Save Kyoto

Stopping climate change will take more than clean-energy investment. We should start by reforming Kyoto, not scrapping it. A response to Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are clearly among the “good guys” in the climate debate. They accept that climate change is real and important, and that it requires serious action. But the solutions they propose are inadequate–representing only part of what needs to be a far bigger and more encompassing response to the greatest collective challenge ever to face humanity.

They begin with a convincing (if understated) attack on the Kyoto Protocol as a means of constraining greenhouse gas emissions [“Scrap Kyoto,” Issue #9]. As they note, since the agreement was struck in 1997, the Protocol’s flexibility mechanisms have created a multi-billion dollar market in a bewildering diversity of carbon-backed securities. But their overall effect may have been to increase, not diminish, emissions. In response, Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s would, first, have the world community scrap the Kyoto Protocol and its byzantine flexibility mechanisms. In its place, they write, “The G-8 and other wealthy nations should together invest between $100 billion to $250 billion annually in technology innovation and infrastructure, both in their own countries and in rapidly industrializing nations like China and India.”

They are right on both points. The Kyoto Protocol is a poor starting point from which to develop an effective climate agreement. And the world certainly does need enormous investments in researching and deploying clean-energy technologies and infrastructure. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), government-funded global energy R&D spending is currently about $10.9 billion per year, of which only about $3 billion is spent on clean technologies. This is only 57 percent of the peak level of spending, in 1980, of $19 billion, even though the need for sustainable-energy solutions is far greater now. Meanwhile, multi-trillion dollar energy investments are being made, and planned for coming decades, in fossil-fuel-based infrastructure. China alone is building a one-gigawatt, coal-fired power station per week, with a probable lifetime of 50 to 75 years.

Yet what the authors advocate is not a solution in its own right. It is but one element in a much wider solution that must incorporate adaptation; a globally harmonized regulatory system; effective measures to conserve and sequester biospheric carbon; and a global cap on emissions–in other words, a new and radically improved Kyoto. Without the latter, it is all too possible to have an ever-rising rising proportion of renewables in our energy supply, at the same time as we are burning more and more fossil fuels. Reject the Kyoto Protocol by all means, but the Kyoto process must continue.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger never dispute–and presumably support–the principles of the Climate Convention that birthed the Kyoto Protocol and its core objective, the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” But they appear to believe that this can be delivered by a 500 parts-per-million (ppm) stabilization target for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a 90 percent reduction in emissions by 2100; this is, after all, the reduction goal that drives their investment estimates. But this target–representing a near-doubling of pre-industrial emission levels–is seriously inadequate.

There is increasing evidence that even at the present level of 385 ppm, greenhouse gases are setting off positive environmental feedbacks that threaten to render all but the most aggressive emissions reduction targets irrelevant. Take the summer melting of Arctic sea ice. As the ice melts, more sunlight is absorbed by the water rather than reflected back into space, and the Arctic sea warms. A possible outcome is a runaway Arctic warming process, which in turn will trigger eruptions of methane (a greenhouse gas 70 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over 20 years) from Siberian and Canadian permafrost. The warmer Arctic climate could lead in turn to the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet–and if that collapses, global sea levels will rise by a catastrophic seven meters. We don’t know how long that might take, but it now seems that earlier IPCC estimates of a multi-century timescale could be seriously overly optimistic. Elsewhere in the world, rising temperatures threaten to turn the Amazon into a tinder-box and reduce the ability of other forests, and the oceans, to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And that is at present levels; if we stabilized at 500 ppm, think of how much worse things would be.

In short, Nordhaus and Shellenberger, for all their talk about belt-tightening, are significantly underselling the challenge. The celebrated if controversial climate scientist James Hansen now proposes an intermediate target of 350 ppm (taken up as a global campaign platform by the recently formed group 350.org), and he expects that we may have to aim for even 300 ppm to achieve longer-term climate stability. As Andrew Weaver, a professor at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences in Victoria, British Columbia, demonstrated in 2007, even if emissions are stabilized at 90 percent below present levels by 2050, the 2 degrees Celsius threshold (widely if erroneously supposed to represent a safe level of warming) would eventually be broken. Only global carbon neutrality by 2050, Weaver concludes, can do the job. That won’t be achieved with Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s numbers, and it won’t be achieved by clean-tech investment alone.

We need to act on all fronts. Above all, we must stop the loss of biospheric carbon, currently responsible for about a quarter of total emissions, and increase the biosphere’s capacity to act as a carbon sink. That means, for one, working aggressively to conserve our forests and other ecosystems (both for the sake of the carbon they embody and the wider climate services they perform), and maintain carbon in soils, most especially in peatlands. This will involve, along the way, an agricultural revolution as new low-emission, high-absorption agricultural techniques are developed and put into action. Fortunately, this will also raise productivity–essential as human populations increase–as enriching soils with carbon (whether humus or charcoal) also increases their capacity to retain water and nutrients. But we must invest on a large scale to bring about these changes.

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