before, and public opinion has often changed dramatically when presented with real vision and courage. Please lend your skills and talents to this most crucial of movements at this time of crisis, and of opportunity.
sorry to post twice, I didn’t see it come up the first time. I hope the second can be deleted easily!
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Hi Dan,
In light of your Cancun essay , could you please provide a response to and rebuttal of this essay – bearing in mind Popper’s Falsifiability dictum?
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/the_abdication_of_the_west.html
Many thanks.
Elaine