A. Urgency of Action
The Doomsday Clock was moved 1 minute closer to midnight on 10th of December 2012. The famous clock is kept by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) at the University of Chicago. Its board of directors decides its movement in consultation with the sponsors, currently including 18 Nobel laureates. In December the justification to move the clock closer to midnight was taken because of both the increasing dangers of nuclear proliferation and inaction in climate talks. Allison Macfarlane, the chair of BAS’ Science and Security Board, argued for the decision as follows:
“The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere. The International Energy Agency projects that, unless societies begin building alternatives to carbon-emitting energy technologies over the next five years, the world is doomed to a warmer climate, harsher weather, droughts, famine, water scarcity, rising sea levels, loss of island nations, and increasing ocean acidification.” 55
“Since fossil-fuel burning power plants and infra- structure built in 2012-2020 will produce energy— and emissions—for 40 to 50 years, the actions taken in the next few years will set us on a path that will be impossible to redirect. Even if policy leaders decide in the future to reduce reliance on carbon-emitting technologies, it will be too late.”
From 1940s to 2007 the Doomsday Clock indicated that nuclear holocaust was the biggest danger to the survival of mankind. Recently, climate change has been acknowledged as an important possibility by top scientists as well. And fact remains we are moving closer to the midnight with present trends— unless policies, institutions, and individual action drastically change.
B. Failing Intergovernmental Negotiations
A lot of efforts have been made by the international community to correct the prospects of catastrophic climate change that we have discussed in this Manifesto. But even after over 20 years of intensive negotiations on climate change – both at the technical and political level – CO2 emissions have just grown. Therefore there is something fundamentally wrong in our global governance system, and so far nothing drastic has been seriously proposed to change the present system of negotiations.
Here we list some major events and conferences related to climate change and sustainable development. The number of participants, both heads of state and NGOs, has tremendously grown and some structural improvements have been made and international agreements have been reached but in a key issue – reducing greenhouse emissions – the talks have been a total failure:
• 1962 Silent Spring book by Rachel Carson,
• 1968 Establishment of the Club of Rome and
Spaceship Earth concept launched,
• 1972 The Limits of Growth Report and the UN Conference on Human Environment in Stock- holm,
• 1974 Bruntland Commission on Sustainable De- velopment,
• 1992 Rio de Janeiro, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed,
• 1997 Kyoto Protocol,
• 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg,
• 2009 Copenhagen Summit and “accord”,
• 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Rio plus 20, and
• 2014 UN Climate Summit, New York.
The next critical milestone in climate talks will take place in Paris 2015, an event which we now turn to.
Towards 2015 Paris UNFCCC Climate Meeting
A crucial issue for the future will be the 2015 climate change talks in Paris. A binding deal should be established there although it is, based on earlier agreements, supposed only to come in force in 2020 which is too late. Is it possible to change the dynamics of the negotiations from national short- term interests to global interests and sustainable well-being of future generations? It is a possibility but the international negotiators need a lot of pressure both from the above – from global private economic actors, from biggest companies of the world – and from the bottom, from the citizens of the world. We will shortly discuss why governments left alone might be unable to turn the tide. The following graph illustrated the needed change:
GRAPH 30. POLITICAL FORCES NEEDED FOR CHANGE IN UN CLIMATE TALKS
The role of biggest companies in the world is important as many chief executives – who are well informed about the facts in this Manifesto – have concluded that conducting business is not possible in a radically warming planet and the present emission rate is catastrophic. They could and should act as a major pressure group to force the governments to agree for a binding deal in 2015 and forcing the implementation of the deal to start immediately, not only in 2020.
A Market-based System to Transform Economies Towards a Carbon-free World?
The role of responsible major corporations in the world would be ideally to advise and pressure governments on the ways to use the present world’s market-based system to transform economies into a carbon-free model. Determining an ecologically sustainable price for carbon and setting up a global cap-and-trade system (a system where a limited amount of emissions permits are traded in a worldwide scheme) would be one set of solutions although its implementation in an ideal form is a major challenge as discussed below.
Ideally, we should use the current wealth created by “the oil economy” to drive transition into clean energy. The most rational way would be to calculate how much CO2 we could still emit into the atmosphere, divide that by next 50 years by a down hill curve, split annual emissions as carbon credits and let scarcity in the markets take care the reduction. This kind of cap-and-trade-mechanism was used when acid rain, sulphur dioxide (SO2) problem was solved in North America 1993-2003 with excellent results.
For clean investments, carbon price should be ten times the current price level it is for instance in Europe. There is a large consensus that this alone would attract investments switching away from coal. Instead of subsidizing oil, countries could start to create new mechanisms to increase renewable solutions like solar panels. This would be especially helpful in developing countries.
In order to get a binding international agreement on these issues major efforts should be focused on the UN climate meeting in Paris in 2015. In addition to a global cap-and-trade system we also need to rapidly remove the governmental subsidies to fossil fuels versus renewable energy sources, another topic for an agreement that could be foreseen in Paris.
Our oil companies are investing annually some 600-700 billion USD to find new reserves and governments give fossil fuel subsidies annually over 500 billion USD. Renewable investments were last year only on the level 250 billion USD and subsidies 88 billion USD. This means that the money flow into fossil energy is about 3-4 times bigger than into renewables. If we cannot change this flow in coming years we are not able to develop clean energy fast enough and we could have a major economic collapse, if (or when) some climate change related “Pearl Harbor event” will hit us and we will have a panic exit from investments into fossil companies and use of fossil energy. This could then cause many countries, and eventually the world economy, to collapse.
But What is the Reality in UN Negotiations?
The signs of reaching a UN agreement for instance on changing the subsidy ows from fossils to renewables are not promising at the moment. An example highlights this dilemma. A High-level Panel on Post-Development Agenda was created by the UN Secretary-General in 2012 and headed by Presidents of Indonesia, Liberia and Prime Minister of the UK. It made a reasonable and simple recommendation in 2013 in its final report, under a sustainable development goal “Secure Sustainable Energy”, as it was an expert body without governmental negotiators:
“Phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption“ 56
This recommendation could have been made even sharper and targeted more to the problem of massive governmental subsidies to fossil industry vs. renewables as discussed above. However, when the General Assembly Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals, with all UN Member States participating, directly or indirectly, started its work on this recommendation it was moved out from the energy section of the outcome document and then watered down with caveats – as happens traditionally in UN talks – so that all countries and country groups could live with it. In its final form as it was agreed in July 2014 in the Working Group’s Outcome Document it reads as follows:
“…rationalize inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption by removing market distortions, in accordance with national circumstances, including by restructuring taxation and phasing out those harmful subsidies, where they exist, to reflect their environmental impacts, taking fully into account the specific needs and conditions of developing countries and minimizing the possible adverse impacts on their development in a manner that protects the poor and the affected communities.” 57
This is the dilemma of reaching UN agreements, and often also a problem in governmental schemes regulating markets to a more sustainable business practices. Agreements become so watered down and complicated through negotiations that they lose their impact – as has happened for instance in the European cap and trade system. And they also can become subject of powerful counter-lobbying as happened to the Australian cap and trade system in summer of 2014 bringing down the whole system negotiated over a long period of time.
As governments might be unable to rectify this dilemma, outside forces – corporations and civil society – should step in as we already discussed in the beginning of this section and will discuss more in our concluding chapter.
C. Reforming the UN and Other World Governance Structures
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been active in climate change issues but should also start to act more together with heads of IMF, the World Bank and some other heads of major organizations. UN reports should also become sharper putting out a global emergency message as discussed in this report even if some Member States would object. Also organizationally, the UN should establish a truly multidisciplinary policy planning capacity and global emergency unit in the Office of the Secretary- General to deal with the interrelated emergency issues related to climate change, a trend surely to intensify in the future.
But there should also be a longer-term goal of changing fundamentally the UN and global governance system. In longer term, a second conference of the UN Charter, foreseen in its article 109, could be called for as one idea for a really big reform cor- responding to a global emergency described in this Manifesto. A collective decision to do so is important in order to start a democratic process with all countries and other stakeholders involved to first fully understand all aspects the crisis, and, secondly, jointly to seek organizational innovations and processes needed to solve it.
But it will take a long time to produce results in this kind of major effort as in fact the outcome would be a new governance structure for the world. Therefore, it would be wise to complement it with other initiatives — to be taken separately or jointly by governments, academia, corporations and civil society. When creating new institutions and initiatives it would be important secure the maintenance of major achievements to the twentieth century in the area of democracy and human rights.
“At the same time as new governance structures and a new paradigm for sustainability should be pursued, some very practical measures should be taken in changing the codes for buildings and infrastructure to engage the localities for a more sustainable future.”
D. New Guidelines for Buildings, Localities and Infrastructure
At the same time as new governance structures and a new paradigm for sustainability should be pursued some very practical measures should be taken in changing the codes for buildings and infrastructure to fully commit the localities for a more sustainable future. Some international initiatives or organizations like C40 Cities — 40
Cities Leadership Group for cleaner cities movement and Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) already do important work in this are but much more of the same is needed.
Here are some necessary goals for the future that have been often mentioned in this connection:
• Urban re-design (e.g. using high-density sustain- ability principles integrated with efficient public transport, de-centralizing work centers).
• Rail to become major transport mode both for passengers and freight.
• Electricity from clean energy to become dominant energy supply.
• Air travel will reduce.
• Localized food production.
• Major IT innovations to reduce ecological foot- print.
• Enhanced resource productivity.