Climate change: Giant strides or fairy footsteps?
Giant strides are needed to decarbonise the world economy, and giant strides need a giant causeway - marked out on the landscape by a global deal on emissions targets, generous finance, and a high and rising international price of carbon. But what happens if the road-builders are on strike, or working to rule, as seems to be the case in the global negotiations on climate change? Are there other pathways, less suited to giant strides, but perhaps open to fairy footsteps, which might lead to the same destination?
The need for fairy footsteps is becoming acute. The climate talks hosted by the UN faltered in Copenhagen in 2009, and were barely resuscitated in Cancun in 2010. When negotiators meet in Durban in 2011, they will find themselves discussing not the global deal to replace Kyoto, nor the volume of finance needed to invest in mitigation and adaptation, nor the policies that will deliver a reasonable price of carbon, through taxation or cap and trade. Instead, the agenda will consist of technical detail and future institutional architecture, for example with respect to the Green Climate Fund: useful and necessary building blocks, but far from a breakthrough. That, experts say, will not come until after the US election, and probably not till 2015.
In the meantime, countries have two options: to sit on their hands or do what they can. Some have followed the first course. But others have followed the second. Denmark, for example, has just set the most ambitious targets in the world, with a reduction of 40% on 1990 levels of emissions by 2020, a 50% share of wind in electricity by 2020, all energy except for transport to be completely renewable by 2035, and transport by 2050. Korea has also set very ambitious goals, targeting emissions reductions of 30% below BAU by 2020, establishing a joint public and private sector Commission on Green Growth, and focusing policy interventions, regulations, and finance on key industries which will unleash green growth dynamism. Indonesia, Mexico, China and Rwanda are among the many countries in the developing world that have set stretching targets. Some large companies have followed suit. Shell, for example, has set an internal carbon price of $US 40/t, to encourage attention to mitigation in its new investments.
