The Politics of Carbon

Fred Pearce

January 2006

Environmental groups joined with politicians in calling it a 'triumph'. The international climate conference at Montreal in Canada in early December was, they said, a great victory on the road to controlling the greenhouse gas emissions thought to cause global warming. Can this be true? We are so used to bad news about climate change. And so far, after 15 years of talks, there seems to have been very little progress in either reducing emissions or introducing the renewable technologies and energy-saving devices that could save us all from rising temperatures and rising tides. Does it finally look like the international community will rise to the challenge?

Carbon logic

First, the big picture. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has been burning ever increasing quantities of fuels made of carbon, like coal, oil and natural gas. The fumes contain carbon dioxide gas and we are currently pouring almost 7 billion tonnes of it into the air each year. Nature can only remove carbon dioxide from the air very slowly, so most of it sticks around for a century or more. Therefore it's accumulating. And, because it is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere, it is causing global warming.

The atmosphere has a natural stock of the gas that keeps the planet from freezing. But you can have too much of a good thing. So far, our pollution has raised that stock from about 550 to approaching 800 billion tonnes.

Thirteen years ago at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the world's governments signed a pledge to prevent 'dangerous climate change'. They didn't define the term, but most climate scientists say we must prevent more than 2°C of warming. And that means not adding more than about another 200 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the air. Any more than that could unleash mega-droughts and super-hurricanes, collapse ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and much more.

On current trends, we could reach that 'dangerous' level by mid-century. So there is time to halt things. But, given how complicated it will be to end our heavy dependence on burning carbon to make energy, not much.

Road map to the future

The first step towards implementing the Rio pledge was the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997. Around 40 industrialised nations promised to make modest cuts in their emissions. Those cuts average about 5% between 1990 and the first 'compliance period' from 2008 to 2012. The US and Australia originally signed up to the targets, but then pulled out. And the protocol never imposed targets on developing countries, because their emissions per head of population are mostly much lower. Under complex EU rules for sharing the burden, the UK target is 12.5%.

The protocol is now coming into force. The final details were agreed in Montreal, including penalties for those who don't reach their targets. The Kyoto signatories also agreed in Montreal to start negotiations about making tougher cuts after 2012.

So far, so good. But the current Kyoto targets are pretty small compared to what will eventually be needed. Avoiding dangerous climate change, say the scientists, will probably require the world to reduce emissions by about 60% from today's levels by 2050, and by 80 or 90% by the end of the century.

The UK government has set itself the 60% objective. But even if all the Kyoto nations did likewise, they are only responsible for a minority of today's emissions.

Montreal tried to address that. The reason why everyone from Greenpeace to UK Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett called it a triumph was that all the nations that signed up to the 1992 treaty agreed to a 'dialogue' on the future direction of global emissions. That included the US and big developing nations like China, India and Brazil.

The bad news is that the dialogue may lead to nothing. The official language from Montreal is that it will be 'open and non-binding'. And, in words inserted to keep the US onboard, it 'will not open any negotiations leading to new commitments.'

Technology, targets and trade

Under George W Bush, the US says it will not accept national emissions targets. It says they could damage the US economy, and that anyhow what is needed is cleaner technology not legal targets.

Many disagree about the economic damage. In Montreal, former President Bill Clinton called it 'flat wrong'. But Bush has a point about technology: we badly need cleaner, more efficient ways of generating and using energy. The only question is how best to get them.

Bush says government should restrict itself to funding research and hoping for the best. Most of the rest of the world believes that tough emissions targets will create economic incentives to encourage the development and adoption of cleaner technology.

One way of making those incentives work better is carbon trading. In January 2005, European governments issued major industrial polluters like steel firms, power generators and chemicals companies with carbon dioxide emissions permits. The idea is that companies that find ways of cutting their emissions will have spare permits that they can sell to slowcoaches who have not.

The aim is to allow the market to encourage innovation and find the cheapest ways to reduce emissions. For now, the market only operates within the EU. It could expand, but only among countries that join the Kyoto Protocol and impose emissions caps on industry. Many US companies are concerned that Bush's policy has cut them out of a trading system where they reckon they could make money.

Clean technologies

Tony Blair says Britain may need nuclear power to meet future emissions targets. He could be right. France generates most of its electricity from nuclear power and has emissions only half those of the UK. But there are other options. Wind power is now economically competitive, though some say the turbines are a blot on the landscape. Solar power may one day be the answer, but is still expensive. Tidal and wave power are at the development stage.

Most of British emissions cuts so far have come from replacing coal with cleaner natural gas. Government Chief Scientist David King, a nuclear fan, is also backing technologies for capturing carbon dioxide from conventional power stations and piping it for burial in old gas and oil fields beneath the North Sea.

But most emissions come from cars and aircraft. New hybrid car engines are more efficient and so pollute less. But the ultimate solution may be running cars on hydrogen, which produces no carbon dioxide when it is burned. Unfortunately, manufacturing hydrogen (by splitting water) requires lots of energy. If that came from burning carbon fuels we would be no better off. But if it came from renewables or even nuclear power, then emissions could be cut drastically. Some believe that by the end of the century, much of the world could have adopted a 'hydrogen economy'.

Back to politics

In future, both companies and countries will need a licence to emit carbon dioxide. And to stop dangerous climate change there will only be a fixed number of licences worldwide. So the big question is how they should be shared out. This sets the industrialised and developing worlds at loggerheads. First, because Europe and North America have already used up most of the available 'space' for safe emissions. And second, because developing nations are now coming under pressure to reduce their emissions before they have had a chance to industrialise.

Big developing nations like China and India may rank high in the emissions league table, but measured per head of their populations their emissions remain low. China is below 1 tonne a year for every citizen and India below 0.5 tonnes, while the US and Australia emit around 5 tonnes and Europeans under 3 tonnes.

So how do we share out what space is left for carbon dioxide pollution? The present system under the Kyoto Protocol is ad hoc. Some say we need a grand once-for-all allocation. One solution is called 'contraction and convergence'. Developed by a small British group called the Global Commons Institute, it is attracting support round the world.

The contraction half of the formula requires the world to set firm annual ceilings for global emissions that would gradually fall to a fraction of today's levels. The convergence half of the formula would see the world accept that every citizen on the planet has a similar right to pollute: maybe one tonne of carbon dioxide a head today, falling to half a tonne by 2050. Pollution entitlements should be handed out to governments on that basis.

Of course, at the start that would leave rich nations with too few permits and many poor nations with too many. So they would trade. And the price of buying pollution licences would be a powerful incentive for a global clean-up.

Fantasy politics? Maybe. But if the rich world wants the poor world to help clean up its mess and save the world from dangerous climate change, some such formula will be needed.

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