Head Full of Doubt, Still Waiting for the Promise

Posted in The Strategist on December 21st, 2011

 17 Years on, the COP-series of climate negotiations still cannot forge a plan to save our planet and ourselves

The Avett Brothers, the folk-rock band from Mount Pleasant, North Carolina, has been in heavy rotation on my headphones of late – both for the potency of the music, and the message in the lyrics.  This is especially true of the song, Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise. In the wake of the COP-17 meeting in Durban, and particularly in the assessment that China and India are “winners” coming out of this most recent round of global climate negotiating, I readily identify with the lyric:   

There’s a darkness upon me that’s flooded in light

In the fine print they tell me what’s wrong and what’s right

And it comes in black and it comes in white

And I’m frightened by those that don’t see it

And especially in the mournful cry that:

 And your life doesn’t change by the man that’s elected

For 17 years, representatives from nearly 200 countries have gathered annually under the auspices of the United Nations (UN) to try and craft a solution to one of the most daunting challenges that has ever faced humanity – how to slow the heating of the planet.  Each year, the warnings from the scientific community grow louder, as an increasing body of evidence points to the dangers from the continuing accumulation of human-generated greenhouse gases (GHG) in the Earth’s atmosphere.  Shockingly, global emissions jumped by the largest margin ever in 2010 (see Global Carbon Project) overturning the idea floated by some that the decline in emissions during the recession might continue through the tentative recovery in which we now find ourselves. This GHG jump underscores a long-term trend of inexorably rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change.  Even the International Energy Agency, an industry lobby group, fears that we are within 5 years of a climate “tipping point”. As Al Gore put it in his gloriously eloquent 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Lecture: 

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential.

For Canada, the costs of climate change – by any measure – could indeed be stark.  In September, the National Round Table on the Environment and Economy reported that climate change will trigger wide ranging impacts across Canada, from flooding in low-lying coastal regions and threats to the country’s timber supply, to health problems caused by deteriorating air quality. The financial cost for these impacts was pegged at about $5 billion a year by 2020, climbing to between $21 billion and $43 billion a year by mid-century.  In the worst-case scenario, NRTEE put the cost at $91 billion per year by 2050 – social, cultural and environmental costs would push the figure much higher.  The Canadian situation is, of course, the thinnest edge of a much, much larger wedge. Globally, the costs – those that can be monetized, at least – are frighteningly larger.

Against this dire backdrop, you could be excused for thinking that the COP negotiators were achieving real progress.  And yet, for 17 years the results of the UN climate talks have been modest – at best. John Broder, writing in The New York Times earlier this month, characterized the prevailing feeling at the close of each COP meeting as one of disillusionment and discontent:

Every year they fail to significantly advance their own stated goal of keeping the average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels.

It’s important to put the 2 degrees aspiration in context.  As the researchers at Real Climate remind us:

Even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, a target of 2°C seems almost cavalier.

And so it is that the gridlock ensnaring global climate talks is cause for accelerating concern.  There’s a well-worn story about a 17^th century English sea captain that animates the problem of institutional gridlock beautifully.  I share it here to underscore how little we seem to have learned from our own past as a species.  In 1601, James Lancaster served lemon juice to the crew on one of four ships he was commanding on a trip to India.  Most of the crew on this one ship remained healthy, but on the other three ships, 110 of 278 sailors (40%) died of scurvy by the journey’s midpoint.  Now this was important stuff to 17^th century seafarers because scurvy claimed more lives than anything else, including warfare.  So, you’d think Lancaster’s experiment would ignite revolutionary change.  Not so.  The British Navy didn’t stock citrus fruit on its ships until 1795 – nearly 200 years later.  Louis Roddis, in A Short History of Nautical Medicine, notes that in the 200 years from 1600 to1800 nearly 1,000,000 men died of an easily preventable disease.  “There are in the whole of human history few more notable examples of official indifference and stupidity producing such disastrous consequence to human life."  Despite the magnitude of the problem, and the availability of a simple solution, people were slow to change.

 In many obvious ways, the world in which we live today is indisputably a different place than 17^th century Britain, but in other, subtler ways, it is really not so different.  The analogy is an imperfect one, but think of climate change as our generation’s scurvy. There is abundant evidence of the importance of the issue; the solution – a weaning of our economy and life off fossil fuels – though not easy, is also well known.  Yet we refuse to change.  We get hung up on the differing obligations of developed and developing nations, or the question of who will pay to help emerging economies adapt, or the urgency of rapidly developing and deploying clean energy technology, of the classic policy analysis dilemma of concentrated costs (entrenched industry in the developed world) and diffuse benefits (global society).

I get it; the COP negotiators operate on the principle of consensus, meaning that any nation can hold up progress, much less an agreement.  Such was the case again this year.  The COP-17 meeting closed with a “pledge” to work toward a new global climate treaty, and the establishment of a climate fund to aid developing countries in addressing GHG emissions as their economies modernize. But that is all it is – a pledge – all of the details are still to be defined and negotiated.  No one was ready, or able, to take a clear and firm stand, to articulate a vision or story that cut through the bureaucratic knot, and mobilize collective action.  If I may return to Al Gore’s Nobel Lecture, his observation that too many of the world’s leaders are best described in the words Winston Churchill gave to those who ignored Adolph Hitler seems apt:

They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.

The characterization in some quarters of India and China as “winners” coming out of COP 17 is particularly irksome to me.  Let us all, please, be clear about what is unfolding on our watch.  Climate change is a classic illustration of the tragedy of the commons, a situation in which many individuals or countries, acting in their self-interest, deplete or destroy a shared limited resource – this case, our atmosphere, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.  China and India might realize some short-term economic advantage, but there are no “winners” in this scenario.  There is no business to be done on a dead planet; there is no economy to grow in sterile ground.

At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Verlyn Kilnkenborg wrote a powerful essay for The New York Times on the accelerating extinction of mammals worldwide.  It seems even more right now than when he wrote it – deftly drawing a parallel with the convulsions in global financial markets and the efforts to calm them:

What complicates matters further is a simple lesson we might also draw from the present financial crisis; everything is connected.  No species goes down on its own, not without affecting the larger biological community.  We emerged, as a species, from the very biodiversity we are destroying.  At times it seems as though the human experiment is to see how many species we can do without.  As experiments go, it is morally untenable and will end badly for us.

For much of my life I have lamented the fact that in Canada, and too many other countries, we separate our economic and innovation agenda from our environmental agenda, conveniently ignoring the fact that all wealth ultimately flows from the environment.  The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around. When we put off the systemic changes to energy production, transportation, agriculture and other features of “life” because we fear the drag these changes might have on the economy we are being penny wise and pound-foolish.  These changes are the ultimate investment in humanity’s future. Climate change, as COP-17 once again demonstrated, is not an environmental issue; it is sustainability writ large, politics on a grand canvas, and it requires much more than environmental delegates gathering annually if we are to forge something meaningful, something commensurate with the scale of the challenge before us.  As Nick Robins, an energy and climate change analyst at HSBC put it recently: “There is a fundamental disconnect in having environment ministers negotiating geopolitics and macroeconomics.”

So, how to move forward?  To begin, I believe that we have not yet had a meaningful conversation about community and collective action and how this colors our approach to climate change. As a result, we continue to joust for metaphorical turf in a tiresome and ultimately unwinnable tragedy of the commons.  As a species we are a community that transcends boundaries or borders.  We share (or should share) something in common – an abiding desire to achieve sustainable management of the Earth’s atmosphere.  All of us live in communities of place, past, purpose, perspective, and practice and the quantity, quality, and reach of connection in any of these communities depends on how connected people are in each community and how much connecting each person does with other people in each community.  This is not an abstract concept; I passionately believe that to address global climate change people must be invited into a conversation that firstly optimizes the possibilities of belonging, engagement, and making a difference. Only then can the more tactical and tangible actions be identified.  Can we dare to imagine world leaders engaging in this kind of deep conversation, a conversation that is about nothing less than raising consciousness?  I choose to believe that we can, that we must.  The alternative is to live in a state where, as the title of this essay suggests, the head is full of doubt and we perpetually wait for the promise of something different, something better. 

Contact Rob Abbott at: rob@abbottstrategies.com and follow him on Twitter: @rma1962