Brad Johnson of The Wonk Room is covering the Clinton Global Initiative.
Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday, new UN climate chief Christiana Figueres criticized the failures of the Copenhagen talks and said that a comprehensive “big bang” global climate treaty is not possible.
Figueres, who was chosen to be the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary after Yvo de Boer stepped down following Copenhagen, discussed her expectations for the next round of talks that will take place this December in Cancun, Mexico. “What went wrong at Copenhagen,” her brother, former Costa Rica president Jose Maria Figueres asked, “and what are you going to make Cancun better?” After saying that she intended to avoid the logistical chaos civil society groups encountered in Copenhagen, Christiana declared that there will never be a comprehensive global climate treaty to follow the Kyoto pact, which expires in 2012:
I think that one of the major mistakes that we all bought into, because all of us bought into, was the myth of the big bang theory in climate. Maybe the universe was created by a Big Bang. But what is clear is that this planet is not going to be saved by any big bang agreement. Not in Copenhagen, not this year, not next year. The fact is that it’s unreasonable to expect that there is going to be one large comprehensive agreement that will address all issues and will miraculously change the way that we’ve been doing things for a hundred years.
Figueres then outlined her vision for the Cancun talks in the context of the non-binding Copenhagen Accord: a “realistic” and “probably sane” “progressive approach” that achieves the “politically possible,” recognizing this would be “only a step” in the right direction:
So the big lesson learned for us this year is: let us be realistic, let us really make a very concerted effort “” and governments are doing so “” to see what is politically possible, what is achievable in Cancun. Let’s focus on that and let us ensure that what we’re doing here is taking one step at a time, ensuring that Cancun is going to be a firm step in the right direction, but only a step. That’s there’s going to have to be much more work going forward.
Now this progressive approach is probably a sane approach, but it is in stark contrast to the urgency of the matter. That’s the problem: that we can only go in incremental steps but the matter is really very urgent, particularly for low-lying states.
This is the essential challenge of climate diplomacy “” by definition only the “politically possible” can be achieved by the UNFCCC, but global warming is governed by the laws of physics, not of man. The timeline to reduce greenhouse pollution is not governed by treaties but by collapse of a livable planet. Because of the inevitability of long-term sea level rise, it may already be too late to save low-lying states from extinction “” so they have little sympathy for “incremental steps.”
Figueres hopes to tackle this challenge by changing the “psychodynamics” of the negotiations from the cost of climate destruction “” and the moral and economic culpability of the developed world “” to the “opportunities moving into the future”:
Which is why we need to change the psychodynamics to exactly what you said when you started, Jose Maria. The psychodynamics right now in the negotiations is focusing on the cost. Who is going to pay for what when because of the debt that we have incurred with each other over the past x number of years. That’s an important part of the conversation. But we should also focus part of the conversation on: what are the opportunities moving into the future? And that part of the conversation is not present.
As the life story of CGI’s organizer, Bill Clinton, proves, there is indeed great political power in hope, no matter how ephemeral it may often seem.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
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In comparison of presidents in their work, CGI ranks up there with the work Jimmy Carter has done after his presidency.
It sounds to me as if the new Executive Secretary is telling the NGO world to stay home. Leave it to us government-types. We’ll take small realistic steps but we will be taking steps.
Steps where? Towards the cliff, I suppose.
After Copenhagen, I already assumed Cancun would produce nothing of value. Johannesburg, in 2012….forget it.
The real deal happens when Beijing and Washington come to terms with their mutual survival interests. No other meeting, convention or whatever comes out of post-Kyoto has any meaning until they shake hands on action –not steps– but sprinting.
John McCormick
Where’s the emergency break? I want to get off this planet!
Are Russia and Pakistan low-lying states?
Apparently she is OK with hundreds of billions of dollars moving annually from global national treasuries to hydrocarbon mining corporations (International Energy Agency). Soon Russia will deploy floating atomic fission reactors to the melting Arctic (which will kill more aquatic life by filtration and heating) for fossil materials extraction. In the face of insanity she seems to embrace a strategy of appeasement.
I agree with John McCormick, comment #2, China and the U.S. must reach a profound agreement. Probably India will have to join such a pact as well. Meanwhile, the atmospheric CO2 concentration will continue to rise at 2 ppm and even faster if the world’s GDP recovers from the Great Recession. A concentration of 450 ppm is pretty much assured by 2040 unless crude oil supplies and use drop considerably in the nest 30 years and another large recession results.
Your dictation software is at it again, Joe. You’ve got a couple of typos of “Figueres” as “Figures”.
On topic, I do fear that the “politically possible” is going to lead to the physically inevitable.
Geez, I can catch typos but I fail to notice who the author is. Sorry, Joe, I guess the typos are Brad’s.
[JR: Yes, and voice dictation software makes homophone errors, not simple typos.]
Being “Reasonable”
“Of all the things in the world that need changing, metaphysics may not be high on your list of priorities. But to understand how metaphysics circumscribes your life, consider what you mean when you tell someone: ‘Be realistic.’ A good translation would be: ‘Decrease your expectations.’ It’s a sentence you use on someone who is younger than you are, or someone you want to feel that way. He still has dreams and goals you’ve given up, or never had in the first place, and they are a standing challenge to the limits on life you have long since accepted. He wants more of the world than the world tends to give. Realizing his plans would require changing pieces of reality you believe to be fixed. And so you meet him with a palette of platitudes about human and other sorts of nature, the most harmless of which seems to be the well-meant advice to be more realistic.”
(The quote above is from Moral Clarity: A guide for grown-up idealists, by Susan Neiman)
To me, being “realistic” means understanding that Nature is real and that real people will be really harmed in very real ways if we don’t get real and address the real climate problem. The sort of “being realistic” that ignores these points and accepts our present behaviors (that will bring harms to people) is nothing more than laziness and excuse-making. Sorry for the bluntness.
That said, we should be careful not to confound two different things: One matter is the degree to which we face the climate problem and agree to approaches that will be effective, and responsible, to address it. The other matter is whether these approaches all take the form of, or are based within, one big agreement among all key countries, or (instead) whether various countries and subgroups of countries will have differing (yet effective) agreements between them. In other words, one “big” agreement could be effective, or ineffective, or somewhere in-between. Similarly, an approach involving multiple agreements among different groups of countries could be effective, or ineffective, or somewhere in-between. What matters, of course, is not whether the final outcome consists of one “big” agreement covering all countries and all things, or multiple agreements among different countries and groups of countries. Instead, what matters is that the agreements are effective and that they are wise and strong enough to effectively address the problem when considered together, even if they are separate agreements in themselves.
Put another way: The number of agreements doesn’t matter. Their timeliness and ultimate effectiveness does.
Some of the comments (by Ms. Figueres) seem to confound these two different matters or at least leave it unclear how she sees the various possibilities. In my view, I don’t think we can or should, or can afford to, “back off” and accept something that is considerably less than what will be necessary to address the climate problem. On the other hand, I don’t really care if the effective solution involves one big huge agreement, covering everyone, or (instead) if it involves an assortment of agreements between and among different groups, e.g., an agreement among the U.S. and China and India, and another between the U.S. and Europe, and another between Europe and China and India, and another between some assortment of early-developing countries along with the U.S. and Europe, and so forth and so on. Again: The number of agreements doesn’t matter. Effectiveness does.
Cheers,
Jeff
As with Jeff (#8), for me what stuck out of Ms. Figureres’ statement was her observation that we had to be “realistic.”
And yet to succumb to what passes for “reality” in this discussion is — in the true sense of the word — a tragedy. The philosopher Whithead spoke of a tragedy as residing in “the solemnity of the remorseless working of things” toward a conclusion which is drenched in unhappiness.
Put another way, nature dictates the reality — the test of whether our political responses are realistic resides not in whether they are achievable, but in whether they are adequate to deal with the reality established by nature.
Having said that, an agreement between the EU, the US, China, India and Brazil, could — just barely — put us on a path to meet nature’s terms. Maybe.
But certainly, allowing the politically possible to substitute for the scientifically necessary is the first step on an inevitable journey into the tragic.
There is an Open-Space meeting coming up in a few weeks in West Palm Beach to which you are all invited where we will start over again on the issue of Climate Change as if the past 4 years were just a “false start.” The meeting is http://www.next-gen-expo.com/ and thinkers/doers are coming from all over the World. Here is part of the program announcement -
Because of the urgency of the IPCC report and An Inconvenient Truth we moved to action on climate change without necessary reflection and coordination. It is time to make up for that lack of planning. We will go back to the point where the Climate Change issue was uncovered for us all and move forward together as a group, using the wisdom of the assembled crowd and open space conferencing.
We will start with a blank wall and fill it with your ideas starting with Vision, Values and Purpose, then we will break up in small groups to discuss your ideas. Next we will clean the wall and move on to your description of Mission and Grand Strategy, break up into self-selected interest groups and discuss your ideas.
The next steps are Defining Standards of Strategic Excellence, Designing Coherent Messaging, Specifying our Long-term and Short-term Objectives, and coming up with Action Plans which finally include Tasks and Measurements. We will use the same system throughout where you come up with the topics and you lead the small group discussions and you reach conclusions and report back to the larger group.
You can get a $30 discount by ordering a ticket at:
http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaID=209481
Subsequent Next-Gen Expos will be held in NJ in March 2011 and CO in June 2011 and will use whatever we come up with in West Palm Beach as a jumping off point to start their work. In the meantime we will develop the project on the Next Gen social network.
It is time for a grass-roots answer to this massive problem. Please come and bring your ideas and your input.
“I think that one of the major mistakes that we all bought into, because all of us bought into, was the myth of the big bang theory in climate”.
I thought she was going to say that one of the myths we’ve bought into is that the market approach to reduce emissions is not working and never will work. I guess that’s too much to ask of her and her cronie$.
Big Bang in climate negotiations? Our politicians haven’t even delivered a Little Bang.
Positive spinning sounds too much like PR salesmanship to me. Sure we need to tout wind and solar, but, unfortunately, the keys to doing something are pricing carbon and removing subsidies to oil, coal, and gas. Otherwise, renewables will remain niches. At some point our leadership will have to take a stand and piss people off.
Someone needs to tell Christiana about the history of the “big bang” (to use her terminology) Montreal protocol that phased out CFC production worldwide (with multiple revisions) based on the best scientific evidence at the time despite the fact of the dire financial predictions (at the time). She needs to know that not only is this type of agreement possible, its been done (and relatively recently).
Of course, until the US actually starts trying to reduce CO2 emissions at a national level, something similar is not in the cards at the world level.
Mike Roddy, you got it exactly right: “At some point our leadership will have to take a stand and piss people off.” The idea that only politically viable solutions are possible is what is unrealistic when faced with the unrelenting reality of physical processes. There comes a time in human affairs when leadership has to make informed decisions based on the best evidence and to give orders, and the populations have to obey them or else face destruction. We have definitely reached such a time and it is becoming obvious to me that democratic niceties will have to take a vacation for a while if we hope to have any chance of surviving what’s coming. We don’t have any time left for any more debate.
I am mildly heartened by the tone of these comments. There is a lot of clarity here on what is realistic. Now we just have to move that forward.
IMHO, that means finding ways to move this understanding further into the grassroots. Who but the electorate, present and future, can change our course away from the edge of the cliff we so rapidly approach?
Out of curiosity, could the UN make the movie Survival of Spaceship Earth available?
Without having watched the movie yet, a Survival of Spaceship Earth 2.0, is due.
Christiana Figueres speaks of the great urgency of the situation, but argues that political progress can only happen in incremental steps. It’s possible to interpret that as having a subtext which says, “We politicians cannot move toward the comprehensive policy agreement that’s needed until our citizens force us to act.”
In other words, I agree with Dave Finnigan: It’s time for a true grass-roots movement.