Copenhagen is concluded.
Hamlet's question has been answered with respect to Global Climate Change policy: not to be.
If Kyoto can justly be ridiculed as commitment without accomplishment, Copenhagen must be considered a step back from that.
I do not blame President Obama for this, as many are more than willing to do. The failure is so large that no one leader or nation can fairly bear it alone. The question is: where to from here?
I happen to look at the global issue from a particularly local perspective as anyone who has followed my earlier blogs may know. In 2004, I co-convened a workshop for municipal officials on the potential impacts of Climate Change on land use policy on the Connecticut shoreline. In 2005 and 2006, I unsuccessfully attempted to convince the State DEP Commissioner, who is now a Cap and Trade Commissar in the Obama administration, to continue at the state level what Guilford initiated. In 2007 I persuaded my Town government to pass a resolution recognizing Climate Change impacts as a subject requiring Town assessment, planning and management. Little has happened since passage of that resolution, but at least we have the paper. After two attempts in the state legislature and with the aid of State Senator Ed Meyer and State Representative Pat Widlitz, the Legislature required the Executive Branch to do what the previous Commissioner of Environmental Protection declined to do at her own initiative: study the possible impacts of Climate Change as they might relate most specifically to the State of Connecticut.
This week, as the world was dithering in Denmark, Connecticut's Governor's Steering Committee on Climate Change released its first draft reports on impacts and adaptation. Although much work remains to be done in developing measurement and reporting regimes to gage Climate Change progression from this time forward, and to define relevant contingency plans and the resources to execute them at the state, regional and municipal levels, these reports are an important first step in the education process that must take place among the general citizenry and its leaders, most of whom remain ignorant or mis-informed by myth and dogma on the issue.
But the utter failure, and I don't think that is too harsh a term, of Copenhagen makes local initiatives all the more challenging, if not impossible. So where do we go from here?
Let's start with the Climate Change contingent's battle cry: 80% by 2050. This benchmark apparently got all but flushed in the Copenhagen Accord and the collateral drafts that have apparently been denuded as badly as our health-care reform legislation. If we do not have a credible and universally understood and accepted goal, how can we possible build a bridge to it from here? Apparently, it is a 'bridge too far'. And in its absence, what?
It has been my contention in previous blogs that 80% by 2050, if credible, imposes daunting challenges to re-engineer civilization as we know it. The proponents of this goal have so far failed to move the great mass of the uncommitted to accept this goal as necessary on the premise that failure to achieve it is unacceptable. And Al Gore doesn't cut it as the cross-over messenger to the uncommitted, no offense meant to Al.
The Deniers and Skeptics have argued that the cost of achieving this goal will be too great, while not effectively calling to question the validity of the goal itself, except by denying the entire premise of Climate Change, which makes them look mildly silly. They are partly correct that the costs of achieving 80% by 2050 will be huge. What they have not done is to identify the costs of Business As Usual, which will likely dwarf the costs of mitigation and adaptation in the intermediate to long term. Again, this truth is more readily grasped at the local level than at the global level.
What both sides have failed to do is to identify the potential benefits on multiple social, economic, health and political fronts of moving the world toward 80% by 2050. Deniers and skeptics are viewing the challenge of 80/50 from the mindset that the status quo is sustainable by some means. Until we recognize the futility of this premise, and the opportunities of an alternative, there will be little mobilization toward that alternative. That is the great failure of Copenhagen, but not its only failure by any means.
* * *
If Copenhagen's communal rancor produced nothing of substance, it did succeed in bringing competing agendas to the fore, perhaps as never before. In so doing, it created the opportunity for future unintended consequences, some of which might actually be beneficial.
Let's take the issue of equity for under-developed countries and the related issue of financial aid for climate and energy transition. Much has been stated of the developed world's obligation to the less developed, but what of the obligation of the less developed to themselves and each other?
Many of the less developed nations that face risks of climate change are in the cross-hairs of the developed and developing economies (China) in a resource scramble that is currently under way. This gives the developing countries with resource base the opportunity to secure their own transition by bargaining wisely in the trade of natural or economic resource for financial resource. To the extent that they are sufficiently endowed with natural or financial resource, as in the case of the Saudis and China, there would seem no rational claim on the developed world.
As for those less fortunate nations without adequate resources but with more than modest environmental challenges, the next hurdle should be one of political transparency and accountability. While on the one hand it would be naive for developed nations to presume to transform other societies, the process of transferring wealth to achieve humanitarian equity should not be a one way, blank check proposition. It should be an explicit condition that the granting of aid to nations for Climate Change survival shall be predicated on their political openness and acceptance of accountability and oversight in applying the funds to the intended purpose. This applies the Rahm Emanuel theory of 'never letting a crisis go to waste' to achieve multiple goals.
China is a special case. While the United States has appeared to approach China as a supplicant rather than an equal (our illusion of 'super power-dom' is ringing a bit hollow these days), the imperatives of Clim-Ergy give us unique bargaining power, if we use it wisely.
The first challenge is to strip China of its pretense of being an under-developed country. On the basis of its accomplishments of the past ten years, its importance in international financial and economic paradigms, and its future potential, it has lost its virginity, so to speak, and its pretense of an underdeveloped country. President Obama made an important first step in his call for transparency and accountability. Next, he must engage all developed nations in 'calling out' China to assume its role of responsibility and accountability in the community of nations.
China is a nation still struggling to find its place and its identity. Ironically, so are we, for different reasons. Clim-Ergy presents us both with an opportunity and an inescapable challenge to reconcile our separate selves with a shared reality.
Meanwhile, back in the US of A, we have daunting challenges and, equally magnificent opportunities.
We have a sprawled environment which is inefficient economically and logistically, and psychologically degrading and counter-productive. If we rebuild our communities to be denser, more amenable to public transportation, we can reduce and substitute the dependency on personal transportation, and suck a lot of the economic overhead out of our costs of living and doing business.
Rebuilding our infrastructure and living structure to be more operationally cost efficient in the long run of an altered climatic and energy future creates a paradigm for economic sustenance and sustainability that our current consumer oriented culture has not and will not provide.
Building a robust internet that can substitute communication for transportation wherever feasible; that can bring the doctor and the teacher to the home; that can allow mother and father to be at home and working when feasible; that can be extended to all to assure universal access and opportunity, and in so doing can create the platform for added economic opportunities. That is an investment, not an expense, in dealing with the challenges of Clim-Ergy that will likely have multiple paybacks.
Downsizing from Mc-Mansions on undersized lots or remote mini-Ponderosas to denser development around parks and open spaces can create for the individual and society a different but better sense of privacy and spaciousness in an economically and environmentally more sustainable paradigm.
It is somewhat surprising that more voices of business have not risen in chorus to sing the opportunities of Clim-Ergy rather than cry its risks to their status quo. Where are the entrepreneurs? Where are the risk takers, besides T. Boone Pickens? They are cowering in their individual silos of uncertainty, rather than collaborating in a consensus of mutual well-being, not only for themselves but for the consumers they profess to serve. We have an incredible opportunity before us to deal with an incredible challenge.
So, once again, where to from here? President Obama must lead in rhetoric and deed. He must first set out for the American people in explicit terms the climatic and energy future we face, and our alternatives in dealing with it. He must propose a 'best alternative' in the same way he did with Afghanistan (irrespective of whether you agree with that decision). He must prepare the American people for that decision through a similar process that he prepared them for Afghanistan, bringing together a high council of economic, energy and environmental interests and authorities to hammer out a sensible consensus, and not a consensus of convenience. He should announce the beginning of this initiative in his State of the Union address, with the intent of addressing the nation on July 1, 2010, before Independence Day weekend. From that point on, he should bend the federal budget wherever possible to supporting the Clim-Ergy agenda, and encouraging business and state government to follow. His stimulus strategy has embodied some of this intent, but without an explicit definition of the need and the goal. This must change.
The alternative is policy entropy: defined by Webster as 'a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder', which is already well in progress.
We have choices, and our choices have consequences. But continued dithering will steadily diminish our opportunities to choose wisely.
Onward.
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