E3G

Creating a secure climate: the G8 leadership challenge

By Jennifer Morgan

DANGEROUS LEVELS

The aim is to reach an ambitious global climate deal at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December next year. It should set the world on a path to keep the global average temperature rise below two degrees in relation to pre-industrial levels. This is a tight but important deadline, intended to maintain confidence in the growing carbon market and drive the rapid changes required in government policy and investment decisions.

Climate change is already approaching dangerous levels. To avoid passing potentially catastrophic tipping points, global emissions must peak and decline within the next ten to fifteen years. That means making the right technology and infrastructure investments today that will lock in global emissions levels for decades to come. The global deal must include a new technology cooperation and innovation mechanism that makes the transition to a low carbon economy possible throughout the world.

To put this into perspective, global greenhouse gas emissions are on a path to reach sixty gigatons a year by 2030. The challenge is to switch to low-carbon development that saves at least thirty gigatons per year by 2030 and does so in an equitable fashion across major economies that have fundamentally different starting points.

Analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others suggests that around eighty percent of the necessary savings – twenty-five gigatons – can be achieved with existing technologies. Many of these could be introduced at minimal cost, including measures to improve energy efficiency in key sectors – power, industry, buildings and transport. Others will require some form of public support to accelerate their adoption, including renewable energy sources such wind and solar. It is also vital to reduce emissions from coal through large-scale carbon capture and storage technology.

LEADERSHIP STARTS AT HOME

At the heart of the post-2012 deal must be ambitious, absolute mandatory caps on emissions by developed countries so they are twenty-five to forty percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The G8 summit should endorse this range; in Bali it was accepted by all G8 countries except the US.

Without this it will be immensely difficult to get developing countries such as China and India to commit to something that has never been done before – rapid economic development combined with radical decarbonisation.

For developed-country commitments to be taken seriously, they must be backed up by concrete laws and domestic measures that demonstrate the transition to a low carbon economy has begun. Nowhere is this more important than in Europe, which will be debating its own low carbon plan at a key stage in the international negotiations. The European climate package must be finalised by the end of the year.

Through this climate package, it must be clear to the world that Europe will not build any more coal-fired power plants, unless they are designed for carbon capture and storage; that big improvements in energy efficiency are reducing demand; that renewable supplies are becoming mainstream; and that the emissions trading system will have permit auctioning at its core, with the auction revenue earmarked to support developing countries’ adoption of clean technologies and adaptation to climate change.

In parallel, Europe should be encouraging the production and trade of low carbon goods. Next year the European Commission should remove high tariffs on Chinese compact fluorescent light-bulbs so that European consumers can purchase them cheaply and Chinese firms can see the benefit of producing such goods.