constructireland.ie - Climate control

Climate control

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James Hansen, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Other rich countries can be expected to use offsets too and big developing countries like India and China are keen that they should do so because it brings in foreign exchange. The smaller poor countries which want the 1.5 degree target are free to demand it because they get no benefits from CDM. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, out of 18 CDM projects, 11 are in South Africa. There are three small electrification projects in Uganda, a large scheme to capture methane from a dump in Tanzania, two small plants recovering methane from waste water, one in the Central African Republic, the other in Nigeria, which also has a large scheme to prevent an Italian oil company flaring off natural gas. Not very impressive, but if you look at a map showing projects in India, China and Brazil, there are so many dots they merge into each other.

In view of this, the CDM has to be considered to be nothing more than a big-country you-scratch-my-back-I'll scratch-yours scam. Under it, the rich countries continue polluting and bribe big poor countries not to kick up a fuss. Global emissions are not reduced and smaller, poorer countries are ignored.

The existence of the CDM has enabled countries to avoid having to develop effective means of achieving rapid, substantial emissions cuts within their own borders. Feasta, an Irish NGO, has put forward Cap and Share as way of doing this but the idea has not been taken up. As result, some combination of cap and trade and a carbon tax are the only tools governments have available.

That's not good. The EU's version of cap and trade, the Emissions Trading System, has failed badly so far. In its first phase, from 2005-2008, it enabled the power producers to make massive profits at the expense of their customers and produced no reductions at all. In the current phase, 2009-2013, the price of the right to emit is so low that it's not worth anyone taking much trouble to avoid paying it. In any case, the ETS covers less than half of the EU's fossil emissions.

The Maldives, arguably the lowest-lying country in the world, could disappear under the waves due to rising sea levels

A carbon tax is a clunky solution because it cannot guarantee that the target emissions level will be met. The rate has to be adjusted up and down depending on fossil fuel prices and economic conditions to get the required reduction, and these constantly changing rates would make it a political football. “There's a lower rate in Britain and Germany. We can't compete against that.”

Ireland is planning to introduce a carbon tax in this December's budget to try to reduce emissions not covered by the ETS, such as those from road transport and heating fuels. A report last December commissioned by Comhar, the National Sustainable Development Council, showed that the tax might have to rise to e182 per tonne of CO2 to get non-ETS emissions down by enough to reach the 20 per cent target. That would add 42 cents to petrol's current price. If such a price rise was brought in overnight, imagine the outcry about the hardships to people living in rural areas and the damage to national competitiveness.

So, in the absence of suitable tools, the 450 target will not be easy to reach, and governments are coming to realise that they would have more wriggle-room if emissions from the way the land is used could be reduced. For example, if deforestation, the source of about 25 per cent of global emissions, was ended entirely by 2050, it would only be necessary to reduce the world's fossil fuel emissions to 55 per cent of their 2005 level by 2050 rather than by the 80 per cent, and they would not have to be reduced any further after that. Accordingly, one of the topics on the agenda for Copenhagen is REDD – Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation – which is all about rich countries continuing to emit and paying countries like Brazil, Central African Republic and Indonesia not to clear their trees as rapidly as they have been doing up to now.

But the real problem with the 450 target is that it does not guarantee that the world's average temperature will not rise by more than two degrees. You can see this for yourself by using C-LEARN, an easy-to-use climate model which is said to give results very close to those used by climate professionals. Just go to:
http://forio.com/simulation/climate-development/ and put your assumptions into the boxes on the screen. For example, if you assume that all parts of the world reduce their fossil emissions by 55 per cent by 2050 and deforestation has been halted by then too, you hit the 450 target.