E3G

Climate change: choosing the tools

By Tom Burke

The right mix of political, technological and economic instruments is essential if the challenge of irreversible climate-change is to be met, says Tom Burke of E3G, in an article published today by Open Democracy.

Since the publication of the Stern report on the economics of climate change on 30 October 2006, several things about climate change have come into much sharper focus. We know what the world has to do to avoid the risk of fundamentally undermining our prosperity and security. We know how to do it. We know we can afford the cost. We have the technology and the capital we need to guarantee climate security. What we do not know is how to mobilise that technology and capital on the scale and with the urgency required by the inexorable laws of physics, chemistry and biology. In other words: it’s the politics, stupid.

When Kofi Annan addressed the climate-change conference in Nairobi on 15 November, he pointed to “the frightening lack of leadership” from the world’s politicians. There is a yawning gap between what the science of climate change requires if we are to maintain climate security and the pace at which either national or global action is taking place.

The Stern report pointed out that if the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere doubles from its pre-industrial levels, the odds are even that the rise in global temperature by the end of the 21st century will be some 30C. This is well past the point at which the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice-sheet will have begun, and very near the point at which the Amazon rainforest could begin to collapse. If greenhouse-gas concentrations continue to rise at their current rate, that doubling will occur in less than four decades.

Nicholas Stern’s estimate of the possible cost to the economy of damage on this scale was a loss of 5%- 20% of global GDP: enough, he pointed out, to “derail the economy”. Strangely, the response of many economists was to criticise his estimate simply because it was out of line with the 2%-3% more common in literature on climate economics. Many scientists thought he had erred in the other direction and greatly underestimated the actual costs of a rapidly changing climate.