Museologia Informal e Alterações Climáticas
Descripción
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Ficha Técnica: Heranças Globais – Memórias Locais Revista de práticas de museologia informal Nº 7. winter 2015 Diretor Pedro Pereira Leite ISSN - 2182-7613 Edição: Marca d’ Água: Publicações e Projetos Redação: Casa Muss-amb-ike Ilha de Moçambique, 3098 Moçambique Lisboa: Passeio dos Fenícios, Lt. 4.33.01.B 5º Esq. 1990-302 Lisboa -Portugal
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Índice Museologia informal e alterações climáticas ........................................................................ 8 Climatic Changes and Negotiation .................................................................................... 10 1.
Towards a New Climate Change Agreement ............................................................. 12
1.1: The Challenge of Human Induced Climate Change ...................................................... 14 1.
2: The History of Climate Change Science ............................................................... 18
1.3: The UNFCCC .......................................................................................................... 24 1.4: From Kyoto to Copenhagen ...................................................................................... 31 1.5: Towards COP21 ...................................................................................................... 36 2.
The Basics of Climate Change Science..................................................................... 42
2.1: The Earth’s Energy Balance ...................................................................................... 43 2.2: The Greenhouse Gases and Feedbacks ...................................................................... 48 2.3: The Relentless Rise of CO2 ...................................................................................... 56 2.4: Other Drivers of Climate Change .............................................................................. 61 2.5: Recent History of Climate Change ............................................................................. 66 3: The 2-Degree Limit .................................................................................................... 72 3.1: The Business As Usual Trajectory .............................................................................. 73 3.2: The Consequences of the BAU Trajectory ................................................................... 77 3.3: Limiting the Mean Surface Temperature Increase Below 2-Degrees Celsius vs. PreIndustrial Levels ............................................................................................................ 81 3.4: Debates Over the 2-Degree Celsius Limit ................................................................... 86 4 The 2-Degree Carbon Budget ....................................................................................... 91 4.1: What is a Carbon Budget? ........................................................................................ 92 4.2: What is the Global Carbon Budget for the 2-Degree Limit? ........................................... 95 4.3: What is the Global Emissions Reduction Pathway for the 2-Degree Limit? ...................... 99 4.4: How Does It Compare with the Potential Emissions from Fossil Fuel Reserves & Resources? .................................................................................................................................. 104 5: The Deep Decarbonization of Energy Systems .............................................................. 108 5.1: What is an Energy System? .................................................................................... 109 5. 2: Energy-Related CO2 Emissions Trends .................................................................... 112 5. 3: The 3 Pillars of the Deep Decarbonization of Energy Systems ..................................... 115 5.4: A Global Mitigation Scenario .................................................................................... 120 6: The Key Technological Challenges of Deep Decarbonization ........................................... 123 6.1 The Need for Accelerated Development of Low-Carbon Technologies / Key technologies For RDD&D ....................................................................................................................... 124 6.2.: Grid Management of Power Systems with High Penetration of Renewable Energies ....... 127 Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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6.3 Carbon Capture & Sequestration ............................................................................... 130 6.4: Advanced Nuclear Power ........................................................................................ 133 6.5: Electric Vehicles and Advanced Biofuels .................................................................... 136 6.6: The Role of Technology Roadmaps and Roundtables ................................................... 139 7: Deep Decarbonization Pathways: Country Case Studies ................................................. 141 7.1: Why Countries Need Deep Decarbonization Pathways to 2050 ..................................... 142 7.2: The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project ............................................................. 145 7.3: What We Learn From Countries’ Deep Decarbonization Pathways ................................. 148 7.4: Lessons for the Global Agreement on Climate Change at COP21 in Paris in 2015 ........... 153 8: Energy & Development ............................................................................................. 156 8.1: Energy & Poverty ................................................................................................... 157 8.2: A World Without Modern Energy .............................................................................. 163 8.3: Energy for All in Africa ............................................................................................ 166 8.4: How Climate Change Threatens the Poorest of the Poor .............................................. 172 8.5: Sustainable Energy for All ....................................................................................... 177 9: Main Challenges of Climate Change Negotiations .......................................................... 183 9.1: Efficiency & Fairness .............................................................................................. 184 9.2: Basic Principles of a Global Agreement ..................................................................... 194 9.3: What is Fair? ......................................................................................................... 198 9.4: Making an Agreement Stick..................................................................................... 203 9.5: Problem-Solving Versus Negotiating ......................................................................... 208 10: Towards a New Climate Agreement Based on 2-Degrees Celsius ................................... 215 10.1: The Three-Tiered Structure of Mitigation Commitments ............................................ 216 10.2: Technology RDD&D .............................................................................................. 219 10 3: Climate Financing ................................................................................................ 224 10.4 Can Everybody Win? Should Everybody Win? ............................................................ 231 10.5: Achieving Large Global Goals ................................................................................. 237 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 242
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Apresentação
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Museologia informal e alterações climáticas
Heranças Globais - Memórias Locais apresenta neste número a questão das alterações climáticas. Em Paris inicia-se no último dia do mês a COP21 – A Conferencia Intergovernamental sobre o Clima. Trata-se da última das importantes cimeiras internacionais que decorreram este ano. Depois de em Julho é Addis-Abeeba se ter Reunido a III Conferencia dos Dadores para o Desenvolvimento (para o seu financiamento) que ficou conhecido como a Agenda para a Ação de Adis Abeba, e de no final de Setembro ter sido aprovado em Nova Yoork os Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável (ODS) que marcarão a agenda internacional até 2030, reúne-se agora esta Conferencia Internacional para tomar decisões sobre as alterações climáticas. A sua relevância reside fundamentalmente nas medidas que vierem a ser adoptadas em relação ao processo de contenção do aquecimento global. Um conjunto de medidas que poderá afetar de forma profunda o modelo económico e social em que vivemos. O grande objectivo desta conferência é marcar o limite de 2º C colo limite ao aquecimento global. Em parte essa medida já se encontra consensualizada, quer pela comunidade internacional em encontroa prévios, quer nos ODS. Há contudo a prespetiva de nesta Conferência esta questão ser assumida como um objectivo global. E será daí que decorrem a necessidade de transformação do modelo energético e de gestão dos recursos naturais. A ciência tem vindo a alertar para a possibilidade ultrapassagem de alguns limites do planeta. Entre eles o aquecimento global é talvez o mais difundido. A ciência aponta para a um aumento da temperatura média de 2º celsius, medidos a partir dos níveis pré-industriais, colocará os diferentes sistemas em situação de eminente ruptura. Este aumento médio, afirma-se, proporcionará eventos extremos em maior frequência e força destruidora, permitirá um degelo nas calotes polares, com um aumento do nível médio das águas do mar, secas e desertificação, enxurradas, alterações dos biomas. Possibilidades que não se sabem se acontecerão, como acontecerão, que resultados terão. Para que isso não suceda é necessário inverter a trajectória de aquecimento global rapidamente. O problema é que neste momento, projectando o processo de aquecimento médio, prevê-se que ele seja cada vez mais rápido, ou seja a continuar ao Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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actual ritmo ele atingirá até final do século mias 4º Celsius, o que permite antever um cenário devastador para a humanidade e seus recursos. Ao mesmo tempo, dentro de quinze anos habitarão na terra cerca de 9 biliões de seres humanos, para os quais teremos que dispor de recursos necessários para nos alimentarmos. E este crescimento será registado sobretudo nos países do sul, fazendo aumentar a pressão na produção de energia, consumo de água, de terra e florestas. O que se decidir é Paris é fundamental. Apesar de se reconhecer esta questão a comunidade internacional tem vindo a protelar o compromisso sobre problema. E dizem os cientistas, já não existe mais margem para adiar. A que enfrentar a questão, procurar uma solução alternativa para o modelo energético. Existem várias soluções para descabornizar a economia e colocar o mundo numa trajetória de sustentabilidade: a melhoria da eficiência energética nos sectores da construção, dos transportes e da indústria; a geração de eletricidade de baixo carbono, através de uma combinação de energias renováveis (eólica, solar, nuclear), e combustíveis fósseis com captura e sequestro de carbono (CCS); e a mudança para soluções de transporte de baixo carbono, como são por exemplo os veículos elétricos. A museologia deve introduzir estas questões nas suas preocupações e deve intervir ativamente na procura de soluções e como elas podem ser aplicadas em diferentes contextos nacionais. Devem ser locais de experimentação da transição para uma economia de baixo carbono
Pedro Pereira Leite, novembro 2015
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Climatic Changes and Negotiation
Emmanuel Guerin1
Director of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project. http://deepdecarbonization.org/ 1
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This new course on Climate Change Science and Climate Change Negotiations. Will bring us to the center of this atual and relevant question.
a path in which we can really confront this serious indeed, grave and urgent challenge of human induced climate change. So here we are in the fall of 2014, and we have an absolutely filled diplomatic agenda coming up in the year 2015 The world has said that in September 2015 leaders of governments of the 193 members states of the United Nations will come to the UN Headquarters and adopt Sustainable Development Goals. And then just shortly after that, they will meet again in Paris in December 2015 guided by this sustainable development framework to adopt a meaningful, global agreement on Climate Change.
DDPP, that's a phrase you're going to come to know, of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Now what is all of that? We're in a complicated time. We are in a period in the world in which we face massive economic, social, and environmental challenges. And of all of the environmental challenges, the greatest is the challenge of climate change. Humancaused climate change. We're going to be talking about the science of climate change. And we're going to be focusing on This course is about the path to that new the negotiations, globally, to do something agreement. What does the underlying about climate change. science tell us? What is the evidence about how we can best head off, and we'll also As we'll see in just a moment we've been discuss, adapt to climate change? What at this for quite a while. It's in fact 22 should be the principles of negotiation? years since the world signed the first And this course should provide you with all major agreement on facing human-caused of the basics on the nature of the climate climate change. But we're still not science, the challenges we face, the succeeding. And this course is about the reasons why negotiations have been so underlying science, and the challenge of difficult to date, the urgency of finding a negotiating a meaningful agreement, so solution, and some of the path to that we can really do something to slow successful negotiation in 2015 Now here's down, and eventually halt, this human- the added prize. caused change to the climate system. We're going to be talking about why that's important. I'll remind us all in just a moment. But why now? Why this course at this time? Because we are at a crucial moment Globally diplomatically. This is a period, as I've stressed elsewhere, where we're entering a new era. I've called it the Age of Sustainable Development in fact, I hope that some of you will look at that online course on The Age of Sustainable Development. It tries to depict this complicated, interconnected challenge of integrating economic, social, and environmental considerations.
You're gonna learn a lot this semester and based on what you learn you will have the opportunity to be a delegate. A delegate not to the December 2015 negotiations in Paris but to a preliminary, online, global negotiation which will take place early in 2015. Based on what you will learn in this course, you will have powerful tools to help decide on the framework that should be adopted by the world's governments to guide us forward.
So you will be online delegates starting early in 2015 to a global negotiation building on the science, the evidence, the technology base that we are going to be studying in this course. Welcome to it! Let's get right into this first Now, the world's governments have said, lecture which is about the path to successful negotiations in Paris in 2015.
we've gotta get on this. We have to set some clear goals and we have finally to set
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1. Towards a New Climate Change Agreement
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1.1: The Challenge of Human Induced Climate Change2 I want to talk about the challenge of human-induced climate change. Why do we care? Why are you going to spend a semester reading treaties? Reading about technologies of low carbon energy systems? Studying all of the barriers that have come up to an effective negotiation? What is the problem? A good place to start in understanding this problem is with the concept of planetary boundaries. Because in a way the climate change problem is part of a more general problem. The general problem, I often say, is the problem of living in a crowded and productive world. Here we are. 7.2 billion people. That's a lot of human beings. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution a little over two centuries ago, we've had roughly an eightfold growth of the human population. But per person we're also using a lot of resources and per person the world is now so productive that average output for each of those 7.2 billion people is about 12 thousand dollars US measured. So we have 7.2 billion people. We have about 12 thousand dollars per person of output. That's about a ninety trillion-dollar world economy. That's the level of annual production. Well that is pressing hard on the planet. We've reached the point where in this crowded world, this juggernaut of a world economy, using so many primary resources, using so much land, so much water, burning so much fossil fuel that is the coal, oil, and gas that power so much of the world economy - that we are now pressing against physical boundaries of Earth. The systems that keep life, sustain, that enable us to grow food, ensure we have safe water for our daily survival. The ecologists have realized that we're in a unique situation. Never before has a single species, and that would be us human beings, pressed so hard against the physical boundaries of the world. They've given it it a title - "Planetary Boundaries," shown by this well-known graphic in the scientific community. 2
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch1.html
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It's like a clock. Indeed the clock is ticking. If you go around the circles of this clock, starting at 12 noon, high noon, is climate change and then at roughly 1 o'clock is ocean acidification. The fact that human beings are making the oceans - the vast oceans - more acidic. We're doing that as a species. The next round, between two and three o'clock, is ozone depletion, a phenomenon that many of you will be familiar with, that some of our industrial chemicals are threatening the ozone layer in the stratosphere and if we destroy the ozone that could lead to calamitous health affects on all living species including us. And as you go around the circle you see one after another of these planetary boundaries: pollution coming from nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, taking groundwater faster than it can be recharged, destroying the habitat of other species leading to massive loss of biodiversity. Well, of all of these planetary boundaries that are being threatened and trespassed climate change is perhaps the most pervasive of all because if we fundamentally change the Earth's climate, as humanity is on a course to do, we threaten every other part of the biosphere, about the web of life on the planet itself. Now we've already had a huge effect. This is a graph which shows, year by year, the changing temperature in the month of May. I take this because, as I speak to you now, May 2014 was the most recent month of data available worldwide to look into climate temperature and what's shown here is the temperature on average in the month of May 2014 compared to an average May temperature for the years 1981 to 2010. The areas in red, the months in red, signify the fact that the May in those years was warmer than the average of 1981 to 2010. What you can see is we are on a steady, not quite steady because it bounces year to year, but we are on upward path that is absolutely unmistakable. And if you look closely, May of 2014 is the highest point on that entire graph. May of 2014 was the warmest month of May in measurement history of the planet Earth. Oops. That's a problem. We are on a path of global warming, but that's not all there is to human-induced climate change. We're changing all aspects of the climate. The patterns of rainfall, precipitation, and evaporation of water. The nature of storms and other ancillary effects. Well, I travel around the world I as part of my work as director of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and as a special adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. I can tell you from personal experience just in this year of 2014, just about every place that I have been, and that is a couple of dozen countries during 2014 so far, there's an ecological crisis. There's climate change that is already bearing down on the well-being of societies. Even the physical survival of people. Take an example of the chronic droughts and heat waves that have hit the Thar desert of Pakistan. A country that has a considerable portion of the country in very dry almost desert-like conditions when the rainfall fails
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when the heat rises, you can have a calamitous famine, drought, lack of access to life saving water. Consider a different circumstance high up in the Himalayan mountains of that wondrous Kingdom of Bhutan, where communities live near glaciers in the Himalayan mountains and those glaciers are retreating. They're melting. They're forming so-called glacier lakes, and those lakes have threatened or on occasion burst out of their banks and flooded villages below, killing many people. This is a sight of workers high up in the Himalayas trying to relieve the pressures of these glacial lakes that are coming from the retreating melting glaciers. Or floods. We now kow from climate change - we'll be discussing it - that because of the warming of the planet and the more intense convection that occurs alongside a warmer planet, that rainfall events are more intense; there's more likelihood of flooding; and indeed we're seeing disastrous floods in many places in the world. This is just one of many many floods that have been experienced, often one in a century or worse floods. This one shown here in Sri Lanka. But the flip side is that many dry parts of the world are getting drier and that is also to be expected from human-induced climate change. In country after country that I visited in 2014, I've come into circumstances of intense drought. When I was visiting Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the spring of 2014, the water reservoirs with deeply depleted. Here is an engineer inspecting what's supposed to be a water reservoir but you can see that it is a completely dry because of the failure of the rains this year. If you look to halfway around the world, we see drought and attendant forest fires in the island of Sumatra in the country of Indonesia. If you look in my own hometown back to the floods and extreme storms, we had a superstorm that were still trying to recover from. We called it Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Sandy. It slammed the east coast of the United States. It led to tens of billions of dollars of property loss. Here is a sight of New York's police cars floating down Tenth Street in lower Manhattan. Just a shocking visitation to a city which prides itself on on being in the cutting edge but found that it was very very hard to overcome such a natural devastation. And what you see here is a shock that also still reverberates. Typhoon Haiyan, which swept over the Philippines, is, on some measurements, the most powerful land falling tropical cyclone - that means a typhoon or hurricane - in recorded history. And of course there was vast, tragic loss of life in the Philippines, massive property destruction, and it will take years and years and years to overcome this. But these are the kinds of devastations that are coming with increasing frequency. They are being felt all over the world. They remind us that human-induced climate change is a global phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that is immediately within our sights. It is a phenomenon that is
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being experienced in different ways in different parts of the world but in all parts of the world. As the governments of the United Nations deliberate on how to overcome this challenge, and I had the chance to meet with the ambassadors in the General Assembly of the United Nations, I see across the chamber, in every country in the world, a realization of the dangers that Earth faces and determination to do something about it. And that of course is what brings us all together in this course. What shall we do? Let's understand the science. Let's understand the options and let's head towards a successful global agreement.
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1. 2: The History of Climate Change Science About the history of climate change science. Sometimes it's thought, sometimes it's claimed, that climate change science is some new idea, some very strange bizarre idea. A few people, pretty outrageously, even say it's a hoax but climate change science actually dates back almost two centuries. Now the basics have become very well understood, even though of course there are many uncertainties about this specifics of our extremely complicated planet. The core notions of climate change science really date back to the 1820's and rather than take us through a lot of equations and specific technical I thought I would introduce you to some of the greater thinkers who have been the pioneers, who helped us find our way to understand what this human-induced climate change is really all about. Now the first of these great scientists is Joseph Fourier, a great French scientist who, in the eighteen twenties, thought very deeply about a basic problem about the Earth's temperature and the Earth's place in the solar system. And he made a calculation and said you know given where the Earth is, 93 million miles away from at the sun, given the sun's energy, the Earth really should be a colder planet, like the moon. The moon is a considerably colder than the Earth. And so Fourier asked the question, 'what is it that is making Earth warmer than one would predict simply given the solar radiation and the physics of the Earth as a planet circulating the Sun?' And he intuited something with startling brilliance and that is that the Earth's atmosphere is a kind of blanket that warms the planet relative to what it otherwise would be. He realized even more deeply that perhaps because of the chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere, which he could not know at that stage of Earth science, that the atmosphere would allow the solar radiation into the Earth, actually, to be absorbed by the planet and to warm the
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planet but that the atmosphere somehow would trap that heat that the Earth would otherwise re-radiate back to space. He said that the Earth would be in a kind of thermal equilibrium, or energy balance; that it would take in energy from the Sun; that would warm the Earth; as a warm body the Earth would radiate its own energy back into space; and the Earth would arrive at a balanced temperature, such that the energy outgoing from the Earth would balance the energy coming in from the Sun. And that would be the thermal equilibrium. That would determine the Earth's temperature. But Fourier said, 'Hmm, suppose that the atmosphere traps some of that outgoing radiation, then the Earth would end up being warmer than otherwise and that is the famous greenhouse effect that Joseph Fourier first pioneered. It was a brilliant insight. In later decades, other great scientists, and I would mention John Tyndall in Britain, deepened this insight by understanding more deeply the atmospheric chemistry. Tyndall realized that even a small amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be part of that heat trapping blanket that surrounds the Earth in the atmosphere and that causes the greenhouse effect. And Tyndall also realized that as the greenhouse effect operates to warm the Earth, that the air being warmer would also thereby hold more water vapor, H2O, and that water itself would have a greenhouse effect, trapping some of the heat that otherwise would be radiated from Earth into space. And so the carbon dioxide would trap heat warm the planet; with warmer air there would be more water vapor in the atmosphere; water itself in the atmosphere would be another greenhouse gas that would further amplify the warming; and it would be the combination of carbon dioxide and water, thought Tyndall, which would explain the overall greenhouse effect. Now from Fourier's work and Tyndall's work came an absolutely magnificent and brilliant contribution a by another genius: Svante Arrhenius. Svante Arrhenius is a Nobel Laureate Swedish chemist who made many many great discoveries at the end of t he 19th century in the early 20th century and at one point around 1896 Arrhenius being the genius that he was, decided with paper and pencil, of course not a computer to be available for dozens and dozens of years later and with no climate model, that he would calculate numerically what the effect of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would mean for the Earth's temperature. And by paper and pencil and extraordinarily brilliant insight, understanding how carbon dioxide absorbs part of the radiation from Earth back into space, Arrhenius was able to
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calculate astoundingly that if the carbon dioxide were to increase significantly in the atmosphere and Arrhenius himself used the standard of carbon dioxide doubling compared to its baseline level and he also looked at what would happen if carbon dioxide halved compared to the baseline level that the temperature change that would result from that would be pretty significant. In Arrhenius' calculations that turned out to be four or five degrees Celsius, and he hit it almost on the mark. Of course that calculation has been refined since then and there are many many complexities and many debates about the specific sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But I marvel at the fact that well over a century ago, without climate models, without computers available, Arrhenius was able to really hone in and make a brilliant calculation and come up with the basic relationship that every doubling of carbon dioxide would lead to a certain step increase of the temperature on the planet and almost nailed how much that increase would be. Now it turns out that the Earth is pretty complicated. It's not just a solid sphere with a cover of atmosphere. We have a lot of complexity on the planet. We have oceans and atmosphere and very complicated water cycle and many factors that mean that the kinds of calculations that Tyndall and then Arrhenius made are subject to many deep questions. As the atmosphere warms what happens to the water vapor in the atmosphere? What is that feedback mechanism? As carbon dioxide builds in the atmosphere how much of the carbon dioxide gets absorbed in the ocean and thereby is taken out of the atmosphere? These are not just complex details. They determine a lot about the climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide. Now, Arrhenius, being the genius that he was, realized that not only would carbon dioxide change the temperature on the planet, but that humanity would have a largescale effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because by the end of the 19th century, in the age of steam and soon to be the age of automobiles and oil, Arrhenius realized we're burning a lot of the fossil fuels - the coal, oil, and in the 20th century and 21st century natural gas - that we use for our transport, in our heating and cooling, in our industrial processes to make iron and steel, and so many other vital parts of our economy. And Arrhenius said as we continue to burn the fossil fuels we will then change the carbon dioxide measurably and thereby change the mean temperature on the planet according to his calculations. But he didn't quite get it right because he did not anticipate the geometric growth of the world economy. He underestimated how fast the world economy would grow. He underestimated as all of us did how fast China would grow, for example, at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century. And so Arrhenius said it would take about seven hundred fifty years for the carbon dioxide to double from its pre-industrial concentration. Well that wasn't as good as his climate calculations because it turns out that he was writing in
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1896 and best guess for us now is that the carbon dioxide relative to its pre-industrial concentration could double by the year 2050. We're on a path of a period in which it's going to be 150 years from Arrhenius' writing, not seven hundred fifty years, and that is what leads us to the drama our present-day. Now after Arrhenius made these calculations, there ensued decades of complicated debate but one thing has become clear. Arrhenius was right that carbon dioxide would shoot up under human effect and that would warm the planet. This is a figure well-known in the scientific community which shows the ups and downs of carbon dioxide on natural cycles, starting from the left hand side of this graph, 800,000 years ago coming to the present. And what you can see is that from 800,000 years ago to 700,000 years ago and so forth, carbon dioxide fluctuated up and down between a range about 150 and 250 parts per million in the atmosphere, what are called ppm. What is that parts-per-million? It means that in our atmosphere, which is filled with nitrogen and oxygen and just a small amount of carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide molecules only account for right now around 400 molecules for every 1 million molecules in the atmosphere. In other words four hundred parts per million.
Well before the Industrial Revolution, the carbon concentration, or carbon dioxide concentration, was roughly between 150 and 250 parts-per-million, up and down up and down. What was causing these fluctuations? These were fluctuations that were caused by natural changes of the Earth's orbital characteristics around the Sun. But look what happens suddenly just at the very right-hand margin of this grab. Up and down for 800,000 years within a band and then suddenly the graph shoots straight up, just takes of like a rocket. That is humanity putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every time we dig coal out of the ground and burn it. The carbon in the coal combines
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with the oxygen in the atmosphere to produce carbon dioxide and thereby raises the co2 level and when we burn natural gas or petroleum the same phenomenon. So Arrhenius said raise the co2 level will raise the temperature and humanity is on a path of raising the co2 level. And here we have it. We're shooting straight up and so fast that we're creating a massive danger. Well for decades after Arrhenius' findings, there were big debates. Would the water vapor in the atmosphere really be a feedback? What would happen to clouds? Wouldn't the carbon dioxide just be dissolved into the oceans and thereby not create this blanket of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Another great scientist in the nineteen fifties, Roger Revelle, dispelled some of the calm by saying the ocean would not absorb the atmospheric carbon dioxide and Revelle, who is shown here, produced the first integrated assessment of oceans, atmosphere, and climate, and gave the alarm that Arrhenius was right. We can't rely on the oceans to take away the carbon dioxide. We have a problem. Another great scientist, who was a young man, said we better measure the carbon dioxide and we're going to be seeing his measurements which we rely on still, that started in 1958. This is Charles Keeling. He created the best measurements we have of the human-induced changes of carbon dioxide and those measures taken at the top of a mountain in Hawaii, Mauna Loa, give us a record vividly showing that humanity is causing a rise of carbon dioxide.
So start in 1958 and you see the carbon dioxide levels rising year by year. Within the year there's a zigzag because that is the seasonal change of carbon dioxide concentrations when we have spring and summer in the Northern Hemisphere of Earth and the forests fill with the plant life and the leaves and trees are growing and photosynthesis, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed backed into the biosphere and we get a little bit of a downturn in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 Then comes the fall and winter. The leaves fall; they decompose; the carbon dioxide in the leaves enters the atmosphere once again and the cycle turns up. And so there's an annual up and down, up and down, depending on summer, winter in the northern hemisphere, but there is a upward slope that is really the main part of our story. We are burning so much coal, oil, and gas that the carbon dioxide levels are rising, and Arrhenius' warnings need to be taken to heart. Now who told Congress of the United States, 'You better listen and watch nature.' That was my wonderful and brilliant colleague, Dr. James Hansen, who for thirty years was the US government's lead climate scientist. He's recently stepped down from being Director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Professor Hansen is one of the most brilliant scientists I've ever met and one of the bravest also because he tells it as he sees it and he sees it as clearly as anybody can because he knows every aspect of this science.
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And in 1988 he went to the US Congress and for the first time said this is real, this is serious, you better listen. And think about it, 1988 - we are now 26 years later and still don't have an adequate response. But fair warning was given. Professor Hansen, who has lead teams of scientists, putting up satellite measurements, looking at the most sophisticated measures of how the atmospheric chemistry is changing, how the ocean chemistry is changing, how the energy balance of the Earth is changing, has given the warning and he's sounded the alarm for all of the years since then. We're here in part to listen carefully to what he's been telling us. What he's been telling us is what Arrhenius warned about and what Joseph Fourier hypothesized already almost two centuries ago. The Earth is warming. Not only was May 2014 the hottest May in recorded history, but on average temperatures have continued to rise. They have increased now compared to the mean or average temperature on the planet before the start of the Industrial Revolution by almost one degree centigrade. And we're on a path, as we're going to note, not to stop there, not even to stop a two degrees centigrade, but on our current trajectory to reach 3, 4, 5, 6 even more degrees Celsius in the future, if we don't start to heed these warnings. Well another great scientist said we're changing the atmosphere chemistry in so many dangerous ways and we're changing the planet in so many dangerous ways that the entire geology of Earth is creating a new phase of Earth's history. this is Paul Crutzen, one of the great scientists who discovered the ozone depletion effect from the so-called CFC's or chlorofluorocarbons. And Professor Crutzen, another Nobel laureate said all this human impact has brought us to a new geologic epoc, which he is called the anthropocene. The Anthropocene is from the Greek meaning the human induced phase of the planet. Some time scientists say that human change is driving the planet but I call it drunk driving. We don't know the way we're driving the planet. We are changing the planet but we're changing it in a reckless way. That is a pantheon of great scientific leaders, but I do also want you to be introduced to some of the anti- scientists on the planet because as hard as it is for the scientists to uncover the principles of nature we have people of great irresponsibility trying to hide the scientific evidence and they are delaying an appropriate response. One of them, one of the world's leading media magnates, Rupert Murdoch, has used his vast media empire to propagandize against the science. Another, these two brothers, two of the richest people in the world, the Koch brothers - Charles and David Koch – worth a combined 100 billion dollars, are using their vast fortunes to help spread anti-science, anti-climate change science, to call the climate scientists agents of a hoax. They spend a lot of money financing campaigns of politicians who oppose Climate Action. Why do they do this? Well, one reason no doubt is that they own the world's largest private oil company, Koch Industries, and they are contributing massively through their own industrial activities to climate change. And they're funding the anti climate effort. And some of the biggest companies in the world, the oil giants, have not taken a responsible stand. Here's the CEO of Exxon Mobil, a part of our job is to ask them the question, as leader of one of the most powerful companies in the world, a company responsible for the exploration, development, production, and shipping of one of the fossil fuels, petroleum, that is leading to this climate change, what is your company doing to keep us safe? The climate scientists have given us the warning. It's our responsibility to understand the science, and to take heed and to take action before disaster ensues.
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1.3: The UNFCCC UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The climate scientists have been telling us for almost 200 years that the Earth depends on its atmosphere, change the atmosphere chemistry and we're gonna change the climate. Change the atmosphere chemistry a lot, by burning coal, oil, and gas, and we'll change the climate a lot and we'll threaten our own well-being and the well-being even the survival of millions of other species. Well it's taken a long time for that warning to be heard, and it was in recent decades when the climate science became clearer and clearer that humanity at least began to take note. We need to do something. This growing world population and expanding world economy pressing against the planetary boundaries is a threat to human well-being. I want to review how we have gotten to our current circumstance today, a circumstance were the climate risk is understood, where we have a legal framework to do something about it, and yet where we have been unable to take the deep actions that we are going to need to take to head off the grave dangers that we ourselves are causing. An absolutely critical point in that story is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or the UNFCCC. This is the legally binding framework that the world's governments agreed to in 1992 to confront the challenge of human-induced climate change. You'll be reading the UNFCCC - I always wonder if I get the right number of C's in there. There are three of them - the Convention on Climate Change. You'll be reading this document and really I hope marveling at the insight, the precedence, the clarity that this important treaty reflects, but one of the deep questions for us to ponder this semester is why is it that, twenty-two years after adopting the Framework Convention, we feel a bit paralyzed. Here we have an international law. It makes sense. We have a framework for action and yet we have not acted. So now I want to
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understand how we got to that framework, what it has meant, and then we will carry on to understand better what its limitations have been. I think our story in modern times really does start in 1972. It starts for me then. I was a freshman in college. Actually the first book in economics that I was assigned was Limits to Growth, which is a book very much of its time produced by the Club of Rome which said that we would have a collision of the growing world economy on a finite planet. Unfortunately, perhaps typically, many of my economics teachers said 'don't worry so much about that; that's not so realistic.' But the fact of the matter is it too was a precient warning. Well 1972 was the year that the world's governments first came together on an environmental summit to recognize the fact that we have a global scale problem. This was a famous conference on the environment in Stockholm, Sweden. It did get the global environmental movement off the ground. That summit plus Limits to Growth, opened the eyes of the world to the problems that we face all around that planetary boundary circle. Well back in 1979 was the first time that experts got together globally to analyze the climate crisis, which by now was becoming established science, still not quantified, still too early to demonstrate in actual experience in many places, but there was growing evidence that humanity was indeed warming the planet and changing the climate. And 1979 marked the first the world climate conference. In the nineteen eighties, attention shifted to another global planetary boundary and that is the fragile ozone level, the O3 molecules in the stratosphere, and by chance by brilliance of scientists like Paul Crutzen and by chance that Crutzen and other great scientists began to study the problem they realized almost accidentally that some industrial chemicals, the
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chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs which were thought to be safe, inert compounds used for aerosol cans and used as refrigerants would actually not be so inert when they entered the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, and these great scientists realized that these chlorofluorocarbons would dissociate and the chlorine atom in these compounds would actually have an atmospheric chemical effect of destroying ozone. And as the chlorine interacted with the O3 and destroyed the ozone, there would be a decline of the ozone concentrations in the atmosphere. Well the producers of these chlorofluorocarbons, the big companies said that's another hoax science. That's generally what they always say when confronted with the problem. But then NASA used satellite imagery to suddenly show the world we have a big hole in the ozone level over Antarctica and suddenly this chemistry was shown to be real and this change of the atmospheric chemistry quickly led to an agreement called the Montreal Protocol to phase out these chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. I mention this in the context of climate change because it is the vivid example of understanding that human caused change of atmospheric chemistry could threaten humanity and could require us to have a global agreement to stop the human-induced change of atmospheric chemistry. And in this case it worked because the companies that made the chlorofluorocarbons came up with alternatives that were not perfectly safe but we're safer than the CFC's. And they and the United States government and others said okay let's get together and phase out the CFC's. It's a bit of a model, not a perfect one but it's a bit of a precedent for what we need to do now. The only problem is that CFC's, the chlorofluorocarbons, were used in aerosol cans and as refrigerants, whereas fossil fuels - coal, oil, and gas - they're used in everything. The whole world economy depends on them; so phasing them out, we're gonna see, is a much more complicated challenge. Well I think that this realization about the fragility of the atmospheric chemistry and direct scientific linkages indeed between CFCs and greenhouse gases intensified the scientific search for understanding human-induced climate change and a very very important scientific process was created called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC and you're going to be reading the fifth assessment round (AR5) of the IPCC, which is being published during this very year. Now the IPCC is a careful process of the world scientists to assess and summarize for policymakers what is known about human-induced climate change. The IPCC started in 1988. It issued its first assessment round reports in 1990. They were rather striking because they said this is real, it's serious, we need to do something about it. So when the 20th anniversary of the Stockholm conference came around, there was the next global environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro. We know it as the Earth Summit, the 1992 Earth Summit. In many ways it was a glorious occasion. In fact up until now, one would say that it was the very apex of the world environmental movement because world leaders from all over the world assembled in Rio in 1992 to take on several absolutely crucial questions of planetary
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boundaries and the core of those were 3. First, climate change. Building on the IPCC's report. Second, biological diversity. Building on the growing realization that humaninduced climate change, pollution, deforestation, ocean acidification, and other humancaused factors were threatening the survival of other species. And the third, which also was a response to human devastation of droughts in Africa in the 1980's, was the challenge of the spreading deserts in the world as dry land regions became less and less hospitable in many places in the world and that is the challenge of combating desertification.
Well here you see a platform of some of the world leaders who assembled in June 1992 in Rio. And Rio produced three great treaties. It produced the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, it produced the convention on biological diversity, or CBD, and it produced the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. Three really quite remarkable documents. Of course our focus is on the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed in the spring of 1992. It was endorsed at the Rio Earth Summit a couple months after the formal draft had been agreed. And then as is true of UN conventions, it was sent out to member states for ratification and when enough adopted it, it went into force in 1994. Now what is the purpose of the UNFCCC? As you see here the ultimate objective is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere quote, "At a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system." Hmm. What does that mean? First greenhouse gases. I've talked a lot about carbon dioxide, now it's time to let you in on another fact, which of course many have you know. It's not only carbon dioxide. It's not only carbon dioxide and water vapor, which I've mentioned briefly. It's a number of other human-caused chemical changes in the atmosphere that also have the greenhouse or the warning affect. This includes methane; it includes nitrous oxide; and it includes a number of flourine based chemical gases that are used in industry also for refrigerants like the CFC's have been used. So, what the UNFCCC said was because science tells us as the greenhouse gas concentrations rise we warm the planet, and that warming is dangerous, we have to stop the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We have to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in order to prevent dangerous anthropogenic - anthropose: human, genic: caused - and other words dangerous human-caused interference in the climate system. Interestingly they
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didn't say to stop global warming because that's just one part up human-induced climate change.
Climate change includes changes in storm patterns; it includes changes in drought frequency, flood frequency; it includes other changes such as rising ocean levels or changes in the chemistry of the oceans that are also extremely dangerous for humanity. So the UN Framework Convention talks more generally about dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. Now this is a complicated task; indeed our whole semester will be discussing how we can meet this standard. How can we meet it technologically and how can we meet it fairly, especially when the world's countries, world's economies are in such different circumstances. Some are super-rich like the United States using vast amounts of coal, oil, and gas, putting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And others are just as poor as can be where people can't afford an automobile so they don't use petroleum and burn\ petroleum they don't even have access to elect ricity in a gas-fired power generation plant. And so there's some countries that use almost no fossil fuels and yet they suffer the consequences of climate change. Other countries perhaps use vast amounts of fossil fuels and don't have so much direct impact or are able to buffer themselves at least for a while against human induced climate change because they're so rich. And so one of the challenges of the Framework Convention was how to make this fair. How to make the human response fair. How to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in a way that was not only effective, not only efficient in terms of trying to keep the costs of action to the minimum, but also fair in distributing the burdens across the world especially between the rich and poor countries. And as will be seeing in the UNFCC the answer was, 'let the rich countries take the first steps,' and the rich countries in this agreement are called, because of the Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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way that an annex is attached to the document, Annex 1 countries. The Annex 1 countries are basically the rich countries and the post-communist countries of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. And the treaty said, 'you guys go first. Let the poor countries have more time for adjustment. Let the rich countries, which bear the historical responsibility for raising the co2 levels and have the wealth and the technology take the lead.' And the standard that was applied is called CBDR. That's a another one of these acronyms of global diplomacy. Common But Differentiated Responsibilities. Common in that the whole world has to have a responsibility but differentiated because countries differ by their income levels by their circumstances by their vulnerability and by their capacities and therefore their responsibilities also differ. Now this UN Framework Convention also said rich countries would help poor countries to face the challenge of climate change and that countries should give regular reports. It's a hugely important treaty. It was signed by the United States and just about every other country in the world almost immediately after the Earth Summit. The US Senate ratified this treaty in October 1992, just a few months after the Rio Earth Summit. And then what happened? Well then the country that at the time was the number one burner of fossil fuel, the United States, the country that still has the biggest historical responsibility, looking back at which country has most changed the global chemistry, the United States said Uh uh. We're not doing more. The US Senate in a resolution passed in 1997, called the ByrdHagel Resolution, passed by 95 to nothing, said, 'Nope. We don't accept Annex 1 responsibility the way that we actually ratified in this treaty. We won't move until some the developing countries - China very much on the mind of the Senate - moves. And I will just quote. It says, 'The United States should not be a signatory to any protocol or to any other agreement regarding the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 at negotiations in Kyoto or elsewhere, which would mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gases unless the protocol also mandates new specific scheduled commitments for developing country parties.' In other words, the Senate said we don't quite accept this common but differentiated responsibility built into the treaty, where the Annex 1 countries, of which the United States was top of the list, would move first. This Senate said we will only move together with other developing countries. Now what is this language about protocols and Kyoto and so forth. This is very important for us to understand The UNFCCC is a convention. A convention is a treaty but a treaty has to be implemented and in the UN parlance a convention is implemented by a protocol. When it came to ozone, we had a convention called the Vienna Convention. It was implemented by the Montreal Protocol. When it comes to climate change we have a convention, the UN Framework Convention to Combat Climate Change but we need a protocol to implement. And the first attempt at such a protocol was the Kyoto Protocol sign in 1997. You see, after the Framework Convention was adopted, the parties to the Convention would meet every year. These are called the Conference of the Parties or COP. And the Paris negotiations in December 2015 will be the twenty first such meeting or COP21. The first of these meetings was COP1 in Berlin in 1995. The third such meeting was in Kyoto. The idea of the Kyoto COP3 was to adopt a protocol, hence the Kyoto Protocol in which the Annex 1 countries would take responsibility to implement the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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Now the United States signed it but President Clinton, president at the time, never submitted it to the US Senate because the Senate said don't even come close. We're not going to adopt this protocol. And then in 2001 when President George W. Bush became president, President Bush formally took the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, said I'm never going to submit it to the Senate. We're just not going to be party to it. So this is the rather grim start of implementation of the UN Framework Convention signed in 1992, quickly ratified, hailed the world over as the world getting its act together. Three great treaties coming out of the Rio Earth Summit, ratified by the United States Senate, the Framework Convention. By the way to Senate never even ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity, but by 1997 the Senate said no way. The protocol to implement the Convention was adopted. The United States wanted to have nothing to do with it. When we move forward we're going to look at what the Kyoto Protocol did and didn't do and how it has brought us to our current situation.
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1.4: From Kyoto to Copenhagen We're talking about the path to COP21, to the conference of the parties 21st year in Paris in 2015, a bit over a year from now. And I've been recounting the history of the climate change science and the climate change action. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC, was the high water mark, in a way; 1992 Rio Earth Summit world leaders got together; they adopted a solid convention, a solid treaty, which you've read now I hope. And it's a well thought-out treaty. It said let the Annex 1 countries, the high-income world, lead the way to preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. And after the treaty went into force in 1994, the conference of the parties, that is all the countries that are signatories to the convention, began to meet. Berlin was COP1, Kyoto was COP3, and by the third meeting of the parties at the convention it was time to implement a protocol to put the convention into real implementation. This is the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto Protocol is the only protocol that we have agreed for actually implementing the UN Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol was put in place in 1997. And it had a period, a vigilance period, of force till 2012. And it accomplished a little bit but not enough to really change the needle, change the course of the planet as we hurl along towards more and more human-induced climate change. Well remember that the US government as it went off to Kyoto to join in the negotiations at the Kyoto Protocol was given warning by pretty obstreperous US Senate, which in the Byrd- Hagel amendment it voted 95-nothing to say don't you sign that protocol unless the developing country parties are also taking on obligations. But the developing country parties in Kyoto had a rather different view and and I think the right one from the point of view of international law. Certainly they said read the UN Framework Convention. The UN Framework Convention spells out very very clearly that it is the high-income countries, the countries on the list of Annex 1, including the United States and Europe and Japan and the countries of the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe that have to move first. These are the rich countries; they have the technology; they're
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the ones that are putting the carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere; they're the ones that have been doing that for decades; and so the ones that bear the historic responsibility historical responsibility for raising and co2 concentrations in the first place and thereby putting the whole planet at peril. So that was a collision course already in play. What happened at Kyoto? The Kyoto Protocol was adopted, was adopted by the Annex 1 countries and it covers the Annex 1 countries. It says that the high income world will take specific responsibilities to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by the period 2008 to 2012 as a group Annex 1 countries agreed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5 percent compared with the 1990 level. Now here's a problem that we'll be discussing in a bit more detail shortly. You have many greenhouse gases. Six main anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the covered by the Kyoto Protocol. Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide (N3), and flourine based industrial gases. So how can we talk about 5 percent reduction? Does it mean percent of each one or by what metric should this be measured? And here will introduce a concept of the carbon dioxide equivalent of each of these greenhouse gases. By measuring how each greenhouse gas changes the planet, warms the planet, creates a greenhouse effect relative to the effect of the carbon dioxide molecule we're able to take a sumation across the 6 human-induced greenhouse gases to come up with an overall measure, which is called the carbon dioxide equivalent of the six greenhouse gases combined. And what the Annex 1 countries said is that they would reduce the emissions a that aggregate measured as carbon dioxide equivalent by 5 percent compared to the 1990 emission levels of this group of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. I should mention parenthetically, why do I keep saying anthropogenic greenhouse gases or remember human caused greenhouse gases? It's because there's another very very important greenhouse gas. Water, which is not anthropogenic; it's a naturally occurring greenhouse gas; it's affected in its concentration in the atmosphere by human activity because as the atmosphere warms the atmosphere also holds more water and that water vapor has a greenhouse effect but the anthropogenic or human-caused greenhouse gases are the ones that humanity is directly putting into the atmosphere through industrial or other activities. Now in the Kyoto Protocol, each country also took on a specific commitment of reducing its own emissions or increasing it to a limited amount as a national standard, in addition to this group commitment by the annex 1 countries of a five percent reduction. Some countries said will reduce our emissions by six percent or by eight percent. Some were even given some space for a small increase of greenhouse gas emissions because of their particular economic circumstances. So the aggregate had to add up to a five percent overall reduction, and each country took a specific individual commitment. Then the Kyoto Protocol added a number of other features. It was not directed at specific commitments by non annex 1, that is
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developing countries, indeed as the original Framework Convention made clear the first efforts should start with the high-income countries. But the Kyoto Protocol invented particular mechanism, actually set of mechanisms, in this case called the Clean Development Mechanisms, to enable developing countries to join in the action in one way or another by saying we'll take steps to reduce our own emissions voluntarily, we're not bound at this stage by the Protocol or by the Treaty but to reduce those emissions voluntarily if someone will help us pay to do that and by the rules of the game, countries that had their own binding limits were able to perhaps exceed the limits in their own domestic emissions by engaging emissions reduction through a Clean Development Mechanism in developing countries. In other words the idea was a fairly complicated and indeed it became a pretty complicated set of mechanisms, not happily successful set of mechanisms, to link developing countries in through a voluntary but supervised approved set of means to enable rich countries to meet some of their obligations by undertaking emissions reduction projects in developing countries. Well what can we say about the outcomes the Kyoto Protocol. Fairly complicated. The one thing we can surely say is that the Kyoto Protocol did not succeed in changing fundamentally the direction of Earth as a whole, humanity as a whole, in heading towards massive climate damage. Interestingly the Annex 1 countries as a group, as a group, did meet 25 percent reduction. This happened in part because of actions that some of these countries took. It happened in part because of a big recession that hit the world in 2008 thereby reducing industrial activity and burning of fossil fuels. That happened in part because in the post-communist, socalled transition era, in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, there was a very big drop of emissions in many countries as those countries experienced a massive transformation from the very heavy industrialization of the Soviet era. So as a group the Annex 1 countries did get the emissions down by a little bit above the five percent threshold but the fact of the matter is many countries never lived up to the Kyoto Protocol. First on the list - my own country, the United States, not only did it not live up to the Kyoto Protocol, it never ratified the Kyoto Protocol. As I have mentioned President Clinton didn't send it to the Senate. President Bush took the United States out entirely said forget it we're not even gonna try. And several other major fossil fuel producing and using countries that were signatories to the Kyoto Protocol all along basically just threw them off and ended up not taking them very seriously at all. I would mention in this list two very important countries. They're big, advanced, technologically sophisticated and major producers of fossil fuels. These are Canada and Australia. Canada discovered how to use its vast heavy oil in Western Canada in the province of Alberta to produce petroleum for world markets. Saw riches before its eyes and said were not really going to meet Kyoto Protocol. Australia is one of the great coal producing countries of the world, and coal exporting
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countries in the world. Australia had a minerals boom over the last twenty years. It's become a major provider of coal for the rapidly-growing Chinese economy and Australia also said it can't meet the conditions and basically failed to honor the Kyoto Protocol. This graphic shows in red many of the countries that fell short of what they had promised to do back in 1997 and many of the countries in blue that outperformed the reduction of greenhouse gases that they had promised in 1997. A mixed bag. Some countries acted, other countries did not. In the aggregate, partly because of action and partly because economic circumstance the Annex 1 countries slightly reduced their emissions relative to 1990 as Kyoto called. But some failed. The United States a did not take action, even though in the end it has had a modest reduction of emissions by now partly because of economic circumstances. But one can say the following overall point about the Kyoto Protocol: whether the Annex 1 countries did or didn't, came close, fell behind from their specific commitments, the world as a whole has continued to have a very very strong overall increase of carbon dioxide emissions and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, that means adding in co2, nitrous oxide, methane and the flourine-based industrial gases. That has not slowed. Why is that? That's because in fact while the Annex 1 countries were the dominant users of fossil fuels up to UN Framework Convention and are still the rich countries in the world with the highest per person emissions of greenhouse gases the fact of the matter is that the non-annex one countries, the developing countries, experienced a surge of energy use, surge of economic development, and therefore a surge greenhouse gas emissions after 1997. When you add in the non-annex 1 country emissions with the annex 1 country emissions, boy we have missed the point. In a sense you could say that the US Senate had a little bit of a point saying, well the developing countries are gonna have to do something. But they didn't have a moral or legal sense at all. The Annex 1 countries were right to say that the world had promised let the industrial world start this effort. What's clear though is that arithmetically, when you look at the massive growth China, the other emerging middle income economies, the overall growth of the developing countries as a whole, the massive increase in fossil fuel use the in the developing countries the Kyoto Protocol did not really change the direction of the world. In terms of the upward march year by year, of more and more emissions of greenhouse gases, and therefore a trajectory of very very dangerous climate change. Nothing like the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. Now this realization was more and more apparent in the early years. The previous decade, of course the withdrawal the US from the Kyoto
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Protocol was a shock, the rise of China and the world economy was an economic miracle, a great economic success, and also an amazement for the world. The fact that China is a coal-burning economy was becoming such a major emitter of carbon dioxide was also a wake-up call to a need to do more. And from Kyoto through each of the COP meetings Kyoto being COP3 and and onward, the realization came - we're going to need a new approach. And in any event the Kyoto Protocol was set to end in 2012. So when it came to the 15th of these meetings COP15 in Copenhagen, with President Obama newly-elected promising action, with the realization that the Kyoto Protocol was nearing its expiration, with China having entered the ranks of one of the world's most important economies and having overtaken the United States as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases, the eyes were put on COP15 in Copenhagen. This is the time. We need to make a change and COP15 in Copenhagen was the great hope in 2009 that a new approach and a new breakthrough would be met. Indeed it was the greatest gathering of world leaders on Climate Change really since the Rio Earth Summit. 115 heads of state and government came to Copenhagen. President Obama is newly elected, the highly popular US President was there, the chinese leadership, the world's leaders assembled and this was going to be the place to make the breakthrough. The hope was that there would be an agreement in which both the Annex 1 and the non-Annex 1 countries jointly would commit to real action, that we would be able to take a step of realism in which there would be an effective and fair allocation of responsibilities and a new approach would be made. And it was at that point recognized that the world could actually define, based on the science, at least a limit that we must not surpass in global warming. That was the idea that many scientists had put forward, that the European Union was championing, that a two degree celsius increase of temperature would be extremely dangerous to exceed and two degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit was put as the limit. Do not cross this boundary! To go beyond the two-degree Celsius limit was rightly recognized as extraordinarily dangerous and as we'll be discussing in the future lectures. So Copenhagen: here's the big hope. A two degree C limit; a universal agreement; financing of specific amounts, indeed a hundred billion dollars a year for developing countries from developed countries by the year 2022 to enable the developing countries both to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the ongoing climate change. Big hopes. Great drama. Last-minute negotiations. And it wasn't to be. The leaders just couldn't reach an agreement. They made some declarations. They made some notable announcements the two degrees Celsius limit, the hundred billion dollars a year - but they couldn't agree and it was a huge emotional deflation. A huge political deflation. Kyoto hadn't worked. Copenhagen would be it. Copenhagen collapsed and in a way we're still picking up the pieces. It is from Copenhagen to Paris now that we put our great hopes and we resolve, all the world leaders are resolved, don't have the Copenhagen experience again in Paris in 2015 at COP21. Let's find a path to real success.
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1.5: Towards COP21 We're aiming towards COP21 in Paris in December 2015. And last lecture we left the damsel in distress on the railroad tracks. Copenhagen had not succeeded in reaching a binding new framework, a clear legal protocol to follow up Kyoto. The conferees at COP15 in Copenhagen did make a political declaration. They said we're not giving up, we're agreeing climate change is real, that we need to focus on limiting the humaninduced increase in the Earth's temperature and all the other consequences of climate change that accompany that. We need to keep working. But they didn't reach the kind of agreement that they really had hoped to reach. There was some statements by governments in the Copenhagen Declaration - here's what we'll do. But those statements just didn't add up to the scale of change that's needed to head off the great dangers for the world. So here we are COP15 and the world since 2009 has been trying to pick up the pieces and really in a way dust ourselves off and say okay, we are going to reach an agreement and the determination has put the eyes on 2015 as the date when a new protocol, a new agreement will be reached. It will take some time to go into force so we're really looking at an agreement in 2015 that will be ratified by member states by 2018, go into force and become really operational in 2020. Where do we stand? What has happened since Copenhagen? Well Copenhagen did set some very important markers. Copenhagen was the place where the limit of two degrees Celsius remember 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit was set based on the underlying science that said that is a limit we dare not exceed If we do exceed that, as we're going to be discussing, in future lectures, we face really grave risks and alas we're on a trajectory not only to exceed two degrees celsius but even 3, 4, 5 degrees Celsius if we don't change course. So Copenhagen did get that 2 degrees C limit in there. Copenhagen was also very important for establishing the idea that rich countries are gonna pay a meaningful amount to help poor countries to take on both the
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challenge of mitigating, that is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as adapting to the climate change that's underway. Now the year after Copenhagen, governments met in Cancun, and in Mexico at COP16 the governments really strengthened and solidified the commitment to the 2 degrees Celsius limit. That's our limit. We have to find a way to keep the increase of the mean temperature compared to its preindustrial temperature, that is compared to a couple centuries ago, below a 2 degrees Celsius increase and because many countries said even 2 degrees Celsius is too much. We should review all the scientific evidence and ask ourselves the question maybe we shouldn't even dare to go up to two degrees Celsius. Maybe we should be stopping at an even tighter limit, say one and a half degrees Celsius. This is certainly what the small island developing states are saying because they are saying we're gonna disappear under the waves if the sea level rises so much. We can't even afford a two-degree Celsius limit. Now at COP17 in Durban an even more consequential and clear decision on timing was taken. That's when the world's government said okay 2015. No joke. That's it. We must reach a serious agreement. Let's get everything in place and this is an agreement that's going to move beyond the Kyoto Protocol; it's going to involve all countries not only the Annex 1 countries. Of course, the non Annex 1 countries, the developing countries are saying, and rightly so, that doesn't mean we're all on even par. The rich countries have more capacity, more money, more technology, more historical responsibility; so they still have to do more, in other words the developing countries are saying we still need to adhere to a standard of or like common but differentiated responsibilities. This is all still to be negotiated. How the relati ve burdens will be shared. But the idea is agreed that we need a universal agreement to be reached and Durban in COP17 in 2011 said that. In Doha, at COP18 the following year, 2012, the specific work streams on how to reach that agreement at COP21 in Paris were set even more clearly and the following year in Warsaw in COP19, several specific important areas were discussed. One for example is based on the recognition that deforestation not only is damaging in its own right, destroying the habitat of other species in highly biodiverse environments, threatening viability of rainforests - say the Amazon or the Congo Basin or the Indonesian archipelago - but when the rainforest is cut down or any forest is cut down, carbon dioxide is released into the air and that's adding to the greenhouse effect like the burning of fossil fuels. And so the governments have increasingly
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recognized that storing carbon dioxide biologically, by preventing deforestation or supporting reforestation is crucial and in Warsaw in COP19, important agreements were reached around what's called REDD+, we'll be discussing that in a bit more detail, to really strengthen the biological storage of carbon in vegetation and in the forests. Agreements were reached in more detail on what's called monitoring reporting and verification so that we know what's actually happening, who is releasing carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide flourine-based gases. We need to be able to monitor; we need a realistic and accurate reporting; we need to be able to verify the actual emissions if we're going to have a meaningful, enforceable framework. And in Warsaw also a major push was made and it was shocking because Warsaw took place just as Typhoon Haiyan was slamming the Philippines. killing many many people the the losses and damage being experienced by poor countries needed compensation. Here are poor countries experiencing massive losses from human induced climate change that they've had almost nothing to do with, and yet they're experiencing huge storms, rising sea levels, flood surges droughts, famine, and there has been no reliable way to get help. So they're saying don't call that aid, call that compensation for losses for damages and in principle that too was agreed in Warsaw. Now eyes are pointed on Lima, where on December 1 (2014) the draft of a new agreement, the one to be adopted in Paris a year later, will be tabled. December 1 is our date, and this course, I hope, will prepare us all to look at December 1 and say, hmm. What about this? What about that?' To have the basis for analyzing that and for negotiating a global online agreement as global citizens in the second semester of this course, beginning early in 2015. And so we're aiming towards COP20 in Lima in December as the place where the new draft agreement will be put. Now what do we want in that draft agreement? Of course fundamentally it is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at levels to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system, just as the treaty as the Framework Convention Center back in 1992 and continues to apply. What does that mean? Well here I think it's helpful and here we'll start what will be our long and deep investigation of the actual path of greenhouse gas emissions and especially of carbon dioxide emissions, the path that we're on and the path that we need in order to be able to honor the 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit limit. The path that we're on is the dotted black line that you see in the left. The vertical axis measures the tons of carbon in billions of tons that are being emitted worldwide through energy use and other industrial processes. You see that as of 2014 that reaches about 10 billion tons of carbon being released. The business as usual path is
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more or less that top red curve. This is one of the scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and you see that the business as usual path would have emissions continuing to rise as the world economy continues to grow, as China becomes an even bigger economy, as India experiences rapid growth, as Africa escapes from poverty - all wonderful things if we continue with the technologies that we have right now there will be more oil, coal, and natural gas burned, more CO2 released into the atmosphere, probably more rainforest chopped down, releasing carbon dioxide through land use change, more other greenhouse gases also being emitted, though they're not shown in this particular graph and we would have an upward curve and what would that upward curve suggest?
Well run those emissions through our best climate science and we're not at a 2 degree centigrade limit. We're at four degrees increase, six degrees even. There's a range of uncertainty but we're way way way beyond safety on the business as usual path. Well how could we get on a business as usual path? Really we have to stabilize the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that means we have to get down to 0 net emissions this century, We have to bed the curve rather than the curve continuing to rise. We need the lower curve shown in blue of the curve bending and then coming down and hitting 0 on the vertical axis somewhere perhaps around year 2070, and if you look at that graph, it says that by the middle of this century, we have to be less than half of the 10 billion tons of carbon that we're emitting today, maybe somewhere around four billion tons of carbon by 2050 and then down to around 0 net emissions by 2070 or 2080. Now it's the whole purpose of this course in the detail to understand how could we turn that curve down? How could we take carbon emissions out of the energy system? How could we experience, achieve a deep decarbonization of the world economy. That's what it means to turn that curve down, to deeply decarbonize the world economy, even to reach 0 towards the end of this century. Now one footnote important to understand sometimes you'll see a graph or a table measured in terms up carbon emissions, sometimes you'll see a graph or table measured in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. You ought to be able to move flexibly between those two. Now the point is that there's an easy translation. If we're putting a ton of carbon into the atmosphere,
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we're putting more than a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because we're putting that carbon in the ton of carbon plus the weight of the oxygen, the two atoms of oxygen, that go along with every atom of the carbon. So carbon dioxide per atom of carbon weighs more than than carbon alone. That's obvious and chemistry reminds us how to make that translation of the weight of carbon dioxide relative to the weight of carbon. The atomic weight of carbon is 12, check back on the periodic table from your chemistry class and the weight of an atom of oxygen is sixteen so the weight of two atoms of oxygen is 32. Add the weight of the oxygen to the weight of the carbon the weight of carbon dioxide is therefore 44. If we add 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere we're emitting ten times the ratio 44:12 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So let's do the arithmetic. 44/12ths, the ratio the weight of CO1 to carbon, is 3.6666… or 3.667 let's say and that means that if we are emitting 10 billion tons of carbon, that would be the same as a emitting 36.67 (billion) tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I want you to be very flexible on the two because you'll otherwise be confused. When we go back and look at this graph, this is a graph of carbon but were often going to be referring to carbon dioxide emissions. But the point either way is the same. We need to bend the curve of emissions rather than a business as usual path which could take us to forty, fifty, even sixty billion tons of CO2 emitted per year compared to the roughly 36 billion tons now. We need to get down to maybe 12 or 15 billion tons of carbon dioxide by the middle of the century and down to 0 by 2070 or 2080. That's the goal. That's the commitment. It ain't easy. It is not easy at all. Deep decarbonisation is massive challenge and we're going to have to find technologically meaningful, sophisticated, economically sensible pathways to it. That's what we're after. Now will we reach an agreement in time? Will COP21 prove to be the breakthrough for universal meaningful agreement that really turns the curve of carbon dioxide emissions down sharply. Let's be aware as we enter that discussion seriously of the obstacles. Many countries are not paying so much attention. They want to find and they want to burn more fossil fuels. That's their economic base and we're living in a period of a boom of some kinds of fossil fuel discovery and production. In the United States we have the shale gas boom. In other places the deep sea oil. In other geologic formations, what's called tight oil, that otherwise could not be pumped through traditional means now can be extracted. And so there's a hydrocarbons boom and a lot of money behind it that's saying don't stop our carbon emissions. Let's go for even more discovery and development of our fossil fuels. There's not high trust among the major countries.
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Poor countries say rich countries make promises that they don't live up to. Rich countries say the poor countries they're stealing our industry. There are so many charges and counter-charges that the level of trust required for a deep agreement is something that we're going to have to build actively and consciously over the coming year. There are many exit ramps, I would say, for politicians who want a good photo opportunity but not the very heavy responsibility of turning that emissions curve downward as deeply as possible. Some politicians say let's make an agreement to 2025, just a short term agreement; let's not look too far into the future. And they want to do the easy things, the low-hanging fruit not the deep decarbonization pathways that are gonna be really required to get down to net 0 in the second half of the 21st century. Many countries say, not now, we don't want to think about this. You know low-carbon energy systems are likely to be more expensive. Okay yes it's true, we will wreck the planet but right now our priority is our budget. Our priority is unemployment. Our priority is starting growth. Don't bother us about the long term. We have short-term political problems. Politicians today, they're not going to be facing an election in the year 2050, they may be facing an election in the year 2016. And so how do we make a negotiating process face the long-term realities of the planet even when the incentives facing the negotiators may be very very much short term. And finally we have a simple fact that absolutely needs to be emphasized but you're gonna face it whether we emphasize it or not in the coming weeks, this is not an easy process technologically. You see, ever since James Watt brought the first really effective steam engine to the market in 1776 the world economy has developed with fossil fuels. In a way you have to love coal. It brought us the modern world. Oil brought us modern transportation, brought us the possibilities of aviation. Natural gas brings us a massive increase of access to electricity and I can tell you as I work in places that don't have access to electricity because they're so poor you don't want to go there because without electricity there is no modern life. Without electricity there is desperate disease that can't be brought under control, hunger, food that can't be properly stored. Modern energy is a vital need for society. We want the world economy to continue to grow. We want poor countries to develop. They will need to use more energy and therefore the technological challenge of recognizing the reality of a world economy that has developed for more than two centuries on the basis of fossil fuels, that wants to develop more energy resources to enable the poor to escape the trap of poverty, that wants to help promote economic development and improvements of material conditions, but also to decarbonize the energy system is a first order technological, systems, economic, social, and political challenge. It's hard, its complex, it's the topic of the lectures to come.
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2. The Basics of Climate Change Science
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2.1: The Earth’s Energy Balance We will be talking about the basics of climate science. We need to build on these basics in order to understand our choices about deep decarbonisation and other actions related to other greenhouse gases in order to understand why, how, when, at what pace we should be reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in order to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases at safe levels. What's safe? What's the relationship between the greenhouse gases and climate? That's the purpose of lecture 2: to give us an introduction to this very rich, very sophisticated a hundred ninety years of science, and in the first chapter I'm going to talk about the Earth's energy balance. This goes back as we've already noted about a hundred ninety years to Joseph Fourier who first realized that the Earth's average temperature would be determined by a kind of balance or equilibrium between the incoming energy of solar radiation and the outgoing energy that the earth radiates back to space. That's when the Earth's temperature is at a level such that the incoming radiation and the outgoing radiation are in balance. That we have an equilibrium, a place of stationary temperature for the Earth and understanding how greenhouse gases affect that balance has been the core of climate science since Fourier's very creative understanding of this process since the 1820. This diagram that you're looking at shows in very simple, schematic terms this global energy balance. At the center of the graph is the center of the whole issue and that is that the Earth receives radiation from the sun, that the radiation from the sun warms the planet. If we look at the amount of radiation at the top of the Earth's atmosphere that's determined by the distance of Earth from the Sun and from the sun's energy in radiative flux and we can measure that just as we do with our lightbulbs in watts: that's a unit of power and watts per area or watts per meter squared is the standard unit that scientists use to measure the incoming solar radiation and what you can see
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from this diagram is that on average given the solar constant output we have an average amount of about 341 watts per meter squared at the top up the atmosphere. Now as this incoming sunlight comes in, that's mainly how we experience this electromagnetic radiation is sunlight, that is radiation at a certain frequency much of which is within the visible range, part of that is immediately reflected, the part that you see towards the left hand side bouncing off clouds back up into space Another part of the incoming solar radiation is reflected by the surface of the Earth. When the sunshine comes in and hits an ice sheet, say the Greenland ice sheet, or hits sea ice floating in the North Atlantic and and the sunshine just radiates, is reflected in re-radiates back out into space that is reflected on the left hand side. But of course a certain amount of the radiation doesn't bounce off the clouds back into space and doesn't bounce off of the earth's surface but is absorbed by Earth and warms the planet. And the basic idea is that any body, including the body of planet Earth, when it has a certain temperature itself radiates energy. This is a basic fact of physics This is a basic fact of physics and the basic study of it is called the study of blackbody radiation and in fact the Earth absorbs radiation from the sun. You see that from the center to the left of the diagram but then it radiates energy back into space, and one of the most interesting and basic facts of all of this is that the incoming radiation is in the form of visible light or ultraviolent radiation, UV radiation, and that is relatively short wavelength, high-frequency radiation, and the radiation that the earth itself causes by it being a warm body is a bit longer wavelength called infrared radiation. So the incoming arrows are visible sunshine for example and the outgoing radiation on the righthand side of the diagram is infrared radiation. That's gonna play a very very key role in our understanding of climate and the greenhouse gas affect because the basic idea is that the greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, some industrial chemicals) are basically transparent to the incoming solar radiation, they allow it to come in, but they are not quite so transparent to the outgoing infrared radiation from Earth itself, the longer wavelength. In fact, they absorb that infrared radiation in part, and it's that absorption of the Earth's own infrared radiation that traps energy that otherwise would go out to space.
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It traps energy and creates a kind a blanket or the greenhouse effect if you will that makes Earth warmer than it otherwise would be. You see that in this simple diagram by the fact that we have surface radiation aiming back towards space and then you see that some of that circles back after it hits the greenhouse gases in terms of what's in this diagram call the back radiation towards the plane. Now in balance or in equilibrium the Earth's temperature is determined such that the arrows coming in equal the arrows going out, and if we were to have no greenhouse gas in the atmosphere if we were a a planet without an atmosphere, if we were like the moon, then there would be only radiation going back out in space, none of that back radiation going from the greenhouse gases back to earth, and the balance would be reached at a relatively low temperature of the planet. Indeed, the temperature would be roughly 33 degrees Celsius lower than it actually is on the planet. The actual temperature of Earth on average is about 14 degrees Celsius. If we didn't have the greenhouse gas cover we would be roughly 18 degrees minus, negative 18 degrees Celsius, instead of the actual 14 degrees Celsius that we have, and that is the difference of having a greenhouse effect that traps some of the outgoing infrared radiation and not having an atmosphere with that greenhouse effect that would just allow the radiation to go back into space directly. Now this diagram's filled with all sorts of complications and this is why be underlying science of the greenhouse effect has many challenges How much of the incoming radiation actually reflects back to space? That depends on cloud cover, that depends on the surface of the earth, how much is ice for example, how reflective is the Earth's surface, what's called the albedo of the Earth. If ice melts then what used to be reflected back into space of the solar radiation now gets absorbed and you get a kind of feedback effect where a warming up the planet melts the ice, reduces the reflectance of the incoming radiation, increases the absorption of the incoming radiation, and further warms the planet. And many other dynamic effects are present here meaning that your simple simplest calculations can't quite do the job telling us precisely how an added level love greenhouse gas is going to change the radiative balance and thereby change the equilibrium temperature but this simple illustration is very very helpful in explaining the basic greenhouse effect. Now to move one step more deeply, it's important to understand this specificity of what makes a greenhouse gas and that is shown by what's called a radiation spectrum of both the incoming radiation and some of the absorption of that spectrum. Light comes to Earth from the Sun or electromagnetic radiation comes to Earth across different wavelengths and so we go from very very short wavelengths on the left handside of the spectrum to very long wavelengths on the righthand side from ultraviolet towards the left hand side of the electromagnetic spectrum towards infrared and long wavelengths
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on the righthand side of the spectrum, and the amount of energy that is in the solar radiation is shown essentially by this spectrum of the sunlight and it's that dark line which shows the radiation spectrum. How much of irradiance, how many watts per meter squared is coming at each wavelength of solar radiation. You can see that the peak of that radiation is in what's called the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible because that's what we see that's the light we see. We don't perceive ultraviolet or infrared, that's outside of the visible range for human beings, not for some animals but for us, and so most of the energy, most of the watts per meter squared of the incoming solar radiation is in the visible range. Not so for the outgoing radiation from the planet, and this is a part of physics that comes from that theory of blackbody radiation called the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. It basically says that a very hot object like the sun will have more irradiance at the high frequency or low-wavelenth end of the spectrum whereas a cooler body like the Earth will have more radiation at the long-wavelength or infared part the spectrum. So since Earth is a lot cooler than the Sun, we radiate at the righthand side of the spectrum. Now why does that matter? It matters because certain compounds, these are the greenhouse gases, absorb infrared radiation. That's part of their chemistry, part of their quantum physics. The compounds that absorb radiation all have more than two atoms so O2 or N2, oxygen as it is in the atmosphere or nitrogen, dinitrogen, as it is in the atmosphere, is not a greenhouse gas. To be a greenhouse gas you need to be 3 atoms or more. That allows the atoms to jiggle in particular ways and to absorb the infrared radiation So CO2 was three atoms, 1 carbon, 2 oxygen atoms. Nitrous oxide, N2O, methane which is 5 atoms, carbon and 4 hydrogen atoms all have configurations in their bonding that allows them to or makes them absorb infrared radiation and by absorbing the infrared radiation, they absorb the energy that otherwise would radiate to space. They warm the planet and so one can see shown in this diagram, the so-called absorption bands of carbon dioxide and water. They're to the right hand side of this figure. What does that mean? They absorb longer wavelength electromagnetic radiation, the kind that Earth radiates, they don't absorb the kind of radiation coming. The long and the short of it, they are transparent to the visible sunlight that we see when we go out on a sunny day but they absorb the infrared that we don't see that the Earth is re-radiating as a warm body at an average of 18 degrees Centigrade and it is
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precisely the absorption of the infrared radiation that keeps the planet at the average of about fourteen degrees Celsius rather than the minus 18 degrees Celsius that would prevail if we didn't have the greenhouse effect. And what we know is what Arrhenius told us back in 1896 and that is that as we increase the concentration of carbon dioxide or methane or nitrous oxide or other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere we're going to get a warming. We can measure the temperature, you have to do it very carefully in weather stations all over the world, my colleagues at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, NASA's leading scientific outfit for measuring the Earth's mean temperature and one of the major enterprises in the whole world for this has produced very very careful data on changes of Earth's temperature that's illustrated by this graph. Now in this particular graph, the 0 line is the Earth's average temperature for the years 1951 to 1980 and what you can see is that by our period by the years after 2010 or so, we're at about .6 of 1 degree Celsius or about one degree Fahrenheit warmer than the average of 1951 to 1980, and you can see from this upward slope that the Earth is warming warming. It's not warming every year, there's a lot of variability. In fact there are even episodes, look at graph from around 1940 to around 1980, where there wasn't a lot of warming and that raises a lot of questions CO2 and other greenhouse gases were rising but the temperature wasn't rising all that much so that poses a question of what else is happening but the general direction is unmistakable and it instead of taking an average of 1951 to 1980, we took the average temperature before the whole industrial revolution started we would see that we're close to a one degree Celsius increase of temperature now, about .9 of one degree Centigrade and this is of course the upward slope that is so frightening because it's already disrupting the planet and it will cause a lot more disruption. Now let's turn in more detail to the specific greenhouse gases that are responsible for this human-induced change. That will be the topic of the next lecture.
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2.2: The Greenhouse Gases and Feedbacks I am going to talk in this chapter in more detail about the individual greenhouse gases and some of the other forcings or human-induced as well as natural-induced changes of earth's climate. It's been recognized and, as I discussed in the previous chapter, that several different compounds--carbon dioxide being the most important, but several other compounds all three atoms or more because of this infrared trapping property play a role in the Greenhouse Effect, and when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was introduced and then the Kyoto Protocol, the focus was on the so-called anthropogenic, well-mixed greenhouse gases. These are greenhouse gases that are caused by human activity, so not water vapor which is a huge greenhouse gas but not directly caused by human activity, and a kind of gas that mixes in the atmosphere. that's extremely important also to understand when carbon dioxide is emitted from a power plant in China or in New York State or in South Africa or in Indonesia within about a month the carbon dioxide that is emitted from any of those particular sites is pretty much uniformly distributed in the whole world. In other words, the atmosphere is well mixed. The carbon dioxide that I'm inhaling right now or exhaling isn't going to be specific to New York City where I'm speaking right now; it's going to have an effect on the global carbon dioxide concentration in a uniform way. We could add as a footnote that if each place on the world emitted its own greenhouse gases that have stayed there over their own heads and their own responsibility in their own local climate, we'd probably reach a resolution of this crisis a lot more quickly because a place that was experiencing warming or climate disruption would say look what we're doing to ourselves, but since when we emit carbon dioxide or methane or nitrous oxide has effects globally, we don't pay so much attention to our local actions causing global effects spilling over all over the world.
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Well, the Kyoto Protocol identified these well-mixed anthropogenic greenhouse gases and the focus has been on the major 6 which are shown in this table. Carbon dioxide, the most important of all, and it will be our focus through most of this course because it's so important, it is so long-lasting in its effect, it is so deeply part of the world economy because the core of these anthropogenic emissions are from our use of fossil fuels for use of modern energy that it is appropriate to call the whole challenge decarbonization, but you can see there are other very important greenhouse gases as well. Methane or CH4 is emitted by human activity in the atmosphere in many ways that we'll discuss these briefly: in agriculture, in landfills, in escaped methane from natural gas pipelines as gases piped to our cities, and into kitchens in many parts of the world. Nitrous oxide is another greenhouse gas that comes from ways that we burn fossil fuel that comes from fertilizer use of nitrogen-based fertilizers that comes from other industrial processes, and then there are these long complicated so-called "F gases" fluorine-based gases: the hydrofluorocarbons or HFCS the perfluorocarbons or PFCs and sulphur hexafluoride or SF6. These are also very potent greenhouse gases. Fortunately, they're used in such limited amount that they're still quite small part of the overall anthropogenic process. Now, in order to aggregate across the six anthropogenic greenhouse gases, we have to ask the question how powerful are they in their greenhouse effect, how much of that infrared radiation emitted from the earth does each molecule of these 6 gases absorb and by comparing that absorption of infrared radiation by these different gases we can give a weighting to the different gases in terms of their overall greenhouse effect. Everything is scored relative to carbon dioxide, and so we want to understand the greenhouse effect of each gas relative to carbon dioxide so carbon dioxide is given a warming potential of one that you can see in the middle column top row of this table. Then, each of the other gases molecule for molecule has even a more powerful warming effect than a molecule of CO2; methane 23 times molecule for molecule taken on a hundred-year timescale more greenhouse warming than carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide, you see in the table, 296 times more powerful. Perfluorocarbons 5,500 times more powerful, so why is CO2 so important because there's so much human emission of carbon dioxide compared to the others that even adjusting for the per-molecule warming potential taking the number of molecules that humanity is emitting of each kind of greenhouse gas multiplying it by the warming potential per molecule, CO2 comes out way ahead and that you can see in the final column this is for the year 2000 and of course it keeps changing as the relative proportions of emissions change but in the year 2000, carbon dioxide accounted for about 77 percent of the human-induced greenhouse effect of missions that year. Methane number two 14 percent, nitrous oxide number three and the sum total of the fluorine-based gases under 2 percent, so that's the summation; that's why
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decarbonization is number one three-quarters of the total effect but there's another factor that's also extremely important to keep in mind, and that is that when we put these molecules into the atmosphere through human activity whether it's burning coal, oil, and gas or whether it is farming in a way that emits methane from a rice paddy or from livestock that are being grown for meat production whatever it is that molecule in the atmosphere has a certain lifetime expectancy of being in the atmosphere before it is reabsorbed onto the earth or into the oceans. Part of the carbon dioxide that is emitted each year is immediately absorbed by the ocean, part goes into the photosynthesis on the planet and is stored biologically rather than staying in the atmosphere, but the fact of the matter is that when carbon dioxide molecules enter the atmosphere at least a lot of that input of CO2 into the atmosphere is gonna stay there for a long time. In this chart, it says five to two hundred years but the fact of the matter is a certain fraction of that carbon dioxide is gonna stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years maybe 20 percent in total of the co2 in the atmosphere will stay for hundreds or thousands of years--what's called the residence time in the atmosphere will be very very long what we're doing to change the atmospheric composition is not going to be reversed very quickly. On the other hand when methane is put into the atmosphere the residence time for methane is very short through chemical and physical processes the residence time methane in the atmosphere is much much smaller than for carbon dioxide, which means that if we control the methane emissions, the methane that we have historically emitted into the atmosphere isn't gonna stay there for decades or centuries like carbon dioxide it's going to fall much more quickly so when we think about the role of each of these greenhouse gases, we need to think about the molecule for molecule warming potential, the total amount of the molecules that human activity is putting into the atmosphere and the residence time of those molecules in the atmosphere we need all three of those dimensions to shape an appropriate response. It's even worse because of course the greenhouse gases are not the only changes caused by humanity that affect the climate and on top of the human-induced effects there are multiple feedbacks and multiple natural forcings as well. No one said this is easy and no one said that it's an absolute simple matter so when we look at the total net radiative effect of all these greenhouse gases and other chemicals that humanity's putting into the atmosphere and other effects of humanity on the climate system were led to a rather complicated chart of the kind that you are looking at right now. Now what this is is an attempt to add up across not only the greenhouse gases but other kinds of factors that changed the net radiative balance of the planet the watts per meter squared of net radiation that determines the earth's eventual balance in temperature. At the top of this chart are the long-lived, well-mixed anthropogenic greenhouse gases, and the biggest bar in red that means warming, net radiative warming, of the planet is CO2.
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That's what is our main focus. Then, as you see in the next bar not as important as CO2 roughly 1/4 of the total CO2 effect are the other greenhouse gases: methane, nitrous oxide and the fluorine-based gases or here called Halocarbons. Then there is an ozone effect which is a kind of feedback because many of our chemical processes change the composition of ozone in the troposphere--that's the lower atmosphere-- and in the stratosphere--that's the upper atmosphere. On balance as ozone increases for example in the troposphere through various chemical effects and warming itself you get another bit of radiative forcing to warm the planet that's the third red bar that you see not as important as carbon dioxide or the other greenhouse gases but still a major warming effect. Well, you can go down category by category. Let me draw your attention to surface albedo that remember is the reflectance of the earth's surface. If you have forests, they absorb a lot of sunlight; clear the forest, you get more reflection of the sunlight not absorption. The sunshine comes in, goes straight out to space and doesn't get absorbed as much as if you have forest cover so as humanity changes the surface of the earth: ice, forests, cities and so forth we changed the reflectance or the albedo of the earth. The net effect of that is mixed. Land use change has been having a net cooling or negative radiance effect Some kinds of surface changes such as pollution which makes the ice darker because soot falls on the ice means that what normally would be reflected is absorbed by the ice so you see a little bit here called black carbon on snow meaning that even the snow was not reflecting because it's a it has this pollution on it and it absorbs more of the radiation. Then comes a major category called aerosols. Aerosols are a set of small particles also partly driven by nature such as a volcanic eruption which huge amounts and of sulfates into the stratosphere or by human activity when we burn coal and coal has sulfur pollutants and we put sulfates into the atmosphere and these sulfates are tiny little particles which we call aerosols. They are often disastrous for you in health when you have those huge smog attacks in Beijing Beijing or in Indian cities in recent years. That's aerosol pollution. Now, there are many many kinds of aerosols, unfortunately. There are so called white aerosols like sulfates, there are black aerosols like soot, there are organic aerosols that come from burning certain kinds of chemical compounds and certain kinds of biomass. They each have their effects. The sulfates, the white aerosols, tend to dim the sunshine and they have a net cooling effect even though they're very polluting There are even some very bad ideas called geoengineering ideas of putting sulfates deliberately into the air to dim the sunlight as a kind of remedy for our greenhouse gas emissions. Bad idea we'lll come back to it but in any event it's out there.
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Other kinds of these aerosols especially the soot tend to warm the atmosphere so we have to add up all these effects and then there are the direct effects of dimming the sunshine and what are called the indirect effects or the cloud albedo effects. When we put aerosols into the atmosphere, they change the cloud formation they sometimes provide the nucleus for clouds to form those clouds then reflect incoming solar radiation and thereby have a cooling effect on the planet so aerosoles not only diffuse sunlight and dim sunshine and cool the planet that way but they also change the cloud cover and can have an indirect cooling effect as well. Well you see in this that the total aerosol effect of anthropogenic aerosols that's human-caused aerosols is deemed to be cooling on balance but there are certain kinds of aerosols that are definitely warming kinds of aerosols. Well you can add up all of these and get the total anthropogenic effect that is the effect of the net energy balance caused by human activity but of course that's not the only thing going on even on a relatively short scale we have changes though modest in the amount of incoming solar radiation. The sun has a natural cycle of more radiation or less; it's a very small margin but it does have a very small effect on earth's temperature. We have long long cycles of changes of solar radiation that come from changes in the Earth's orbit over tens of thousands of years that's what gives us the long fluctuations of up and down of CO2 that we saw in an earlier lecture that are also part of the ice ages of the interglacial periods of the Pleistocene epoch and those are very long changes of dynamics so we have the human caused greenhouse gases, we have changes of the earth's reflectance, we have pollutants that through aerosol effects both direct and indirect indirectly change the climate, we have changes in solar radiation in the short term solar cycles, and we have long-term changes that depend on earth's orbit. It's a complicated story. it is the role of climate science to parse these various effects, to use advanced physics, both in theory and through many different kinds of observation, to create a graph like the one that you're looking at that is able to add up across all these different factors to ask: what is the human effect? Now if we turn to the next graph, we can get overtime two crucial facts: first that the total amount of emissions is rising that we know because the world economy is growing, more fossil fuels are being used, more nitrous oxide and methane a fluorinebased gases are being used and emitted into the atmosphere. We can also allocate the total net greenhouse effect across these different gases by using and CO2 equivalents multiplied by the number of molecules of each kind of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere year by year. If you look all the way to the right hand side of this rising curve you can see the allocation of the total greenhouse effect according to key categories. The big base in beige at the bottom is the carbon dioxide emitted through fuels and through other industrial processes there are a few industrial processes like cement manufacturing that emit CO2 not by burning fossil fuels but by other kinds of material transformation. Then the next bar darker maroon color is the carbon dioxide that comes from deforestation and other land-use change and this is also notable but a lesser contribution of carbon dioxide emissions than the energy use. Then the next major category of the greenhouse effect is methane emissions. Methane emissions come from many different kinds of industrial activities come from so-called fugitive gas that's being released by drilling for gas and oil or being piped in pipelines. Methane is released by ruminant animals such as cows from the anaerobic digestion in their multiple stomachs.
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Methane is released from rice paddies again by anaerobic respiration of bacteria in the flooded rice paddies so humanity introduces a lot of methane. Methane next to carbon dioxide is the second most important of the greenhouse effects an then the next bar up in light blue is the nitrous oxide, the N2O. That is again a side effect of combustion processes, of industrial activities, of chemical changes to nitrogen based fertilizers and other agricultural activities and then the small amount of about one to two percent of the total greenhouse effect are the fluorine based industrial chemicals used as refrigerants and for other industrial processes. Take the total picture CO2 from energy & industry sixty-five percent add in the CO2
from land-use change that's another 11 percent we're up to 76 percent 3/4 of the total greenhouse effect. Add in methane and you're at ninety-two percent of the total add in the nitrous oxide and basically you're at about ninety eight to ninety-nine percent of the total. Our focus in most of these lectures will be on carbon dioxide mainly on carbon dioxide from energy and industry but any real agreement that is meaningful next year in Paris at COP 21 is going to have to pay attention to all of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases. If we turn to the next graph, we get yet a different way to view this issue and that is by asking what sectors are the source of emissions of these various greenhouse gases and so we add up across all the greenhouse gases and ask what's responsible for this and of the total emissions we can then allocate them through direct actions in various sectors and indirectly from electricity generation that is then used by these various end use activities so what are the end use activities that are shown here if you go around the circle starting at the top in green is something called AFOLU which is agriculture,
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forestry, and other land-use, thank you, and that is ll the emissions that come from the land use sector including from agricultural activity. Now agriculture emits not only carbon dioxide through energy used in agriculture but emits methane from the bellies of our livestock and our ruminants and from rice paddies it emits nitrous oxide from chemical changes to urea and other nitrogen-based fertilizers it turns out that this AFOLU sector agriculture, forestry, meaning deforestation, and other land-use change is the single biggest sector of all in terms of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions if you go around counterclockwise this time you have the dark blue of the building sector and that means greenhouse gases released within buildings. What is that? Well, the direct emissions are from our boilers and furnaces and our stoves and gas, natural gas, cooking and so forth. The next in red is the transport sector. Under the hood, what do almost all vehicles have? Internal combustion engines; a few now have batteries that are running electric motors but most of our vehicles until now over the last century have been internal combustion engine burning diesel or gasoline or other petroleum-based fuels and a few of these internal combustion engines burn biofuels as well but that transport sector which includes not only automobiles and trucks but also rail and shipping, ocean shipping and aviation, is a very substantial part of total emissions about 14 percent of the total greenhouse gases. The industrial sector obviously a major emitter, major user of energy, a major transformer of materials, such as turning calcium carbonate to calcium oxide on the way to cement production thereby releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Iron and steel, pulp and paper petrochemicals--they're all major emitters of carbon dioxide. It's why the heavy industrial economies are in a way structurally major emitters of greenhouse gases. Now all of those shown around the circle until we get to the right hand side are direct emissions of carbon dioxide. What's called here the indirect CO2 emissions are the emissions that come from generating electricity at a power plant, meaning perhaps by burning coal or by burning natural gas and then that electricity is used in one of these other sectors. It can be used in industry, it can be used a little bit in transport like electric vehicles, it could be used of course in buildings to heat, cool, and ventilate buildings and so this is another piece of the action it's the power sector you see the power sector is a big deal. It is a major source of emissions decarbonizing the electricity generation will be one of the keys to decarbonizing the world economy and we see that the industry in the building sector are the two big users of electricity and therefore they are indirect, this is an indirect source of the emissions now I just love the next diagram I want you to go cross-eyed looking at it. It's a beautiful, artistic schematic of almost the same thing but is a way to track where these emissions come from on the right hand side are the greenhouse gas emissions with that big brown section being the CO2 and then just below it, the "F gases" and just below that the methane and then at the bottom the nitrous oxide and then if you go all the way to the right hand the left hand side of this diagram you ask what sectors are the sectors that are emitting these greenhouse gases found on the right hand side so it's another way to go from a basic sector allocation to the greenhouse gas emissions and let's just take an example. Start at the top on the left hand side you have the transport sector and the transport sector is responsible for in this characterization of about a quarter of the total greenhouse gas emissions. Go to the middle and ask what kind of transport?
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Well, roads are most of it but then also air, rail, shipping, and other transport are also there and what kind of greenhouse gases does the transport sector emit? Almost entirely carbon dioxide the transport sector doesn't emit methane; it doesn't emit nitrous oxide much; it doesn't emit any of the other fluorine-based gases and so in the end it's a carbon dioxide emitter. The next big block is the energy sector for producing electricity and heat or for direct fuel combustion for boilers and furnaces and buildings or for combustion for industrial processes such as iron and steel production or petrochemical production. If you go towards the bottom you have a Purple Line which is agriculture. What does agriculture do? Well agriculture is responsible for changes of nitrous oxide emissions for instance through fertilizer use. Agriculture includes livestock raising and the livestock as I've noted emit methane through digestive fermentation processes and the like. This is a very detailed I think rather ingenious rendering of the complexity of where all of the greenhouse gases come from. In essence to get greenhouse gas concentrations under control, we are going to need to move logically and systematically across this graph. What to do with transport what to do with agriculture what to do with the energy sector That's the topic of lectures to come and if we finally just look at the spaghetti of the energy sector alone and in just one country we can see the remarkable complexity of different sources of energy and different uses of energy and so in this final graphical rendering made by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States for the US energy system we are primary energy sources on the left hand side of this table at the base is petroleum you can see carrying along it goes mainly into the transport sector. Then comes coal and if you track that along some goes to industry a lot goes to electricity generation and the like. We have many forms of primary energy. They are transformed partly into electricity for end use, partly through direct use up the primary energy in buildings or in automobiles or in industrial processes and then in the end, it is the carbon use in particular as opposed to alternatives like solar, nuclear, hydro, wind, and so forth that contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions. A chart like this is extremely important because twothirds of the total radiative forcing of anthropogenic greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide from the energy sector and therefore reforming the energy sector so that there's more reliance on low or zero carbon sources and more energy efficiency will be absolutely central to our ability to stabilize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the next section we're gonna talk about carbon dioxide more because it's the relentless increase of human-induced carbon dioxide that is really at the core of the drama.
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2.3: The Relentless Rise of CO2 We've been talking about the role of particular greenhouse gases what their radiative forcing is what their contribution to total greenhouse climate change is where they come from, and of course we're going to aim to understand what we can do to control their emission, but we've seen that carbon dioxide is really at the center of the story. It's about three-quarters of the total anthropogenic greenhouse effect the vast majority about six-sevenths of the carbon dioxide emitted by humanity comes from energy and industrial processes, mainly burning of coal oil, and, gas. About one seventh of the total comes from land use change, mainly deforestation. Our focus is going to be heavily on the energy sector at the energy sector in a way obviously in a way sad to say is so much at the center of the world economy and fossil fuels are so much at the center of the world's energy system that finding a way to reduce dramatically the carbon dioxide emissions is not a simple matter It is the central focus of our challenge both in this course and of course in a global agreement. In this chapter I want to talk about briefly the relentless rise of carbon dioxide emissions. There has just been no stopping it, not even any slowing it. This graph shows CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use in the course of the 20th century and up to 2008 in this particular figure, and you can see that this has been the pretty steep ascent, around a 15x increase of CO2 emissions from 1900 till today, from around 2.5 billion tons or it's showing here as 2500 million tons but I'll say 2.5 billion tonnes shown in this graph to today around 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Now part of that increase has come from the fact that the world population has increased rather dramatically from 1900 until today, from a bit over one and a half billion back in 1900 to today, 7.2 billion people so we've had more than a 4x increase the world's population. But of course the use of energy per person and the use of fossil fuels as the basis of that energy per person has also skyrocketed. Today and it's good to keep in mind with 35 million tons of carbon dioxide being emitted with about seven billion people it's about 5 tons of carbon dioxide per person on the planet.
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Now that relentless rise of emissions we know, and Charles Keeling whom we've already met earlier was the key scientist instrumental in bringing this fact to our attention, has led to the rise in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere Again we see the seasonality be upward and downward squiggles: CO2 high in the Northern hemisphere springtime just after the fall and winter has returned carbon dioxide into the air and CO2 low each year as carbon dioxide is reabsorbed by vegetation on the planet. But those those annual cycles are dwarfed by the longterm upward ascent of carbon dioxide. In this graph, we're just reaching 390 parts per million but I have to tell you sadly as of 2014 in the spring of this year we have reached 400 parts per million month by month for the first time on the planet in about 3 million years and so we have already changed the carbon dioxide concentration over three million years, a longer time period by far than our species Homo Sapiens has existed. We're carrying the climate in other words to a new configuration unlike anything that humanity has ever experienced and the Keeling curve just reminds us of that fact fact. Now why has CO2 continued to rise so relentlessly, both in emissions levels and the part that stays in the atmosphere raising the CO2 concentration? It's because fossil fuels are such a central part of the world economy. In my course the Age of Sustainable Development I really do sing peons of praise to the steam engine as perhaps the single most transformative technological breakthrough in modern history by being able to tap fossil fuel energy via oil, coal, and gas put down in geologic time over tens of millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, and use that what was solar energy and biological form and now is fossil fuel energy we've been able to make a modern economy which depends on vast throughputs of energy for our quality of life and yet it is of course that fact, the centrality of fossil fuels, since the steam engine till today, that has made carbon dioxide such a relentless source of increasing greenhouse effect over the past century. Now in our time the single most dramatic change in the world economy absolutely second to none is China's rise to economic pre-eminence as a macro economist I have to love it. Watching an economy go from poverty where the poverty rate was well over
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half of the entire population to a country, a modern economy where poverty has come down to much less than 10 percent, life expectancy has soared, conveniences of life have increased dramatically, its a wonderful thing from a development experience. I think can be claimed as the most successful economic development experience in history. It's in a very short period of time really after 1978 when Deng Xiaoping came to power till now, perhaps a 35 time increase in the size of China's economy since that time. But it has had very significant side effects and downsides Within China the downsides are massive pollution, massive air and water pollution that has accompanied this very rapid economic development and industrialization. The air is noxious, the waters poisonous, years of life expectancy have been lost to this massive pollution. The Chinese the leadership and certainly the people know it because they breathe the air every day. But there is a global effect as well, an effect that has global meaning that it also affects China very dramatically and that is that the Chinese have become the largest user of energy in the world, not per person mind you, but given the fact that China is the most populous country in the world with 1.3 billion people, China is the largest user fossil fuels and now by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. So dramatic in fact that I think the Chinese government clearly recognizes as does the whole world that China's leadership in finding a way forward together with the United States, with the European Union, with other parts of the world, on reducing greenhouse gases is now a preeminent aspect of any real solution in this climate challenge. So in the graph that you're looking at now we see two quite dramatic curves. One in China's total energy use, that's shown in red. It's measured in this case in tons of oil equivalent. You take the energy in natural gas, you take the energy in coal and so forth converted to an equivalent number of tons of oil add them up--that's the totally energy expressed in units of oil and you can see comparing that to the blue curve, the dramatic rise of real gross domestic product measured in the trillions of dollars that China's economy has boomed and alongside it not unexpectedly has boomed energy use. You can seen that since the blue curve has increased by more than the red curve that energy per dollar of GDP has actually gone down. The energy intensity of the Chinese economy is falling slightly, but the rise at the Chinese economy is so dramatic that total energy use has increased significantly. And if you look at the next picture you see that China has soared to the top of the world leagues in admissions of carbon dioxide. This is showing total billions of tons of CO2
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omitted per year and around 2007 or so China overtook the United States which was long in the lead as the largest emitting economy of the world China became the number one emitting economy. Its a side effect if you will of its stupendous economic rise. Now why are the emissions so large? For two big reasons: one is of course that the Chinese economy is growing so sharply and the second is that China's energy is heavily based on fossil fuels and in particular based on the single fossil fue, coal, which emits the most carbon dioxide per unit of energy so coal is the most important driver of China's emissions and what you can see in this pie chart which looks at total energy consumption of China that China's overwhelmingly a fossil-fueled driven economy. Most are by the way so China is not alone in that but China extraordinarily depends on coal resources for about 70 percent of its total primary energy use, oil another nineteen percent, and natural gas about 4 percent more on top of that. China has major hydro-electric power like get Three Gorges Dam, which is so famous, hat's about 6 percent of its total primary energy, and about 1 percent is nuclear energy with an intention to have a much larger proportion of energy coming from nuclear power in the future because nuclear power is not carbon emitting. It's got many other issues which we'll discuss but it is a zero-carbon energy emitter and therefore part of China's trajectory to reduce its CO2 emissions. Now if we look at the global emissions by country in two different interesting ways we see the primacy of China and the United States in this story. On the left hand pie chart we have the world's emission, they're 9.6 gigatons or that is billion tons of carbon. Remember to multiply by 3.667 and that would keep you roughly 35 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, a little bit less back in 2012 but about that. And China as you can see is that that big red wedge, roughly a quarter of the world's emissions, the United States about 15 percent of the world's emissions as shown here. The two combined? Well you're talking about forty percent of the whole world's emissions. Look to the chart on the right and you see a little bit different story: the US has been emitting CO2 for so long, it's been the world's third-largest economy for so long that it has the lion's share of the cumulative emissions from the start of the industrial era, roughly the middle of the 18th century. So if we look not at the flow of the emissions but at the accumulation of the emissions in history, there the United States is number one. Well what should we look at? Both The flow of emissions tells us how we're evolving now, the historical emissions tell us how did we get this increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere to begin with since it's been rising relentlessly over the last 100 years and there the United States plays the biggest role.
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And not surprisingly the United States looks to China and says you're such a big emitter you have to cut emissions and China looks to the United States and says well where have you been for the last century thank you, you're responsible for the accumulation of emissions, you take the lead. What we know and what we're going to be analyzing with considerable care and detail and what we will be negotiating in the next semester of this course when we're all global delegates to the global online negotiation is how to take into account historical responsibility, current to flow missions, how to do this in a balanced, fair, and effective manner. Now china would also be keen to emphasise this picture. Yes China is the biggest emitting country in the world but after all China's about onefifth the world's population Given that, it's not surprising that it is a large emitter but per person per person in the United States remains way in the lead and this is a chart which shows for 2012 the emissions per person gain measured as tons per carbon. If you want to change it to carbon dioxide multiply by 3.667 or 44/12 and you can see that the United States is about fourand-a-half tons per person of carbon or about sixteen times up carbon dioxide per person. China's about two tons per person or roughly speaking a little over 7 tons per capita. What about the world as a whole? Well that's the dotted line, the global mean, and we remember that's about five tons per person because it's roughly $35 billion tons of co2 emissions divided by seven billion people on the planet, that's five tons per capita. So who are the big emitters per person? It's the richer countries and it's the heavy energy producing countries: the United States Canada, Australia, Russia, those are the high emissions per capita. The big absolute emitters have big populations like China, and China's now above the global mean, it's about the global average, because it has been so successful in economic development that it is now using more energy on average and heavily coalbased energy and that is why together with its absolute size it has become the number one emitting country in the world. What we will look at next time is again putting some of this in context with the most recent debates on climate change out, what's happening year to year, decade to decade, to the change in Earth's temperature? That's the topic for the next chapter7.
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2.4: Other Drivers of Climate Change We've been looking at the greenhouse effect, at the role of particular greenhouse gases, at the relentless rise of carbon dioxide. I want to say a few words at least in this chapter about the year to year and decade to decade rise of temperature that has accompanied the rising greenhouse gases. The main point is that the greenhouse gas concentrations especially the rising carbon dioxide have been the main drivers of the overall rise of Earth's temperature during especially the past century and in recent decades, but year-to-year fluctuations of temperature even decade to decade fluctuations of temperature have even more causes and more complexity then a simple relationship between greenhouse gas concentrations and I the resultant annual temperature. There are many reasons for that but most importantly the greenhouse gases are not by themselves me only factors that affect the Earth's temperatures. There are many complicated both natural and other human-caused factors that for affect the evolution of Earth's temperature and there is a basic point which is worth the bearing in mind right at the start. When the greenhouse gas concentration rises, say carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere, that changes the equilibrium energy balance. The greenhouse effect means that Earth will have to be warmer in order to equate the incoming solar radiation with the outgoing infared radiation of Earth but in a short period of time there's going to be heat trapped before Earth warms to its new equilibrium level and in fact that process of Earth warming to its new balance, new equilibrium is itself complicated because the land will tend to warm faster than the oceans and so the overall rise of Earth's
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temperature will take time. Just as it takes time to heat a big tub of water ,it takes a lot of time to heat the oceans. The Earth has to absorb a lot of and net energy to bring the oceans up to the new equilibrium temperature. That means that even with the high concentrations of greenhouse gases that we have today and the warming that has accompanied them, even if those greenhouse gas concentrations were to remain unchanged from now on and stay at the current level, there would still be a tendency for the Earth gradually to be warming to catch up with this greenhouse effect because the oceans have not yet caught up with the changes of energy balance caused by the higher levels of greenhouse gas concentrations. Now if we refer back to the graph by NASA by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies that we looked at earlier showing the change of Earth's temperature over the period 1880 til recently taking as the baseline 1951 to 1980 we see that on average over a long period of time the temperature has been increasing but we also note importantly that there have been periods where greenhouse gases were rising but the temperature did not rise very much. A notable period is during the 1940s through the 1960s when there wasn't so much increase in global temperature and if you look at the more recent period from around 1999 or the year 2000 till now, there has been some warming perhaps but it's been slower then the period say from the mid-1970s up to the end of the 20th century up to say 1998. So certain periods have a fairly steep slow on this graph, from the seventies through the nineties, other periods have a fairly flat slope, say from the forties to the early seventies, or from 2000 up until now, not necessarily 0 but lower then the rapid increases of temperature What can account for these kinds of changes year to year or decade to decade? That's really the topic but I want to mention briefly. We know that in addition to the greenhouse gases being drivers of the energy system other states of nature and other human activities play a role. Aerosols are a big driver. When pollution increases on a global scale, f it's the kind of white aerosols or sulphate pollution that would tend to mask some of the warming that would be caused by the greenhouse gas emissions. That's at least one hypothesis for the relative lack of temperature increase from the forties to the seventies. That was a period mass industrialization and massive air
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pollution. After that a lot of the sulfate pollution was cleaned up as smokestacks were cleaned, the emissions from smokestacks were reduced of pollutants by smokestack scrubbers, for example, to stop sulfur oxide emissions. So one thought is that it's the aerosol pollutants that are part of the story either slowing the greenhouse effect or masking it or partly offsetting it. Or it's the brown and organic aerosols, the black aerosols, the soot, or the burning of organics that could lead to a warming effect that would accelerate. But of course there are also natural aerosols when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991 that had a global scale cooling effect by the massive amount of sulfates that were put into the stratosphere by that mega volcanic eruption and so scientists track the volcanic eruptions year to year and course on a decadal scale. That has an effect on the precise time pattern of the warming. Another hypothesized effect comes from the roughly 11-year cycle of solar irradiance which is shown in this graph. Sometimes it's called in shorthand the sunspot cycle because sun spots are correlated with the intensity of solar radiation. This is a natural cycle not human-induced in any way. You can see that the range of fluctuation is not so large, it's about .25 watts per meter squared when the total solar flux is about 1,360 watts per meter squared and the amount incident on earth at the top of the atmosphere is 1/4 of that so the changes of solar irradiance are not insignificant but they're not large. Many climate skeptics say well the Sun is getting warmer that's why but you can measure the solar radiance with tremendous precision. It has a very small effect but it does not have a first-order large-scale effect. It certainly does not account for the long-term rise of temperatures nor does it explain much about the decade to decade fluctuations. Now there is another natural cycle that is more important not fully elucidated but clearly quite important in the interannual fluctuation of Earth's temperature and that's the state of the oceans and and especially the state of the world's mega ocean the Pacific ocean. The Pacific Ocean has natural oscillations we are most familiar with something called ENSO, El Niño Southern Oscillation. This is a change in the state of the Pacific Ocean especially in relative pressures wind patterns and ocean surface temperatures across from the western Pacific in the Indonesian archipelago to the eastern Pacific which is off the west coast of South America. We know what ENSO or especially El Niño, most familiar, is the warm water that appears off the coast of Peru often around Christmastime by and so it was named El Niño for the birth of Jesus or the Christmastime season and what it means is a
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phenomenon that occurs on natural intervals of a few years variation in which you have warm water from the western Pacific crossing the Pacific to show up on the coast of South America. When it does that leads to rainfall in what is otherwise a very dry part of South America. It also causes a massive decrease of the normally prevailing easterly winds that blow the ocean water from the east to the west and pile up the warm water of the Pacific around Indonesia and so there's a complicated atmosphereocean coupling in which the trade winds of the east, the easterlies, diminish significantly, the warm water sloshes from west to east, changing all of the tropics in temperature patterns and in precipitation patterns but from our point of view something quite important. When the warm water of the El Niño arrives, global temperatures tend to rise. Not hugely but enough to really make a difference so when we have a big El Niño event as we did in 1998 that's a blowout for global temperature. Many scientists think that 2014 perhaps 2015 could be a big El Niño year in which case right now our season could turn out to have a global boost of temperature coming from the current El Niño. Well there's another oscillation in the pacific less clear hypothesized perhaps of a longer scale, called PDO Pacific decadal oscillation which may be related to the El Niño state or its counterpart La Niña when the warm water really piles up in the West and it's very cold with cold upwelling water off the west coast of South America. This PDO or Pacific decadal oscillation is a more gradual change of the Pacific ocean state that also seems to be related to the frequency of El Niños or the opposite La Niñas and thereby to changes of global temperature. So long story short during the 1980s and 1990s there were lots of El Niños and that tended to boost the warming of the global temperature. The big one was 1998, and 1998 was really a blowout year, a very, very hot year. We've since surpassed it according to some measurements in some of the hottest years more recently, but 1998 really stands out as a very, very warm year because of the El Niño and perhaps that high-frequency of El Niños during those couple of decades associated with warmer global temperatures was related to the state of the Pacific in this decadal oscillation. Now since 1998 we've tended to be more towards La Niña episodes, very cold water off of South America, perhaps related to a change in the longer-term, decades-long oscillation, and that perhaps is responsible for a slowing down of the year to year warming since the late
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1990s. This is all hypothesis except to say that what seems to be the case in trying to project year to year or even decade to decade changes we need to understand the greenhouse gas emissions, we need to understand the aerosols both human caused and natural caused by volcanoes, and we need to understand the state of the oceans. When the state of the oceans are in a particular phase he world tends to be warmer on average, global temperatures are high. When the oceans, the Pacific in particular are in another phase, the warming tends to be reduced. All of this means that we don't yet have a precise year to year model that can absolutely predict how the Earth's temperature will evolve on an annual basis or over a period of a few years but the science does help us to understand certainly the major drivers of the longer-term change and gives overwhelming evidence as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change continues to emphasize that it is human induced causes and especially the greenhouse gas emissions and among those the energy-related carbon dioxide emissions that are the fundamental long-term drivers on the decade to century scale of the global warming that Earth has experienced and that we are likely to see continuing in the years and decades to come until we face up to the challenge posed to us in the framework convention to stabilize the greenhouse gas concentrations at safe levels. In the next section, in the final chapter of this lecture, we'll look briefly at some of the recent implications of climate change.
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2.5: Recent History of Climate Change We've been looking at climate science, at the Greenhouse Effect, at greenhouse gases, at other drivers of climate change--inter-annual, decadal, even we've talked briefly about the long term geological changes caused by changes in the earth's orbital. We're living in real time right now where we're already experiencing significant climate change and the human-induced component of that is our preeminent worry. We know that the greenhouse gas effect is powerful; it is already present. It is responsible for raising the earth's temperature compared to the preindustrial level by almost one degree Celsius or almost 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit and we know that we're on a trajectory of great danger. We're going to talk in future lectures in detail about impacts and about why we care about the two degree centigrade limit agreed in Copenhagen and Cancun as a reflection of or a definition in need of avoiding dangerous interference in the climate system, but here in this 5th chapter of Lecture 2, I want to mention briefly some of the things that we're currently observing, and I want to start with the quite remarkable set of maps produced by my quite wonderful colleague, Professor James Hansen. You'll recall Dr. Hansen testifying in 1998 to the U.S. Congress giving the Congress the first authoritative warning "This is real; it's coming", and Dr. Hansen called it correctly-he's a brilliant global climate scientist, who has been studying every aspect of the underlying physics--the radiative forcing, the earth's dynamics with remarkable perspicacity for decades. He's been telling us we're already in the midst of deep change, and a quite remarkable way that he has demonstrated this is shown by this set of nine maps. If you focus in on the map in the upper left hand corner, you can see through the blotches of color a world map. This particular world map is for the year 1955. What Professor Hansen has done is to take the average temperature in each part of the world, each pixel on the map, each location on the map and calculated the average for the years 1951 to 1980, and a kind of bell-shaped curve of temperatures in that place during that time interval. Well, you know what a bell-shaped curve is or a normal or Gaussian curve. It shows the probability of falling above or below the average
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temperature line, and we say that in the tails of that bell-shaped curve those are when
you have big deviations from the average outcome either on the plus side that something is much larger than average or on the other tail of the distribution when something is much less than average. So, say that for the years 1951 to 1980, you have a bell-shaped curve of temperature in a particular place, but a few years are really warm and a few years are really cold-those are the outliers; those would be at the tails of the normal distribution. Now, events that are two standard deviations above the average or two standard deviations below the average are at the outer tails, and the plus/minus two standard deviations in total accounts for about 5% of the occurrences. Three standard deviations out is an absolutely extraordinary case that happens only a couple of times every thousand occurrences. So, Professor Hansen said, "Suppose we know the normal distribution of temperatures in each part of the world based on what we observed from the period 1951 to 1980 and suppose we define a really extreme event as a three-standard-deviation outlier--super hot or super cold." Well during the period where you calculate that, 1951 to 1980, that wouldn't happen very much by construction that would only happen a couple times out of a thousand, but Professor Hansen wanted to ask the question "are such extreme events, real outliers, occurring with more frequency?" So he made maps that showed when different parts of the world had extreme temperature events either extreme hot, which is shown in dark maroon here, or extreme cold, which is shown in purple on the map, and if you look back at 1955, there are a couple tiny spots just by random that happen to have extreme heat waves. You can see around Hudson Bay in northern Canada or maybe just a part of northern Spain
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had a real heat wave during the summer months of June, July, August of 1955, but the map as a whole doesn't show anything very extraordinary. Most of the temperatures lie well within plus or minus two standard deviations of the normal temperature for that particular place. Professor Hansen has made this map for
every year. If we go to the central column at the top row; that's for the year 1965. I don't see any dark maroon here. There isn't any single part of the planet in the year 1965 that for the Northern Hemisphere summer months had an extreme heat wave. Well, that's natural. These extremes are very very rare by definition because he constructed the definition of extreme to happen very rarely during the period 1951 to 1980. 1975, well again, focus in extreme northern Canada pretty hot, unusual; the rest of the world, nothing too much special. Now, move the calendar forward to our time. Professor Hansen is making a point: what used to be extreme is becoming normal. This is really the shock for the planet. Look at 2006. All of a sudden the map looks nothing like the 1955 or 1965 or 1975 map; there's red all over the place; in the Indian ocean, in North Africa, in the Northeast of the US and Canada. Red blotches all over the map! They weren't there before. What he's saying is that in 2006 by the standards of the historical period of 1951 to 1980, suddenly we're finding ourselves in the tail of the distribution on the hot end of what used to be the distribution in which such events would be very rare, so stay with the bell-shaped curve of 1951 to 1980, stay with the same definition of extreme heat, all of a sudden it's happening in many parts of the world. 2007: red, red, red blotches! 2009: oh my word! Looks like half the world's experiencing extraordinary three-standarddeviation heat waves because that was an absolute again period of this increase in hot temperatures and what we're seeing is the core message; what used to be extraordinary is becoming normal not normal pleasant, normal unpleasant. What used to be an extreme heat wave that happened maybe one time in a thousand or two times in a thousand is now happening fifty times in a thousand, 5% of the time, or a hundred times in a thousand, 10% of the time.
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The extremes are the new normal. We shouldn't take that as normal. We should take that as an alarming reality because of what is shown in the next graph. These are data produced by the insurance companies. They need to know what happens with disasters because they pay out when disasters occur. They have to price their contracts, and what they are recording is a massive increase of disasters and especially not so much the disasters we don't cause, although maybe some of them are better measured or there are more people living in places, say, hit by earthquakes, but the disasters that can be changed in frequency and intensity by global, anthropogenic climate change-the so called hydro-meteorological disasters: the extreme storms, the extreme tropical cyclones like typhoon Haiyan or superstorm Sandy or the massive droughts afflicting much of the world today in Brazil, California, parts of Australia, parts of India, parts of Pakistan, or the massive flooding. These are the kinds that the insurance companies are noting because they're making payouts and they are realizing that we're having a huge rise of hydro-meteorological disasters. Well, we have looked earlier and Emmanuel Guerin in the next lecture is going to look in detail at some of the impacts, I just want to reflect on 2014--our year, our current period. If you happen to be a tennis-lover and you were watching the Australian Open at the beginning of the year, you were watching tennis players playing under nearly impossible conditions--massive heat wave as shown in this map for January 2014. Australia was hit by one of these extraordinary heat waves that have become the new normal. Here's a different map for the spring of this year. California experiencing a state-wide drought and a very significant part of California experiencing the most intense and remarkable drought leading to normal water reservoirs used for irrigation and drinking water dropping to absolutely frightening proportions. And as I've shown earlier, Brazil the same, Indonesia the same. When I was in Istanbul earlier this year, the reports of major drought around the Istanbul area. A water reservoir shown here with the water basically gone and incidentally, hit by, Istanbul hit by massive flooding a couple of months later. Not unexpected or paradoxical. Droughts followed by floods, precipitation patterns characterized by extreme storm events with very heavy downfalls when the downfalls occur and in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and in Serbia in the spring, it was shocking. I arrived in Serbia just after these floods. These were not one-in-a-century floods; these were basically characterized as one-in-five-hundred-years or one-in-the-millennium flooding. They'd never seen the extent of this kind of flooding and tremendous property loss and many people lost their lives. In my work as special adviser to Secretary General Ban KiMoon on the Millennium Development Goals, I work in a lot of the poorest places in the world and not by coincidence many of those are dryland environments; places where
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rainfall is so marginal that getting a crop in particular year is always a risk; it is always a bit of a gamble--will the rains fail? These drylands stretch across the Sahill of West Africa to the horn of Africa--Ethiopia, Sudan, northern Uganda, Kenya, Somalia; they stretch across the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula into Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia; they stretch into western Asia-Iraq, Iran--and into central Asia--Afghanistan and neighboring countries. And that whole swath of thousands and thousands of kilometers and so many millions of people living in vulnerability face the ever-present risk that the rainy season is going to fail. They're already dry, and climate change for many of these places is already a clear and present danger and a taker of lives when these droughts and ensuing famines occur. Now, one of the things that I also see in my UN capacity is that not only do these droughts and crop failures lead to huge suffering, but they are themselves the tinderbox that can lead to conflict. When people are hungry, when people are desperate, demigods, dangerous people absolutely can sway unemployed, desperate, hungry young men or just force them into paramilitaries and the consequences now shown statistically with great care that when the rains fail and poor regions, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, conflicts are likely to follow. One of the most horrific conflicts on the whole planet now is in Syria. Syria is part of the Mediterranean environment, which the climate models tell us is already a drying region that is likely to get much dryer in the future. This is by virtue of the Mediterranean location in the world climate system. Warm, dry air is now descending on the Mediterranean decreasing the amount of rainfall that is coming. Well, all through the Mediterranean Basin there has been a drop of rainfall over the last twenty years, but in Syria, there was nearly ten years of continuous drought and over time, one year of drought may be manageable, two years of drought-very hard to get a crop, three years of drought-the soils lack all moisture and the crops start to fail, populations start to move, farm families can't survive, people abandon their homesteads and in very complex, not well-governed places when people move, frictions explode, frustrations, hunger, and of course desperation also take off. I remember in Syria in 2007-2008-2009 the United Nations was putting out alarms. We've got major drought, major population movements, major food insecurity. Nothing much was done because the world doesn't respond to these kinds of warnings nor did the government, an authoritarian government capable of great brutality and lack of responsiveness and also being overwhelmed by chronic, nearly decade-long drought. What was the consequence? Well, drought wasn't THE cause of Syria's conflict, but one can say that drought and food scarcity, soaring food prices, hungry people, displaced populations were part of the complex mix of bad governance, frustration, corruption that meant in 2011 when
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the so-called "Arab Spring" erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, protests began massively in Syria. The Assad regime cracked down on those protestors, a military insurgency broke away from the Syrian Army, and then as one thing leads to another, suddenly there was support coming from outside powers—the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia supporting the insurgency. There was Russia and Iran supporting the Assad regime and suddenly drought, famine, food insecurity, and the other factors erupted into violence; violence into war; war into proxy war; and soon enough by now more than 160,000 people dead and disaster and still a completely unresolved and indeed spreading war. I mention this because climate change is gonna have many impacts and it's going to have the kinds of impacts that Emmanuel will be talking about in the coming lectures, but we should understand that human capacity, we have it to adjust sometimes, sometimes we're able to counteract these kinds of events, sometimes we're able to use our intelligence and our smarts to get ahead of the curve, sometimes we are just dumber than dumb. The visceral emotions, the hate, the fear, the arms take over and what begins as an ecological crisis turns into a full-fledged human disaster, war, threat of ever-widening proportions. The point is climate change is going to have massive impacts on the planet, and we have to learn to think ahead and think cooperatively if this is not to get the best of us. Well, in this course we are not going to be examining in detail how we can do that, how we can use our intelligence, our technology, our know-how, and the global tools of cooperation in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to get ahead of the curve. By the end of this course, I hope we have the tools so that when we enter the next semester as delegates to the global, online negotiations, we'll be able to find the path forward and help to illuminate the ways that we don't end in this kind of disaster but rather find a way to cooperation, to peace, and to security for everybody.
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3: The 2-Degree Limit
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3.1: The Business As Usual Trajectory Today we're going to be discussing more specifically about a particular target that we have already mentioned, the objective of limiting the temperature increase to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial level, the target that was adopted by the world government in 2010 in Cancun. We have already discussed in the previous lectures basic elements of climate science. have also shown are the key milestones on the to Paris in 2015 when an ambitious agreement on climate change to be reached but want to start this lecture by describing what are some of the possible consequences of climate change if we control the greenhouse gases emissions that we need to.
the the We what road
need I'm I don't
I want to be discussing where the business as usual trajectory leads us so if we continue with the current trends of rising emissions because we've seen already some of the impacts of climate change that are already occurring because climate change is real and is already happening in many parts of the world but if greenhouse gases
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concentrations continue to rise the way they're currently doing these impacts would be really getting more and more severe overtime so let's start this first chapter of lecture 3 by discussing where the business as usual trajectory, the continuation of the current trends, would lead us and what would be the consequences. As we've said several times now the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or the UNFCCC was adopted in 1992 and entered into force two years later in 1994 and by now you should all almost know by heart what is the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC, that is stated in its Article 2, which is to stabilize greenhouse gases concentrations at a level that prevents dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system in order to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner. The last part of the sentence is very important because it shows very well that we're not aiming only for an environmental objective were not only aiming to protect the planet we're aiming to protect planet in order to let economic development proceed in the future so this commitment to stabilize greenhouse gases concentrations was reiterated at basically each and every conference of the parties or COP of the UNFCCC since 1992 and in 2010 as we're going to discuss in more detail today, the parties to the UNFCCC even adopted a quantified target for the first time to operationalize the objective of the UNFCCC, as I said, they agreed to limit the rise in mean surface temperature below two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial level and in this lecture we're going to explain why they chose this particular target and why it is so important for sustainable development going forward but the truth is that in spite of these repeated commitments each and every year to stabilize greenhouse gases concentrations, also in spite of the growing awareness of the potentially catastrophic impacts of uncontrolled climate change and in spite of a growing number of climate change mitigation policies the anthropogenic greenhouse gases emissions, the greenhouse gases emissions that are human-induced are fall from stabilizing as opposed to the goal the UNFCCC quite the country in fact, they continue to increase, continue to increase steadily, and they even continue to increase very rapidly. In fact the average annual growth rate of anthropogenic greenhouse gases emissions has been even higher during the last ten years than during the previous thirty years. From the year 2000 to the year 2010 we have added approximately 1 billion tonnes or one gigatonnes as we're going to say of CO2 equivalent for year on average in the atmosphere so remember we use the unit of CO2 equivalent to find a common metric to add together all of the different greenhouse gases of which carbon dioxide CO2 is only one. So this rise, this addition of one billion ton of Co2 in the atmosphere per year from the year 2000 to the year 2010 represents on average a 2.2 annual rate increase and so my point is that this is even more than the 0.4 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year on average that we added in the atmosphere in the previous thirty years from the year 1972 to the year 2000 which represented of course an increase but an increase of only 1.3 percent per year as opposed to the 2.2 percent of the last ten years and so as a consequence of this continued and accelerated in fact increase, the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions reached their highest level in human history in 2010 which is the latest data that we have available so to put a number on these emissions and one you need to remember because it's going to be important going forward in 2010 the annual anthropogenic greenhouse gases emissions stood at 49 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent that's the level of the emissions per year today or in 2010 and this is what you show on this graph and you show the increase in the total
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greenhouse gases emissions from the year 1970 to today to 2010 and you show that divided by the main types of greenhouse gases so in particular CO2 coming both from the burning of fossil fuels and from industrial processes, the CO2 coming from a different source of human activities, the deforestation and agriculture and also methane emissions and nitrous oxide emissions. So the bottom line looking at this graph is that since 1970 all major sources of greenhouse gases emissions have increased. As I said, the CO2 emissions but also all the other greenhouse guess but what I want you look at in particular is to the increase in CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and from other industrial processes because this rise in particular was spectacular and is going to be the main focus of this course. It contributed to about 78 percent of the total greenhouse gases emissions increase since 1970 so today the fossil fuel related CO2 emissions are the single largest source of greenhouse gases emissions in 2010, it reached 32 billion homes per year and represented approximately 65 percent of the total greenhouse gases emissions and since 2010 these emissions still grew further by about 3 percent between 2010 and 2011 and again by something in between 1 and 2 percent in between 2011 and 2012 and so where did these emissions come from? Which are the sectors that are responsible for these rising CO2 emissions? Well first they came from the energy supply directly for 47 percent, then they came from the industry sector for about 30 percent. After that from the transport sector for 11 percent and the remaining CO2 energy emissions came from the building sector for 3 percent. So what are the drivers of these rapidly-growing greenhouse gases emissions? Well since 1970 economic growth and population growth were the most important drivers of this increase in emissions. The contribution of the population growth to the increase in emissions during the past 10 years remain roughly the same compared to the previous three decades but the contribution to economic growth to the increase in emissions has risen very sharply in the past 10 years compared to the previous three decades and as we already pointed out in some of the previews lectures this is in part the result of good news and that is the very strong catch-up economic growth in the middle-income countries and in particular in China but of course that came with side effects and in particular rising levels of greenhouse gases emissions so these are the two most important factors that explain the rise in emissions in the recent past: the population rose and the economy grows. On the other side since 1970 the energy efficiency of economic growth has pretty significantly improved. It means that progressively we were able to manage to consume less energy per unit of GDP which is the good news in a way from the climate change mitigation perspective because it means that we were also adding less unit of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP produced but the bad news on the other side is that this improvement of energy efficiency was too small compared to the other driving force going in the other direction:the population and the economic growth, in particular the increase in income per capita.
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Since 1970 the carbon intensity of energy also decreased. What does that mean? Well it means, progressively we were emitting less CO2 per unit of energy consumed which again was the good news from the climate change mitigation perspective but here too this improvement in the carbon intensity of energy was much too small compared to be the necessary emission reductions to avoid dangerous climate change but what I want to point out here and what is in a fact very worrying is that during the past ten years the increased use of fossil fuels but in particular of coal relative to the other energy sources has reversed the long-standing trend of gradual decarbonization of the world energy supply. It means that the carbon content of energy is increasing during the past ten years we emitted more carbon emissions per unit of energy we consume when instead this trend should be decreasing and it should be decreasing very strongly and very quickly. So the current trends are clearly going in the wrong direction but the question is where do they lead us? What would be the global warming consequence of these rising emissions going forward so let's do the math. I mean let's look at where we are today and and let's look at where we would be if the current trends were continued in the coming years so where are we today? In 2011, the CO2 equivalent concentration was estimated to be at approximately 430 parts per million remember parts per million is the unit we use to measure the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If the current trends continued then the concentration of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would exceed 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent as soon as 2030. I am stressing this particular number of 450 parts per million because we're going to see when we discuss twodegree limit that this is the concentration of greenhouse gases emissions that corresponds to the two-degree limit in the temperature increase but it wouldn't stop at 450 parts per million in 2030; it would be somewhere in between 750 and perhaps even more than 1300 parts per million of CO2 equivalent by the end of the century so what would be the consequence of that amount of greenhouse gases emissions in the atmosphere? Well that would be very dangerous because it would result in global mean surface temperature increase by the end of the century from somewhere in between 4 and 5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial level and the truth is that if you build into the analysis all the uncertainty regarding the reaction of the climate to the greenhouse gas emissions then this range could expand potentially up to 8 degrees Celsius of warming before the end of the century and the consequences of such an increase in temperature would be really catastrophic .
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3.2: The Consequences of the BAU Trajectory We're going to be discussing the consequences of what I just described, so the consequences of these rising greenhouse gases emissions, of the rising concentration, and of the resulting temperature increase. The truth is that, in short but we're going to go in further detail in a minute, that global warming of 4 degrees Celsius or more would have very severe and irreversible impacts and the truth is that these impacts would really threaten the continuation of economic development in the future and also to be frank threaten our ability to adapt to these impacts if global warming were to even exceed 4 degree Celsius so in the previous lectures we've already looked at some of the examples in many countries of climate change that is already occurring and and some of these impacts but now we're gonna look a bit more systematically and also a bit more theoretically at some of the most important risks of climate change going forward and in particular we're going to discuss three among these most important risks. One being the rise in sea levels associated with global warming, the other being the acidification of oceans as the concentration of CO2 increases in the atmosphere since the oceans trap part of this increase in concentration, and the third and again we've already looked at evidence of them happening, is the increased frequency and also the increased intensity of extreme weather events such as heat waves and or floods. So let's look first at the rise of sea level. How can the increase in CO2 concentration result in a rise of the see. Well, the mechanism is pretty complex but if we try to simplify it, the rise in the level of the sea is caused by the thermal expansion of the oceans but also by the addition of water to the oceans as a result of two things: the melting and the discharge of ice from mountain glaciers but also ice caps and from the much larger Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. So let's try to quantify a little bit the rise in sea levels that would result from global warming. The estimate is that global warming of 4 degrees Celsius would lead to a sea level rise of approximately 0.5 to 1 meters possibly more according to some estimates by the end of the century. But there is something very important you need to understand here and it is that the rise in sea levels is a very slow process that would continue long after the concentration of greenhouse gases emissions has stabilized so if
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greenhouse gases emissions led to 4 degrees Celsius of global warming, the rise in sea levels would not stop at 0.5 or 1 meter by the end of the century. It would be several meters higher in the coming centuries adding to the risks induced by global warming. Even if greenhouse gases emissions were reduced in order to limit global warming to only 2 degrees Celsius the sea level rise would be about 0.3 to 0.8 meters by the end of the century but again and let me stress that it wouldn't stop by the end of the century and it would continue to rise after and most estimates range in between 1.5 and 4 meters of sea level rise by the year 2300 and I should also point out that some estimates and not funny estimates but really really serious estimates even forecast a 6 meter rise in the sea level in the long run associated with a two-degree only of global warming.
The truth is that the sea level rise would likely be limited to below 2 meters in the long run only if global warming was kept to well below 1.5 degree Celsius, maybe something like 1 degree Celsius so why is it a problem It is pretty obvious that such an increase such a rise in the sea level would have really harmful consequences in particular because a very significant fraction of the world population is settled along the coastlines and and often in in large cities so a sea-level rise that would be so gigantic and in the event of climate change and global warming exceeding two degrees Celsius would mean that a very large fraction of today's places inhabited by a large fraction of the global population would be underwater so that really makes sea level rise potentially one of the most long-term but very severe impacts of climate change. Let's discuss another very serious potential impact from global warming and that is the acidification of the oceans. I'll explain in a minute what we mean by the acidification of the oceans but let's look first at the role that the oceans play in the carbon cycle. In fact fact they play a major role because they are one of the Earth's largest sinks for CO2 emission so as the atmospheric concentration of CO2 rises the oceans absorb the additional CO2 in an attempt to restore the balance in between the uptake and the release of CO2 at the oceans' surface and this process directly impacts the ocean's biogeochemistry because the CO2 reacts with water to eventually form a weak acid and this process we call the ocean's acidification.
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So why is that a problem, the acidification of the oceans. Well we only have to look at the past to look at what it would mean in the future and to realize how serious a threat it is because in the past such observed changes in the oceans' acidity have very often been associated with large-scale extinction events, of extinction of marine species. So the problem is really that these changes in acidity are projected to increase in the future as a result of global warming and an increasing concentration of greenhouse gases emissions in in the atmosphere so that would really add another piece of very significant stress to the marine ecosystems when they're already under tremendous pressure from human activities such as overfishing and pollution. The oceans' acidity already increased by about 30 percent compared to the preindustrial level but if the temperature increased by 4 degrees Celsius then the oceans' acidity would increase by another 150 percent and that would really have very severe negative consequences on the oceans' ecosystems and on the marine species and therefore on food supply because we in part rely on the ocean to prove our food. More specifically it would also have very severe consequences for coral reefs and it might sound like nothing but it clearly isn't because the coral reefs perform very important environmental services but the truth is starting at perhaps something like 550 parts per million of CO2 equivalent, so much before the temperature increase would reach four degrees Celsius, the coral reefs are expected to start to dissolve. Let's move on to the third type of potential impacts I was mentioning and that is the increased frequency but also intensity of some extreme weather events and and let's discuss at first the narrow issue of rising temperatures and the heat waves resulting from these increases in temperature. The very basic and and very important point to understand is that a global warming of 4 degrees Celsius or more would not be evenly distributed across the world so that's the world average but some parts of the world would experience a much higher increase than the world average when some other parts of the world would experience a more moderate increase but with global warming of 4 degrees Celsius on average it means that increases of six degrees Celsius or more average monthly summer temperatures would be expected in in very large regions of the world including in particular the Mediterranean, North Africa, also the Middle East but also some parts of North America so it means that recent extreme heat waves such as own those experienced by Australia, California, or Russia recently are likely to become the new normal in a 4 degrees Celsius world and tropical South America and Central Africa all the tropical islands in the pacific are likely to regularly experience summer heat waves of really unprecedented magnitude but also durations and in regions such as the Mediterranean North Africa and the Middle East but also the Tibetan Plateau almost all summer mnths are likely to be warmer than the most extreme heat waves presently experienced. To pick only one example which I think reveals a lot: the warmest July in the Mediterranean region could be 9 degrees Celsius warmer than today's warmest July. Do you realize what 9 degrees warmer would mean for a region like the Mediterranean and in summer for the ability, for example, to grow crops? So the extreme heat waves in the recent years have already had very severe impacts, they have caused heat-related deaths, they've caused forest fires such as those we've seen recently in Russia or Australia, they've also caused very significant harvest losses as we've seen recently in California and the truth is that the impacts of extreme heat waves projected for a 4 degree warmer world have not yet been thoroughly evaluated
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by the scientists but evidence shows that they could well exceed our capacities and the the capacities of some natural systems simply to adapt to the same changes putting us into very severe risks. Global warming of 4 degrees Celsius would also increase the frequency of heavy precipitation. This is another potential impact from global warming that would not necessarily be felt again evenly across the globe but could have very severe consequences on some parts of the planet and this is especially the case in the high latitudes and in the tropical regions in particular through tropical cyclones but also in winter in the northern mid-latitude. Interestingly even in some regions where the total precipitation would decrease as a result of global warming, heavy precipitation could increase and that would result pretty ironically in the combined risks of drought and floods in these regions and these extreme weather events generally could induce the breakdown of infrastructure networks and really critical services such as our power production infrastructure or our water supply networks or our health services and that would really have very severe human and economic costs so to summarize the environmental but also I want to stress the economic and social risks of uncontrolled climate change are absolutely immense. They really threaten to rollback the fruits of decades of growth and development, to undermine prosperity, to jeopardize countries' ability to achieve even the most basic social economic goals in the future including the eradication of poverty and some in the developed world may think that we could be immune from such risk but what we just saw really proves that this is not true them. Unabated climate change leading to global warming of 4 degrees Celsius or more would really affect all the developed and the developing countries maybe not exactly alike put the effect of such global warming would be felt in every part of the globe and the truth is that it's our basic ability to adapt to the effects of this climate change that is at risk if global warming exceeds 4 degrees Celsius in the coming centuries.
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3.3: Limiting the Mean Surface Temperature Increase Below 2-Degrees Celsius vs. Pre-Industrial Levels We just discussed what would be the absolutely catastrophic consequences of climate change if we did nothing to control the rising greenhouse gases emissions. Now, I want us to spend some time discussing what we could do to avoid these catastrophic consequences and in particular at what level we should try to limit the increase in temperature. So as we have already been discussing in 2010, during the Sixteenth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The world's governments gathered and decided for the first time that they would operationalize the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC which so far remained a bit vague and they decided to set a particular quantitative target of limiting the increase in mean surface temperature below 2 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. Of course this in recognition of the extreme risks for a safety of the planet but also for a future development opportunity of the temperature increase exceeding two degrees Celsius as we just discussed by looking at some of the potential impacts but what is really interesting and what I want us to spend a little bit of time discussing is that the adoption of this particular target was really the result of of a long and complex process. It was very interestingly the result both of a scientific but also of a political process. A scientific process first because each assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, provided new insights on three things. I mean the IPCC is divided into 3 main working groups: the first is on the basics of climate science,
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the second is on the risks of climate change and how we can adapt to them, and the third working group is on the opportunities for climate change mitigation on the economics and the policies of climate change mitigation, so each assessment report of the IPCC provided not only by the way more precise estimates but also revised estimates and in general and we're gonna go through the history of these different assessment reports in general sending each and every time an even more alarming message to the world than the previous reports. But I said that it was not only the result of the scientific process but also the political process and it's very important to understand that the two-degree limit is really the result of the combination of science but also politics because some countries or groups of countries and in particular the European Union or the small islands developing states really pushed hard in the negotiations for the adoption of a particular long-term goal to climate change mitigation. So let's look in detail at the key milestones in this scientific but also political process. It all began in a way in 1989 when an advisory group to the United Nations Environment Programme or UNEP released what really became a landmark report. One of the key conclusions of this report was that an increase in the mean surface temperature of 2 degrees Celsius is and I quote "An upper limit beyond which the risks of grave damage to ecosystems and of nonlinear responses are expected to increase rapidly." So that's one of the very first mention of the 2 degree limit in an official document commissioned by the United Nations Environment Program. One-year later in 1990 the Second World Climate Conference was a very important step towards adopting a global climate change treaty. The conference was sponsored by The World Meteorological Organization and also by UNEP, and this time it aimed at making very concrete policy recommendations on the run up to the negotiation of the climate treaty, and one of these recommendations was that the ultimate objective should be to stabilize greenhouse gases concentration at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. It should sound very familiar because as we have discussed several times. Now two years later in 1992 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted, and its ultimate objective is directly in line with the recommendation coming from The World Climate Conference. So moving on, in 1995 the IPCC released its Second Assessment Report, and it was also a very important report. It looked at the consequences of the doubling of the greenhouse gases concentrations of the time to a level of 550 parts-per-million of CO2 equivalent, and here one-year later in 1996 enters the European Union which played a very instrumental role in having the two-degree limit adopted as the global goal of climate change mitigation because in 1996 the European Union Environment Council picked up the conclusion from the IPCC Second Assessment Report, and it said the European Union Environment
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Council that it believed that global average temperature increase should not exceed two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and therefore that the concentration levels of greenhouse gases lower than 550 parts-per-million CO2 equivalent should guide the global greenhouse gases limitation and reduction efforts. This is in fact the very first time that the two-degree limit is picked up politically as opposed to only in a scientific report but what is also interesting is to look at the concentration of greenhouse gases that was at that point in time associated with the two degree limit because again at that point in time we are going to see that after that, science made progress, but at that point in time it was considered that stabilizing greenhouse gases concentrations at 550 parts-permillion would be sufficient to limit the increase in temperature below 2 degrees Celsius. After that came the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC in 2001, and it revised and it revised pretty significantly the analysis included in the Second Assessment Report, and in many ways the conclusions of the Third Assessment Report were more pessimistic and the message that was sent was even more alarming. In particular, the projected increase in temperature over the next century had increased from a range of 1 to 3.5 degrees Celsius in the Second Assessment Report to 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius in the Third Assessment Report. Again, the European Union was key in the process and in 2005 it organized a Heads of State Summit this time and not only a meeting of the Environment Ministers. It organized The Heads of State Summit to discuss the issue of climate change and to define the European Union position in the upcoming international negotiations, and it concluded that and I quote, "With a view to achieving the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC, the global average surface temperature increase should not exceed 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels but what is really interesting and what I want you to focus on is that the European Union Environment Council added that based on the recent scientific research from the IPCC it became unlikely that the stabilization of concentrations above 550 parts-permillion of CO2 equivalent would be consistent with staying within the two-degree limit and that in order to have a reasonable change of limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius then the stabilization of greenhouse gases concentrations well below 550 parts-per-million of CO2 equivalent may be needed. Two years after that in 2007 the IPCC released another this time The Fourth Assessment Report, and it concluded that in order to limit the temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius, the concentration of greenhouse gases emissions would have
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to be stabilized below 450 parts per million instead of the 550 parts-per-million as was previously sought. Following the publication of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the European Union Environment Council concluded that the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report demonstrates that keeping the two-degree objective within reach requires the stabilization of the concentration of greenhouse gases emissions in the atmosphere in line with the lowest stabilization level that was assessed in the report and that was 450 ppm of CO2 equivalent, but interestingly, and I want to emphasize this part compared to the previous assessment reports. The Fourth Assessment Report did not only revise its analysis of the temperature response of the planet to greenhouse gases concentrations it also revised its analysis of the risks induced by global warming of 2 degrees Celsius and some of the risks that were previously estimated to be only limited became this time assessed as severe or even very severe but in spite of this new assessment of the risks induced by even only two degree of global warming, the political support for the two-degree limit grew and many other countries such as Chile or New Zealand or Norway or South Africa or Switzerland to quote only a few of the much larger number rallied the European Union position to make the two-degree limit the long-term goal of global climate change mitigation efforts.
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It is very important to stress that not everybody agreed with that particular objective and in particular the small islands developing states were arguing for a 1.5 degree Celsius limit or to put it in concentration equivalent--a 350 parts-per-million concentration of greenhouse gases—because they were pointing and very rightly so to the risks to their very survival of global warming of 2 degrees Celsius because in particular of the rise in sea levels we discussed that would result from that, but even though not everybody agreed to 2 as opposed to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Copenhagen Accord was adopted in 2009 as a political declaration and then put back into the legal framework of the UN Convention on Climate Change in 2010 and this is really the first time that within the legally-binding instrument internationally there is not only a recognition that the two-degree limit should guide the global mitigation efforts but also the recognition of the need to consider the strengthening of the long-term global goal in particular maybe to 1.5 degrees Celsius. So this is the history of the process as you can see; inputs from science but also in the end the very political decision to make the two-degree limit the long-term global goal of mitigation effort. There is to be frank some irony one might put it like that in the fact that as we've seen as new scientific evidence became available the temperature increase resulting from a given concentration tended to be higher than previously thought and so tended to be the impacts resulting from a given temperature increase in particular 2 degrees Celsius so in fact 2 degrees Celsius has long been in the thoughts of people as the objective but it somehow changed meaning as scientific evidence progressed because the impacts attached to that particular target were considered to be even more significant than previously thought but in the meantime global greenhouse gases emissions continue to increase and at an always faster rate and the window of opportunity to stay within the two-degree limit closes very rapidly which is a very big problem because as we've seen two-degrees is really the upper limit for safety so we're gonna try to see what we can do to keep that target within reach.
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3.4: Debates Over the 2-Degree Celsius Limit We've just looked at the history of how the 2-degree limit in the mean surface temperature increase compared to pre-industrial level became the politically agreed, but also the legal objective of global climate change mitigation as a result of an interesting scientific but also political process through the negotiations. Even though that is the politically agreed goal and even though almost all countries are part and parties to the U.N. Convention on Climate Change, it does not mean that everybody agrees with the 2-degree limit. There is in fact a pretty hot debate as to whether this is the right objective for our mitigation efforts. And there are really two sides to the arguments. So we're going to try to make sense of these different arguments. On the one side, some leading climate scientists and in particular Professor Jim Hansen we've already mentioned quite a few times in these lectures, argue that even a mean surface temperature increase limited to 2-degrees Celsius could be catastrophic. And they instead argue that we should be aiming for a 1-degree Celsius target instead of the 2degree Celsius target. So that's one side of the argument. In the meantime some observers claim that staying within the 2-degree limit is way too difficult, but also way too costly if that proved feasible. And therefore, they claim that the 2-degree limit should be either weakened. I mean we should try to adopt an easier and less costly target or some even go as far as saying that it should be simply dropped and that the world should follow a bottom up approach to climate change mitigation and that after all, countries or businesses should only do what they can do and what they want to do. So that's the two sides of the arguments. And you can see that the 2-degree limit is pretty much under fire, but does it really mean that the 2-degree limit should be revised?
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The problem is that it would be difficult just by looking at these arguments to decide if it should be revised upward or downward. So let's look in further details at the arguments of both sides to try to make sense of them. On the one hand, it is completely true that the recent scientific evidence suggests that global warming of 2degrees Celsius may well generate very severe and irreversible risks. Again, this is why some leading climate scientists are advising for a 1-degree Celsius target instead. What are their arguments, really? Well they point out to the earth's paleoclimate history. And they say that it, it points to the fact that 2-degrees Celsius of global warming is likely to result in sea level rise of 6 meters in the long-run, which I guess everybody would agree is an extremely significant threat. And it's very difficult to see how most of the places could barely adapt to such a rise in the level of the sea. Another argument they have is that they emphasize that global warming of 2-degrees Celsius could induce what they call slope amplifying feedbacks. Another way to call it is to call that chain effects from climate change. So let's look very simply at two examples. The first is that the Amazon forests could eventually die off as a result of repeated drought. And this is a very serious potential problem because the Amazon forest is a major sink of carbon emissions. So the die-off of the Amazon forest would increase and release massive amounts of C02 in the atmosphere and that would in turn further aggravate climate change. Another example is that the methane and the carbon dioxide currently buried into the permafrost of the tundra could also be released into the air as the tundra melts as a result of global warming. So that's another example of amplifying feedback and chain effects of climate change. So it's true that by pushing the climate beyond the experience of the human era for the past 100,000 years, we risk inducing conditions that are inhospitable for the human species and millions of others by the way. So it's very important to understand that a 2-degree increase in temperature is far from being risk free. This is not what it is about. But keeping below 2-degrees Celsius of global warming is really absolutely essential to maintain climate change within the boundaries of manageable risks and simply to maintain our ability to adapt to the effects of climate change. So that was one side of the argument. On the other side, some observers claim that as I already said, staying within the 2-degree limit is too difficult and too costly. Here really the recent scientific evidence does not support this claim. It indicates that keeping below the 2-degree limit for sure is extremely challenging. I mean we're not arguing here that this is an easy task. But it points to the fact that this is feasible even assuming business as usual, economic growth and development. There are many global studies, many authoritative global studies making the same point, including the scenarios reviewed by the IPCC recently released Fifth Assessment Report. But also the publications by the International Energy Agency, the IEA, or the Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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Global Energy Assessment led by the Institute of Applied Systems analysis. All these studies, all these authoritative, serious studies show that reducing global greenhouse gases emissions to a level that is consistent with the 2-degree limit is still within reach, using technologies that are either already commercially available, or demonstrated at the pilot scale. Even if, and it's very important to recognize that they would need further research and development to be deployed at the scale that is needed to achieve the deep decarbonization of the energy systems. And we're going to dedicate one full lecture to discuss the necessary research and development that is necessary to bring these technologies to eventually large-scale deployment. But what these studies also show very clearly is that the window of opportunity to stay, to keep the 2-degree limit within reach is closing very fast. So it, it's certainly true that countries need to act very quickly and in a very determined and, and also coordinated manner to keep that target within reach, if we don't want it to simply disappear. The question is what would be the cost of reducing greenhouse gases emissions to a level that is consistent with this 2-degree limit? And how does it compare to two things really, one, how does it compare to the size of the global economy? It's important to look at that, to see if we have the ability to invest into climate change mitigation actions. But also very importantly, we need to compare the cost of mitigating climate change that is reducing greenhouse gases emissions to the cost of climate change itself because it's based on this comparison that we should take a decision as to what is the appropriate level of climate change that we can afford and what is the level of climate change we should not exceed because it would induce very high costs. The modeling of the overall impact of climate change in monetary terms, that is if we try to quantify using U.S. dollars for example is a formidable challenge. And it is very important to recognize the limitations to modeling the world over one century or more. And that clearly demands that we have great caution in interpreting the results coming from these modeling scenarios. That would be very convenient if we didn't have to use these models, but the problem is that we do. We do, because of the basic nature of the challenge. Because when it comes to climate change, the lags from action to the effect are very long. So the quantitative analysis we need to do because we need to inform policy decisions by quantitative analysis is dependent on these long-range modeling exercises as George Box once very famously said, and there is a lot of truth in that statement, "all models are wrong, but some are useful." So we're going to be using these models with caution, but this is very important that we look at what they have to say to inform our decisions. So what do they teach us? Well with global warming exceeding 4-degrees Celsius, existing models that include the risk of abrupt and large-scale climate change estimates an average 5% to 10% loss in global GDP, the gross domestic product, with poor countries suffering the most in costs in excess of 10% of their GDP. But there are some limitations as I said to these models. And what we know is that the cost of business-asusual, so the cost of the continuation of the current trends if we do nothing to control climate change would increase still further if the model were able to take into account more systematically two very important factors which most of the time they fail to do.
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The first is if they included the direct impacts on the environment and human health, which sometimes we call the non-market impacts, because they're difficult to quantify in monetary terms. And the, the second element is that recent scientific evidence indicates that the climate system may be more responsive to greenhouse gases emissions than we previously thought. This is what we just discussed, that there might be slope amplifying feedbacks and chain effects that release further carbon dioxide and methane as a result of global warming itself. So if we put these two elements and build them into the modeling framework, then they would increase the total cost of uncontrolled climate change, of business-as-usual climate change to the equivalent of 20% of reduction in consumption per head now and into the future. So it is very important to understand that the assessment modeling of the cost of climate change impacts has to be built around the economics of risk and not only the traditional cost-benefit analysis. Because averaging across possibilities conceals the risks. And the risks of outcomes much worse than expected are very real and they could be catastrophic as we have been discussing in the previous chapters. So by nature, climate mitigation policy is about reducing these risks. It's true that they cannot be completely eliminated, but they can be substantially reduced and this is what we should be aiming for in real life. So a climate change modeling framework also has to take into account ethical judgment on the distribution of income and how to treat future generations. And it should not focus on narrow measures of income like GDP because as we've said, the consequences of climate change for health and for the environment are likely to be severe, but are difficult to reflect into a narrow indicator like GDP. So all these principles need to inform the way we do the cost calculation of the impacts of climate change, but also of climate change mitigation measures. Turning to the estimations of the costs of climate change mitigation. It can basically be done in two ways and both of them are complimentary and we're going to be using both of them. One is rather simply to look at the resource costs of measures, including the introduction of low common technologies and other changes that are necessary such as changes in land use. And to compare the cost of these measures with the costs of the business-as-usual alternatives. So what would happen if we didn't invest in climate change mitigation? Another type of analysis more complex but also very useful is to use macroeconomic models to explore the system-wide effects of the transition to a low common economy. It can be very useful in tracking the dynamic interactions of the different factors over time, including the response of the economies to the changes in relative prices. That Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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can be complex for sure, with their results affected by a whole range of assumptions, but they still provide very useful insights. On the basis of these two methods, so the bottom-up technological analysis and the more sophisticated macroeconomic analysis, the central estimate is that the stabilization of greenhouse gases emissions at level of 500 to 550 parts per million of C02 equivalent will cost on average around 1% of annual global GDP by 2050. The results of the bottom-up technology modeling range from minus 1%, so even in that gain compared to the business-as-usual, to plus 3.5%. So a net cost of GDP and the results of a top-down macroeconomic modeling range from minus 2%, so again, a net gain to plus 5%, a net cost of GDP. This is significant for sure. This is not a marginal cost, but this has to be looked at as an investment cost and not as a pure loss. And this is fully consistent with continued growth and development. In contrast by the way with uncontrolled business-as-usual climate change, which will eventually pose very significant threat to growth and development. So let's try to conclude by summarizing everything we've learned in this lecture. The first point that's going to guide the rest of our journey and further exploration of how we meet the challenge of deep decarbonization is that 2-degrees Celsius is really the upper limit for climate safety, because beyond 2-degrees Celsius of global warming, it is our basic ability to adapt to the likely impact of climate change that is at risk. Second, staying within the 2-degree limit is technically feasible and the costs are relatively modest compared to the size of the global economy, that's one. But also and very importantly, compared to the cost of the potential impacts from climate change itself. So there is a very good economic case to be made for climate change mitigation. The conclusion is that the 2-degree limit is a very important tool that we have that must be preserved, but also that must be operationalized in the agreement we're trying to reach in 2015 in Paris, because only an internationally coordinated, goal oriented, it's very important, approach to climate change mitigation will allow us to be on track and avoid dangerous climate change. The truth is, unfortunately, that very few countries have looked seriously at the implications for them of staying within the 2degree limit. So that's why in the next lectures we will explore in detail, but also country by country the deep transformation of the global economy and in particular, of the energy systems that are required to stay within the 2-degree limit.
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4 The 2-Degree Carbon Budget
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4.1: What is a Carbon Budget? In the previous lectures we have discussed why limiting the temperature increase below 2-degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial levels was so important. We've seen of course why it is so important from an environmental point of view to protect the planet, but we've also seen why it was so important from an economic and and social perspective, because the impacts of climate change, of uncontrolled climate change, would really be catastrophic and would even threaten our basic ability for example to eradicate poverty. Today we're going to continue in our journey to see how we can avoid these catastrophic impacts and how the world can meet the challenge of what we've called the deep decarbonization in the sense removing the carbon from our economy and in particular from our energy systems. We're going to see in particular, what is the level of emission that is consistent with this 2-degree limit over time. So this first chapter really is about a key concept, is answering this question. The question is how much anthropogenic greenhouse gases emissions, so again, the emissions resulting from our human activities, our energy production transformation and consumption processes, the emissions from our industrial activities, cement, steel, aluminum production, et cetera. And the emissions also from land: land use change, from agriculture or from deforestation. How much of these anthropogenic greenhouse gases emissions can we still emit if we want to have a chance to live within the limit we've set, the 2-degree limit? The key concept we’re going to be using to answer this essential question is the concept of the carbon budget. So I'll explain in further detail what I mean by that, but in, in simple terms a carbon budget is defined as the maximum level of cumulative that is over time as opposed to just emissions a given year. So a carbon budget is defined as the maximum level of cumulative emissions to stay within a degree of temperature increase. So how do we calculate this budget? Well as we've said repeatedly now, there are four main
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greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and the fluorinated gases. What is important when trying to estimate a carbon budget is to know that these different greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for different amounts of times. Very different in fact, amounts of time, from several months for some to millennium for some others. So they affect the climate on very different time scales. The lifetime in the atmosphere of CO2 in particular, the single largest source of greenhouse gases is unfortunately for us the most difficult to determine because there are several different processes that remove C02 from the atmosphere. First, in between 65% and 80% of CO2 that is released in the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean over a period of somewhere in between 20 to 200 years. The rest of CO2 that's not dissolved into the ocean is removed by other processes, but by processes that take up to several hundreds of thousands of years to happen. That means that once in the atmosphere, the CO2 can continue to affect the climate for hundreds of thousands of years. Methane, by contrast, CH4, is mostly removed from the atmosphere by chemical reaction. And this is a much faster process which takes about 12 years to complete. So overall, since greenhouse gases emissions and in particular, CO2 stay in the atmosphere for a very long period of time after they have been emitted, it is the cumulative level of greenhouse gases emissions that has an impact on the climate and not the emissions at a particular point in time. That's why we're going to be using the notion, the concept of a carbon budget to look at the cumulative level of emissions over time. So what is the relation here in between greenhouse gases emissions and the temperature increase? Well there is a meaningful correlation in between three things. The first is the level of cumulative greenhouse gases emissions, which we measure in tons of CO2 equivalent. Again, CO2 equivalent to measure with one unit and all the greenhouse gases are not only CO2, because they will have a warming potential. Second, their long-term concentration and their radiative forcings which we measure in parts per million of CO2 equivalent and in watts per square meter, so watts per surface, respectively. And third, the resulting mean surface temperature response which we measure very simply in increases in global average and temperature. The relation in between the cumulative greenhouse gases emissions and the global temperature response is approximately linear. So for any degree of temperature increase, and let me remind you that we're interested in one in particular, the 2-degree limit, it is possible to determine the corresponding maximum level of cumulative greenhouse gases emissions. And this is what we call the global carbon budget. That being said, there is an uncertainty surrounding the relationship of cumulative greenhouse gases emissions and the resulting global temperature increase.
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So since there is such an uncertainty, we must speak in terms of probability. A given cumulative path of greenhouse gases emissions will only yield for a given probability of staying below an increase of let's say 2-degree Celsius of global warming. In general we are interested in greenhouse gases emission pathways that give a likely chance of staying within the 2-degree limit and not only a very small probability because that wouldn't be that interesting to know that it offers only a 5% chance of reaching the objective. Usually, we define likely to try to give it a quantitative meaning, we define likely as a probability of two-thirds or higher. So higher than 66% chances of staying within a certain degree of warming. Science tells us that to have a likely chance of staying within the 2 degree limit, again, defined as a probability higher than two-thirds, the greenhouse gases concentration must stabilize at somewhere in between 430 and 480 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. This is an important number for you to remember because it gives the equivalent concentration of greenhouse gases to the 2-degree limit.
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4.2: What is the Global Carbon Budget for the 2-Degree Limit? We just defined a very important concept, the notion of a global carbon budget. I admit this is a pretty complex and sophisticated notion, but I promise we're going to make good use of it. And we're going to do that right away. We're going to apply the concepts to what is of interest to us of course and that is the global carbon budget for the 2-degree limit, because this is our objective. This is what we need to do to avoid dangerous climate change. So how do we calculate this budget? Well we need to look at the greenhouse gases concentration that is consistent with this objective. So we said it was in between 430 and 480 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. And what is especially important is to calculate the global budget for CO2 emissions only, because as we've said repeatedly, CO2 is the single largest source of total greenhouse gases emissions. And it...also because it remains in the atmosphere much longer than most of the other greenhouse gases and in particular methane. So we're trying to narrow down the issue a little bit and to calculate a global carbon budget for CO2 only as opposed to all greenhouse gases. So in order to do that, to limit the analysis to CO2, we need to be making a number of assumptions. First, regarding the known CO2 greenhouse gases emissions like methane, nitrous oxide, or fluorinated gases. Second, we need to make assumptions regarding the contribution from other climate changing factors such as the aerosols and land use albedo. Jeffrey Sachs explained in detail in some of the previous lectures on where the impacts of these factors. Third, we need to make an assumption regarding the timing of CO2 emission reductions and therefore the time the carbon cycle has to absorb the CO2 that is emitted. And fourth and finally, we have to make assumptions regarding the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 emissions and these other climate forcing. So it's, it's a comprehensive set of assumptions we need to be making.
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There are uncertainties in climate science at each and every step of these assumptions. But taking into account all these factors, the global budget for CO2 emissions to the end of the century to stay within the 2-degree limit is within the range of 630 and 1180 billion tons of CO2, or gigatons. That's the budget for CO2 to the end of the century. What is also very important is to calculate this global budget for CO2 emissions to stay within the 2-degree limit, not only to the period to the end of the century, but only to mid-century, to the year 2050, because I guess you will agree with me that the end of the century, although I hope we've shown you that it is very relevant from a climate science perspective is of course very far from an economic perspective or even worse, from a political standpoint. Countries' long-term emission reduction objectives, when they have one and the problem in fact is that not that many of them have one so far, but we're going to be discussing in the, in the next lectures why they should have one and what it should be. Countries' emission reduction objectives are to the best to the year 2050 and not to the end of the century. So it is very important that we're able to calculate a global budget to 2050 because we need to be able to calculate, to assess if countries' projected cumulative emissions to 2050 collectively fit within the global budget to stay within the 2-degree limit, because we need to be able to assess if the emission reduction targets that are taken by the different countries add up and are sufficient to reach the global goal. So if we're trying to define a budget to mid-century as opposed to, to the end of the century, we need to very simply take the century long CO2 emissions and divide them into two time periods, to mid-century first and then from 2050 to the end of the century. And of course the bulk of emissions will occur during the first period to the year 2050 because to stabilize greenhouse gases concentrations the net emissions should decline to zero during the second period. But here I want to mention something very important and that is that some scenarios, not all of them but a significant fraction of them are based on the idea of net negative emissions during the second half of the century. What is it? What, what does net negative emissions mean? How could emissions be net negative, so below zero? Well there is a number of different potential technologies that could be used to achieve net negative emissions. In particular, it could be achieved if the use of biomass for energy production was deployed in combination with carbon capture and sequestration. So it means that the biomass would be burned in the power plants and then the power plants would in turn capture and sequester the CO2 that is emitted. This is what we call bio-energy plus carbon capture and sequestration. And this is only one out of several potential net negative emissions technology, including the direct air capture of CO2. So to the extents that negative emissions are available on a large-scale in the second half of the century, the budget for CO2 emissions for the first half of the century would be of course correspondingly higher. But there is an important but here. The feasibility and the sustainability of the large-scale deployment of net negative emissions technology is still very much under debate.
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I mean not impossible and we should do everything that's possible to make it a future reality, but still unproven at this stage. In particular, what I just mentioned bio-energy plus carbon capture and sequestration raises very serious issues, because it combines the twin challenges of large-scale biomass production on the one side and the largescale storage of CO2 on the other hand. And at the global level, the large-scale use of biomass for energy production could cause deforestation or compete with land use for other purposes such as food production for example, which would have a very negative effect on food security. This is not to say that it cannot be done. In particular in some countries and under some specific circumstances with new generations of biofuels it could be done in a sustainable manner, but we've got to be very careful about the way we do it. And it isn't clear what is the scale of the potential for doing it in a sustainable manner without contributing to deforestation or without competing with land use for food purposes. That's one. On the other end the scale of the geological potential for a CO2 sequestration is also very much under debate. We're going to be discussing in some of the next lectures that CCS is a well-known technology. I mean it's not as if we had no clue how to do it. Each and every element of CCS capture and sequestration and transport is a known technology, but it's unclear what is the geological potential to sequestrate in a safe manner this CO2 under the ground. And what's more, even if CCS became a reality, it would have to be deployed first on fossil fuel power plants and industry and not first on bio-energy plants. So that being said, if we exclude at least for the time being the option for a net negative emissions, again that seems to be prudent at this stage of research and development given the uncertainty regarding their feasibility and their sustainability. If we exclude the option for a net negative emissions, then the global budget for CO2 emissions to mid-century, to the year 2050 is of 825 gigaton, or billion tons. And it is of 950 gigaton to the end of the century, which simple calculation here would imply a 125 gigaton of cumulative emissions during the second half of the century, starting the year 2050 to the end of the century. That being said, it is very important that we scale up the support for research programs that would explore the feasibility and the sustainability of net negative emission technology options such as bio-energy plus carbon capture and sequestration, or direct air capture of CO2 emissions, because it would increase the size of the carbon budget that we can use when the carbon budget is very tough and very strict. So, so far we have calculated a global budget to stay within the 2 degree limit for CO2 emissions, but we've combined CO2 emissions from very different sources in fact. I mean from the burning of fossil fuels and industrial processes, but also from land use. So the emissions coming from deforestation or the emissions coming from agriculture. If we want to define a global budget for CO2 coming only from the burning of fossil fuels and industrial processes, then we need to make yet another assumption. We need
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to make an assumption regarding the potential for CO2 emission reductions in the land use sector, but also for the potential net biological sequestration of CO2, because it's possible to achieve net biological sequestration through different types of practices such as reforestation or peat production or wetland restoration, or even improved agricultural practices. The assumption that is the most often made in the scientific literature is the assumption of net zero emissions from land use over the century. So if that is the case, it means that the 950 gigaton global budget for total CO2 emissions we defined by the end of this century to stay within the 2-degree limit can be considered as a budget for CO2 energy only. But here again I want to stress that there is great uncertainty regarding the precise potential but also the timing for possible CO2 emission reductions and net biological sequestration of CO2 in land use. I mean it might well prove impossible to achieve net zero emissions in the land use sector which would be bad news because it would further reduce the size of the budget for CO2 energy. So it would reduce the emissions that can come from energy production, transformation and consumption. But on the other hand it, it may well prove possible to achieve net negative emissions in advance of the end of the century in which case, the global budget for CO2 energy would be higher which would be a, a good news. So far, the answer is, given the state of the research that we don't really know, so it's really urgent that we do more research to see and define more clearly the budget for CO2 energy. But as a first approximation, I mean we can use what we calculated and that is 950 gigaton of CO2 energy emissions by the end of the century in total to stay within the 2-degree limit.
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4.3: What is the Global Emissions Reduction Pathway for the 2-Degree Limit? We just defined the global budget for C02 emissions that is consistent with what is our objective, the objective of limiting the temperature increase to less than 2-degree Celsius. What we're going to do in this chapter is we're going to look at the shape of the emission reduction trajectory to reach what we said was necessary and that is to reach net zero emissions by the second half of the century. So what are the emission reductions that are necessary over time and what are the implications of doing that? In 2010 the global greenhouse gases annual emissions reached 50 gigaton of C02 equivalent. So if we are to reach net zero emissions by the second half of the century, it means that global greenhouse gases emissions need to decrease not only very significantly, but very rapidly. Given all the uncertainties we discussed at each and every step of the calculation of the global carbon budget, there are several possible global emission reduction trajectories that give a likely chance of staying within the 2-degree limit. Again, we're defining likely here as a probability higher than two-thirds, higher than 66%. But in spite of these uncertainties we can come up with pretty good estimates and we can define the range of a portfolio of scenarios staying within this 2-degree limit. In these scenarios the global greenhouse gases emissions need to get down to 22 gigaton of C02 equivalent by 2050. The full range is in between 18 to 25 gigaton. That's the level we need to reach by 2050. Again, you need to compare that to where we are today, it's 22 in 2050 compared to 50 today. By the year 2020, the global greenhouse gases emissions already need to be lower than today's level. It means that Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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we need to pick the global emissions even before 2020, because by 2020 they need to reach 44 gigaton of C02 equivalent. The full range again is in between 38 to 47 gigaton. And by the year 2030, it's important to look at that because it's also the focus of the current negotiations on climate change. So on the run-up to Paris in December, 2015, the countries are preparing contributions emission reduction pledges to the year 2030, so it's important that we have this metric to compare it to what they will pledge in the international negotiations. And so to state within the 2-degree limit the global greenhouse gases emissions in 2030 need to reach 35 gigaton of C02 equivalent, the full range being in between 32 to 42 gigaton. Here I was talking about greenhouse gases emissions overall. So all the greenhouse gases. But the focus here is going to be on C02 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in industry. So what does it mean for these emissions in particular as we've said, I mean this is the largest source of emissions. And here too, of course given only uncertainties there are many possible C02 energy emission reduction pathways that give a likely chance of staying within the 2-degree limit. But let's pick two examples. The first is the representative concentration pathway, 2.6. It's a complicated term but it's a scenario that was developed by the Netherlands' Environmental Agency and it's the scenario that was discussed in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group One. And that's the scenario among others, but that was the central scenario discussed that gives a likely chance of staying within the 2-degree limit. And it reaches approximately 12 gigaton of C02 energy only in 2050. So remember, that was 22 gigaton of C02 equivalent by 2050 for all greenhouse gases and here we're talking about 12 gigaton of C02 energy only in 2050. If we want to compare the result of that particular scenario with another one, we can use the scenario from the
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International Energy Agency, its 2-degree scenario. Important precision here, the International Energy Agency scenario gives not a likely chance of staying within the 2-degree limit, but only a 50% chance of staying within the 2-degree limit. So the level of C02 energy emissions in 2050 is a bit higher than in the previous scenario. And in fact it's 15 gigaton of C02 energy by 2050. This is what you can see on the graph with the two trajectories from 2010 to 2050 and you can see that the scenario from the International Energy Agency is a bit higher than the scenario, RCP2.6 that was discussed in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, in part because they do not give the same probability of staying within the 2-degree limit. So that's what we should do if we were serious with the commitment we took, the commitment to limit the temperature increase below 2-degrees Celsius. So are we serious? Are we doing what it takes to reach the objective? Unfortunately the answer is pretty simple and this is, no. We're not on track and we're not even close to being on track with this objective. In Copenhagen in 2009 and then in Cancún in 2010, all the large greenhouse gases emitting countries, so that is the U.S., China, the European Union, India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Canada, Russia, all of them, they took some quantitative emission reductions or limitations in the case of some countries, targets to 2020. That was of course a major breakthrough in the history of international climate negotiations because before that, only the developed countries and not even all of them had quantified targets to reduce their emissions. And for the first time in 2009 and then in 2010, all the large emitters of greenhouse gases, whether they be developed countries or middle-income countries took a target to the year 2020. The problem though is that these targets are collectively, widely insufficient to put the world on the 2-degree path. Though there is an internal inconsistency in our climate change agreement because we have a global goal, the 2-degree limit, but then the countries emission reduction targets do not add up to this goal. By how much is the question? Well if countries emissions reduction pledges were fully implemented, then the 2020 level of global greenhouse gases emissions would be in between 52 and 56 gigaton of C02 equivalent. And you know that in order to stay within the 2-degree limit, it's not 52 or 56 gigaton of C02 equivalent that we need, but 44. So there is a big difference in between these two numbers. There is by the way an uncertainty. I'm saying in between 52 and 56, because it was not always very clear what was the target pledged by the different countries. It was not always clear mainly for two reasons. The first is that some pledges were expressed, framed as deviation from business-as-usual emissions or as improvements in the
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carbon intensity of GDP. So the ratio in between the carbon emissions and the GDP. But there is of course an uncertainty regarding business-as-usual emissions, or what Is the rate of future GDP growth. So it's not easy to translate into an absolute level of emissions, pledges when they are made in such a way. The other reason is that some countries put forward in the Copenhagen and then Cancun agreements some emission reduction ranges. And not only a single number. The European Union for example pledged a 20% to 30% emission reduction targets in 2020 compared to their level in 1990. And it said, well I'm only going to move to the high end of the range, to the 30% if other countries do their fair share of the effort. In the meantime, China pledged a 40% to 45% improvement in the carbon intensity of GDP. And India, a 20% to 25% improvement, also in the carbon intensity of its GDP. And it said, both countries said, well we're only going to move to the high end of the range if the developed countries provide us with the means we need, the international financial and technological support we need to implement the intended climate change mitigation actions and measures. So that's why there is an uncertainty and that's why I'm not able to tell you, well as a result of the agreement we have, here is where would be the emissions in 2050...in 2020. It's a bit more complicated than that. We have to play with ranges. But the point is, start anyway. And the point is that there is a very significant gap in emission reductions to have a likely chance of staying within the 2-degree limit. The gap in 2020 is in fact as high as 8 to 12 gigaton of C02 equivalent. This is a huge number, this is not only a margin of error, this is a very significant gap in emission reductions to again, just stick to the commitment we made. In particular, when you compare this gap with what the emission reduction pledges that have been made by countries would deliver, because they would in fact only deliver is 3 to 7 gigaton reduction compared to business-as-usual. So the gap is even higher than what the pledges achieve compared to the continuation of the current trends.
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There is a very simple calculation that we can do and let's do it together to give us an idea of the order of magnitude that is necessary to stay within the 2-degree limit. As we've said, today's level of C02 energy emissions globally is approximately 32 gigaton of emissions. If we use the International Energy Agency 2-degree scenario as a reference and again, that gives only a 50% chance of staying within the 2-degree limit, it means that the global C02 energy emissions need to be divided by a bit more than 2, by 2050, since they need to reach 15 gigaton of C02 energy by 2050. But in the meantime, according to the U.N. Population Division, Medium Fertility Forecasts the world population is expected to grow by 2050. In fact it's expected to grow by 35% in the next 40 years, from approximately 7 billion people on the planet today to a bit more than 9.5 billion in 2050. So if we divide the two numbers, it means that the global average per capita emissions need to be divided by 65% by 2050. Needs to go from 4.6 today to 1.6 tons of C02 energy emissions per person and per year in 2050. Why is it important to make this calculation? It's important because it's a pretty uncomfortable truth, but all countries will need to converge close to this global average of 1.6 tons of C02 energy per capita by 2050. Not that many countries will be able to have emissions higher than this level. And this is the result of a simple mathematical calculation, because on the one hand, very few countries with C02 energy per capita higher than 1.6 tons today will simply technically be able to go far below this level by 2050, because that would push the boundaries of what is technically feasible. But on the other hand, the catch-up economic growth in the low income countries that currently emit less than 1.6 tons per head will increase their per capita emissions by 2050, or at least one should hope that growth in these countries has this effect, because it would be very good news for them. And that would be the case even if they decrease the carbon intensity of their economic growth. So the truth is that if nobody can be far below or above the global average, then all countries should converge close to this average by 2050. It doesn't mean that the convergence of per capita emissions is a way to allocate equitably the global carbon budget in between different countries. And we're going to come back to that in the next lectures, because it doesn't take into account very important elements that are central to the equity of the global effort to reduce greenhouse gases emissions. In particular, it doesn't account for the fact as we discussed previously that the historic contribution of the different countries is not the same. So the developed countries have emitted much more so far than the developing countries. But it's a simple mathematical conclusion that almost all countries will need to converge at least close to this level of 1.6 tons of C02 energy per capita by 2050.
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4.4: How Does It Compare with the Potential Emissions from Fossil Fuel Reserves & Resources? This is the last step in our journey discussing the global carbon budget. And what we're going to do in this last chapter is we're going to compare the global budget for C02 energy emissions to stay within the 2-degree limit. We're going to compare that to the potential emissions embedded into the fossil fuel reserves and resources. It's a very important calculation to make because it gives an indication of the share of reserves and resources that we can use, that we can use without carbon capture and sequestration. But also very importantly those that would have to be used with carbon capture and sequestration or stranded. That means, that we would have to leave these resources under the ground. That we would have to leave them unexploited which of course would have very significant consequences for some companies and some countries. So to do that we need to distinguish in between two things, two different types of categories of fossil fuel amounts. The first is the proven reserves of fossil fuels. So oil, coal, and gas. And the proven reserves are the amount that are already today economically viable under the current economic and technological conditions. This is different from the resources. The resources are the amounts in addition to these proven reserves that would only become technologically accessible and are only potentially economically viable, for example, if the price of oil or the price of coal and gas and...increases and makes the exploitation of these resources economical. So what is the C02 energy emissions that is potentially embedded into these reserves and resources? We need to use a single metric to compare the potential emission from different types of fossil fuels, from oil, and by the way, different types of oil, conventional and unconventional. The same for gas, conventional and unconventional.
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And also for coal because not all the coal has the same potential C02 emissions. In particular, lignite coal is much worse from C02 emission perspectives than other types of coal. But if we take all the fossil fuel reserves, the proven reserves together, they represent approximately 4000 to 7000 gigaton of potential C02 energy emissions, which is enormous. But the aggregate fossil fuel resources, so the amounts in addition to the proven reserves are even more enormous. They represent approximately 30,000 to 50,000 gigaton of potential C02 energy emissions. So if we combine these two together to have the total, it means that the potential C02 that is embedded in the proven reserves and resources is as high as 35, 34,000, sorry, gigaton or 57 gigaton of C02. This is of course one or two order of magnitudes higher than the global C02 energy budget to stay within the 2-degree limit because let me remind you that we have calculated that it was a mere 950 gigaton of C02 equivalent which we need to compare with the potential emissions from the fossil fuel proven reserves and resources. It means that this potential C02 is three to seven times larger than the global C02 energy budget if we limit the analysis to the proven reserves, but it is 35 to 60 times higher if we look at the total reserves and resources. So it is obvious that there are vastly more reserves and resources than we can safely use. We're going to have to leave some of these resources under the ground. This is a very unsettling truth, but this is very obvious from simply doing the math and looking at the global carbon budget for the 2degree limit. I should mention that this conclusion that we're going to have to strand some fossil fuel assets or leave them under the ground is true even if we allow for a significant share of geological sequestration of carbon. If carbon capture and sequestration became available as we have already discussed, each component of the CCS technology is a well-known technology, but the potential for the geological sequestration, the scale of the geological potential for the sequestration of carbon is unknown. But as a reference, the International Energy Agency 2-degree scenario assumes CCS of around a 125 gigaton of C02 until 2050. So.... And the IEA can be considered on the rather optimistic side of the feasibility of the deployment of CCS. But you see that this 125 gigaton doesn't allow for the exploitation of all the resources and the proven reserves. I mean we're talking of different orders of magnitudes here. So again, what is very clear from these numbers is that a very large fraction of these fossil fuel reserves and resources will have to stay under the ground because they'll.... Even the already proven reserves are many times beyond the safe level of cumulative fossil fuel use.
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And yet the energy sector invests hundreds of billions of dollars each year to discover and develop new resources and reserves, which is...raises the obvious question whether such investments are well directed or if they're simply wasteful because the mean developing reserves that can never safely be used. What one would expect instead is that the fossil fuel industry is investing massively in the research and development of carbon capture and sequestration because this is what would allow to use a higher proportion of the existing reserves and resources. Of the three fossil fuels, the coal deposits will most likely have to be stranded in the highest proportion. And this is for at least four reasons. The first is very simply that its reserves and resources levels are much higher than those of oil and gas and vastly greater than any plausible global C02 energy budget, even with carbon capture and sequestration. The second reason is that the C02 per unit of energy of coal is much higher than that of oil and gas. It is 22% higher than oil and 68% higher than gas. The third reason is that coal use has very serious adverse side effects beyond global warming, such as an air pollution that causes very severe disease burden. So there is a rationale, even beyond climate change to scale down the use of coal for power production in particular. And the fourth and final reason is that most coal is used in relatively large stationary sources such as the power plants where there are lower carbon or even zero carbon substitutes that are pretty easy to identify as opposed to oil, for example, where it's harder to see what could be the alternative even if there are some. So given the substitutes for coal, it may soon be feasible, but in fact it may soon be necessary for many or most countries to stop building new coal-fire power plants, except if they're coming with carbon capture and sequestration. Coal would not be the only fossil fuel that would have to be stranded. It's also clear that the available oil and gas reserves, plus resources are very large compared to the global C02 energy budget. Yet it is a question, which of those oil and gas reserves will be stranded and which of them will be developed? nd the efficient answer to the question is to deploy the lowest cost oil and gas, but one has to take into account their respective C02 content per unit of energy and the cost calculation, including a price on carbon emission. And based on this calculation to leave the...to decide leaving the higher cost oil and gas in the ground. But it's important to mention that the issue is not necessarily conventional versus nonconventional resources per se. It's really the relative cost of the development and the extraction of the alternative that is important and needs to be taken into account. What is also true is that stranding fossil fuel assets will have very high distributional consequences because not all countries are equal, vis-á-vis, fossil fuels, because some countries are
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net exporters of fossil fuels when some others are net importers. So a country with stranded fossil fuel reserves may lose a considerable amount of income. So the decision about how strand these assets and whether we do it through consumption type policy measures such as a price on common or if we do it through a production type of measure, for example, through production permits, we'll have a very large distributional implications for sharing the global effort of emission reductions. And it will need to be considered seriously and I would say much more seriously than was the case previously if we want to reach a successful agreement on climate change, because we really need to get the fossil fuel exporting countries such as the U.S., Canada, Russia or the Gulf countries back into the game of discussing seriously how we can reduce greenhouse gases emissions.
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5: The Deep Decarbonization of Energy Systems
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5.1: What is an Energy System? Today's lecture is an important milestone in this course, an important turning point, because so far we've been mostly looking at the problems of human-induced climate change. But today, good news, we're going to start looking at some of the solutions. Up until now you might think that the picture looked quite grim, and you would have a point because indeed the potential consequences of uncontrolled climate change are very severe, very threatening. And the challenge of avoiding dangerous climate change is also very significant. It requires very deep reductions in greenhouse gases emissions to eventually as we discussed in the previous lectures, net zero emissions by the second half of the century. We also mentioned that it, in turn, requires a profound transformation of the way we grow our economies and in particular, a fundamental transformation of our energy systems. But the good news is that this is feasible. This is certainly not easy, but this is feasible. And today we're going to start looking at some of the possible solutions to the deep decarbonization of our energy systems. We're going to do so first at a pretty high level, looking at the solutions at the global level first, but for each of the key sectors of the economy, the energy supply, the industry, the buildings, the transport sector. But in the next lectures we will take a closer look at these solutions by looking in detail at country-specific case studies and also by looking in detail at some of the most important technological challenges such as carbon capture and sequestration, or new generation of nuclear power, or the challenge of having smart grids and energy storage to be able to operate our power system with a high share of intimate and renewable energies, or the challenge of having long-range electric vehicles. But before we do that,
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we need to have a good understanding of how our energy systems function. And this is what this first chapter is about. I want you to understand how energy is produced. I want you to understand how it is transformed and how it is consumed because we need that to understand how we can decarbonize our energy systems. The truth is that energy is everywhere in our daily lives. We use for example energy to transport ourselves. We use energy to light, to heat, to cool our homes. We use energy also to power our TVs or our computers or our washing machines and fridges. But energy is also absolutely central to the process of economic growth and development because we need energy to produce all the goods we consume. We need even more energy to be frank, to produce the kind of construction materials such as cement or steel that we use to build the infrastructures that support our economic growth and our development. And we also need a lot of energy to ship all these products from where they're produced to where they are consumed. There are many different sources of energy. Let me make a short list. We have coal. We have oil. We have gas. We have hydro energy, nuclear energy. And also all different sorts of renewable energies such as solar, wind, or biofuels. We call these different sources of energy the primary energy. And the table you can see is what we call an energy balance. And the different sources of primary energy can be read in the columns to this table. The primary sources of energy can either be used for direct, final energy consumption or they can be transformed into another form of energy, because before their final energy use in energy end use sectors such as transport, buildings, or industry. Let me take an example to illustrate that point. Coal can either directly be used to produce heat for buildings or different types of industrial processes or it can be used to produce electricity which in turn is used for lighting or to power any electrical equipment. There are also many different types of energy transformation processes which you can read in the lines in the middle of the table. Again, let me pick just three examples. Power plants, very important type of energy transformation process. The power plants use all different sorts of primary sources of energy such a coal, gas, hydro, uranium, all different sorts of renewable energies to produce electricity. Second example, the oil refineries that transform crude oil into oil products that can be used by ars or by planes. Heat plants that use coal, gas or biofuels to produce heat for buildings or industrial processes.
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There are energy losses happening during these transformation processes. And these losses represent the difference between primary energy, and final energy. And, and you can see the final energy end use sectors at the bottom of the table. You see the names of the different sectors, industry, transport and on the graph, other, which in particular includes buildings. The transformation and the consumption of some forms of energy, not all of them, leads to CO2 emissions and therefore contributes to global warming. Some types of energy have no direct emissions such as nuclear power, hydropower, or renewable energy such as solar or wind. Even if it's.... And it's important to mention in, they might induce some emissions through their life cycle, but they have no direct emissions. To the contrary, the burning of fossil fuels, the coal, the oil, the gas emits CO2 through the burning process. And of the three fossil fuels, coal has the highest CO2 emissions content per unit of energy. Its carbon content is on average across the different forms of coal, 22% highest than oil and 68% higher than gas. So to summarize this chapter, the ultimate objective of the deep transformation of our energy system really is the phasing out of freely emitting fossil fuels. I underline "freely emitting" here because fossil fuels could continue to be used with some technologies and in particular with carbon capture and sequestration. But the uncapped fossil fuels must go, they must be phased out. And we're going to see in the next chapter that this is a major challenge because fossil fuels still represent the lion's share of our energy consumption. And in fact an ever-growing share.
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5. 2: Energy-Related CO2 Emissions Trends In this chapter I want us to take a closer look at the current energy trends. I want us to take a closer look at the current dynamics in the energy markets because to see eventually how we can decarbonize the energy systems, we first need to really well understand what is going on today and how we can reverse the current trends. So where are we? As you can see on these pie charts, in 2010, primary energy was approximately 13 billion tons of oil. And final energy consumption, 9 billion tons of oil equivalent. I am using the unit of billion tons of oil equivalent to be able to measure within a single unit all the different sources of primary energy I mentioned in the previous chapter. By the way, exactly in the same way, we used the unit of CO2 equivalent to measure with a single unit all sources of greenhouse gases. As you can see on the pie charts, oil is the biggest source of primary energy, 32%. Even before coal, which represents 27% of the primary energy and gas with 21% of the total. So fossil fuels really are and by far, the major sources of primary energy today. And this is precisely where the problem lies. Final energy is primarily consumed through oil, again. This time for a 41% of the total. Then electricity for 18%, then gas, 15%, and coal for 10%. But let's look in further detail in which sectors and for which purposes the different sources of energy are used, because there are some important differences across the different sectors.
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As you can see on these other pie charts, coal as a primary source of energy is mainly used in the industry sector, 80%. Some of the most energy intensive industries include cement, steel, or the mining sector for example. Oil for its part is mainly used in the transport sector, 60% of the total energy consumption of the transport sector. Oil is used in particular in different forms, but in the internal combustion engine of private vehicles and trucks, but is also used for air transport and ocean shipping. Gas a fuel is mainly used in the residential and commercial building sector, most importantly for heating purposes. That's 46% of the total. But also gas is used in industry, for 35% of the total. And finally, electricity is used primarily in the residential and commercial building sector for 57%, to provide lighting for example, or electric heating or to power all different sorts of electrical equipment. But it is also used, electricity is also used in industry. An example of industry that is very electricity-intensive, that consumes a lot of electricity per unit of output is the aluminum industry. In the recent past and in spite of the repeated commitments to reduce greenhouse gases emissions that we discussed in the previous lectures, the energy consumption and the CO2 energy emissions have continued to rise. And in fact, they have continued to rise very sharply. The CO2 energy emissions increased by 10% during the 1990 to 2000 period. And they even increased by 30% during the last ten years from the year 2000 to 2010. And as you can see on the graph, the rise in CO2 energy emissions was especially strong in China. Also in India. Although the Indians' emissions are of course still much lower than the Chinese emissions. In the U.S. the emissions increased from 1990 to 2000, but they decreased from 2000 to 2010, in part due to a shift from coal to gas in the power supply. In the European Union the emissions fell steadily from 1990 to 2010 due in part to the implementation of climate change mitigation policies but also and a bit more unfortunately, more recently as a result of the economic crisis. And the emissions as you can see on the graph fell very sharply in Russia from 1990 to 2000, mostly as a result of the collapse uh, of the Soviet Union, that the emissions are more or less flat in Russia since the year 2000. If the growth in CO2 energy emissions during the 2000-2010 period was so fast, it's because energy demand rose very quickly in this period, mainly due to the rapid economic catch-up growth in some of the world emerging countries. But it's not the entire story. The CO2 energy emissions rose very quickly, also because the carbon content of energy consumption increased which is a very bad news from a climate change mitigation perspective. In fact, almost half of the incremental energy consumption in the last ten years during the 2000 to 2010 period came from coal as you can see on
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the graph. This is absolutely gigantic and even more than during the previous decades. So instead of decarbonizing our energy systems, we are currently carbonizing them. The current energy trends are therefore completely out of line with the objective of avoiding dangerous climate change. In fact, they lead straight to catastrophic climate change because they would induce a rise in the mean surface temperature by 4degrees Celsius or perhaps even 6-degree Celsius. So the current trend is a trend of very rapidly rising energy consumption and increasing CO2 content of energy when we should instead be further de-coupling energy consumption growth from GDP growth and decreasing the carbon content of energy by relying much more heavily on the low or even zero carbon sources of energy. In the next chapter we're going to see how this can be achieved.
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5. 3: The 3 Pillars of the Deep Decarbonization of Energy Systems I kept you waiting and I'm really sorry for that, but now is the time to start to looking at the solutions to the challenge of the deep decarbonization of our energy systems. How can we do it, that is the question? And in particular, how can we do it while making sure that we satisfy the conditions for continued economic growth and development and making sure that there is growing prosperity over the globe. This is precisely what we're going to discuss in this chapter. But first let me recap what is the scale of the challenge. As we discussed previously, CO2 energy related emissions are of approximately 32 gigaton today, gigaton or billion tons. To have a likely chance which let me remind you, we defined as a probability higher than two-thirds, higher than 66%, to have a likely chance then of staying within the 2degree limit, the need to get down to approximately 11 gigaton by 2050. By comparison, to have a 50% chance only, so only one of out two of keeping below the 2-degree limit, the need to reach approximately 15 gigaton by 2050. So we're roughly talking of a division by a factor two or even three of CO2 energy emissions in the next 40 years. When in the meantime the world population is expected to grow and it is expected to grow by approximately one-third by 2050 compared to today. And the world GDP is also expected to grow and much faster in fact than the world population. It is expected to be multiplied by something like three by 2050 compared to today. So if we combine these different numbers together it means that we're talking of dividing emissions per capita by something in between two-thirds and three-fourths by
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mid-century. And dividing emissions per GDP by a factor of six or nine by 2050, which is huge. And so how can we achieve this decoupling between population and GDP growth on the one hand and energy consumption and CO2 emissions on the other hand? If you've looked at the number, this is by any standard a major challenge, but this is certainly feasible. And I want to show you how. The easiest way to understand how that can be done is to decompose the drivers of CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions can be expressed as the product of four inputs. CO2 emissions equal population, that is the first term multiplied by GDP per capita, that is the second term, multiplied by energy use per unit of GDP, that is the third term, multiplied by the CO2 emissions per unit of energy, that is the fourth term. If you multiply these four terms, you get simply the CO2 emissions. I'm just decomposing CO2 emissions into these four terms to explain you where the emissions come from and in turn, to explain you how the emissions can be reduced, through which mechanisms in particular. If we take as a given the population trajectory and if we assume a rising trajectory of GDP per capita, in line with successful economic growth and, and development, then the CO2 emissions are driven mainly by the two last factors out of the four. The first is the energy divided by GDP. And the second are the CO2 emissions divided by energy. The first term is what we call the energy intensity, meaning very simply the amount of energy per unit of final output. The amount of energy we consume per unit of GDP we produce. The second term is the carbon intensity of energy, meaning the, the amount of carbon emissions per unit of energy we consume. So let's look at the ways in which we can reduce these two different ratios? So first, the energy intensity of GDP or as I said very simply, the energy consumption divided by GDP. It can be reduced through what we call energy efficiency and energy conservation measures in all the energy end use sectors. And we're going to look in detail at each of them. First, passenger transportation and freight transport. Second, residential and commercial buildings. And third, industry. So what's the difference in between energy efficiency and energy conservation? Because I just used both. Well usually we call
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energy efficiency the technical improvements of products and processes. And we use the term, energy conservation to describe a broader set of measures, including not only technical improvements, but more profoundly structural and behavioral changes that lead to lower levels of energy consumed per unit of GDP.
So let's simply look at some examples to be very concrete and very precise. Examples of energy efficiency and energy conservation measures in the passenger transport and freight transport, for example to start with.
Well first, improved vehicle technologies. That is more efficient vehicles. Vehicles using less gasoline for example per kilometer traveled. Second, what we can call smart urban design. You can think at least of two things. One, building public transportation systems to reduce the need for the use of private cars, but you can think even more profoundly about building cities in a way that minimizes the distance to travel from where we live to where we work. Again, reducing the need for private transportation cars. Third example. Optimized value change. Again, to minimize the distance, but this time the distance we need to ship the products from where they are produced to where they are consumed.
If we look at the residential and the commercial building sector, we can also think of a number of different options.
First, improved end use equipment. So more energy efficient equipment in our buildings. But also what we could call smart architectural design. So building our houses in a way that reduces the need for cooling or heating for example. More generally, improved building practices to improve the energy efficiency of the building envelope and also the use of different, less energy intensive construction materials.
If we look at the industry sector, again, many different options for an energy efficiency such
as improved equipment and production processes, material efficiency, but also very importantly because the industry is a huge consumer of heat to produce its products.
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So reuse of waste heat is an important part of the energy efficiency measures in industry.
So that's it for all the different ways in he different sectors in which we can improve the energy efficiency of GDP. So the ratio of energy consumption divided by GDP. But as I said, it's not the only driver of possible emission reductions. We now need to looked at the other term, the improvement in the carbon intensity of energy or the ratio of CO2 emissions per unit of energy consumed. And here too the carbon intensity of energy can be reduced in two different ways. The first is and very importantly, because it's really at the core of any successful deep decarbonization strategy, it is the decarbonization of electricity generation. So as I said, your objective is the replacement of the uncontrolled fossil fuels, the phase out of the uncontrolled fossil fuels to produce electricity by a mix of different options, because there are different options to produce electricity with no or very little CO2 emissions. The first is a mix of all different sorts of renewable energy such as hydropower, wind power, solar power, or geothermal energy. But you can also think of using nuclear power or using the fossil fuels, so the coal and the gas used to produce electricity, but with carbon capture and sequestration. So that's a first important way in which we can decrease the carbon intensity of energy, by decarbonizing the way we produce electricity. There is another way which we call fuel switching. It means switching end use energy supplies from highly carbon intensive fossil fuels in transportation or in buildings and in the industry to lower carbon fuels. Electricity is of course one of these possible lower carbon fuels, provided it is decarbonized. But there are other possible forms of lower carbon fuels and in particular, the use of biofuels. So again, this is another way of reducing the carbon intensity of energy which we call fuel switching, switching fuel from high carbon to low carbon sources of energy. So let me summarize. The deep Decarbonization of energy systems rests on three pillars.
The first is energy efficiency and conservation measures. The second is the production of low carbon electricity.
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And the third is the switching of fuels from high to low carbon energy carriers.
I want to stress here that electricity plays a pivotal role in the deep Decarbonization scenarios because you see electricity in two out of the three pillars.
First you see that electricity needs to be almost completely decarbonized and we're going to come back to that in a moment. But also because electricity overall plays a more important role in energy consumption as fuel consumption switches from high carbon to low carbon options.
It is very important that you remember these three pillars because they really represent the basic framework to think about the deep decarbonization of energy systems in any circumstance. As we're going to see in the next lectures, the precise options within each of these three pillars, but also their relative importance is going to vary of course from one country to the next. But these three pillars really represent the basic foundation to think about deep decarbonization.
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5.4: A Global Mitigation Scenario In the previous chapter, I introduced the three pillars of the deep decarbonization of our energy system. So let me just very quickly recap what they are.
First, the energy efficiency and conservation measures. Second, the production of low carbon electricity. And third the fuel switching from high carbon to low carbon energy carriers.
As I said, these three pillars represent the overarching framework for these deep decarbonization strategies of our energy system. But before we conclude this lecture, there are still two questions that we need to answer.
The first is how do these pillars apply to the different sectors of the economy and how can the coordinated implementation of these three strategies result in the overall deep Decarbonization of the economy? The second question is very importantly, the quantification of their effect by how much do each sector emissions need to be reduced to reach level of deep decarbonization consistent with the objective of limiting the increase in mean surface temperature below 2-degree Celsius?
To answer these two questions we're going to use the results of a global modeling scenario. The graph in the top left corner represents the business-as-usual scenario, or the continuation of the current trends. This is if you will, the scenario if we don't implement climate change mitigation policies which by the way, means that this is a scenario in which we don't avoid dangerous climate change and we would face the catastrophic consequences from an uncontrolled climate change. As you can see on this graph, on the top left corner, CO2 energy emissions are increasing sharply. They go from approximately 35 gigaton of CO2 energy emissions by 2015 to more than 50 gigaton of CO2 energy by 2050. And in this scenario, in this business-as-usual scenario, emissions from all sectors are rising, but in particular, the emissions from power generation.
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To the country the graph in the top right-hand corner represents a 2-degree Celsius scenario. So in, in this scenario the CO2 emissions are reduced over time to a level that is consistent with the objective of staying within 2-degree of global warming. And as you can see on this graph, on the top right-hand corner emissions peak by approximately 2020 and then they're reduced, they're in fact reduced dramatically to approximately 11 gigaton of CO2 energy by 2050. So what do we really learn from the results of this global mitigation scenario? Well it shows a few important things.
1. First it shows that staying within the 2-degree limit requires deep emission reductions in all sectors of the economy. Profound emission reductions in power generation, industry, transport and buildings. But what is interesting is that it shows also that these sectoral emissions, the emissions from the different sectors are reduced in different proportions. And that is due mainly to two factors. a. I mean first, the fact that the different sectors do not have the same technical mitigation potential. So technically not the same options to reduce their emissions, b. but also that the cost of these different options in the different sectors is different. And on the two graphs at the bottom, you can see the amount of the emissions reductions by sector in the 2-degree scenario compared to the reference scenario. And I'm just showing you one example here. But I want to stress what is really a general result of all global mitigation scenarios that limit the rise in temperature below 2-degree Celsius and it is that emissions from the power generation are reduced frankly to almost zero in these scenarios. And electricity production by 2050 is almost completely decarbonized and because power generation is done by using zero or very low sources of energy such as renewable energy, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, that's renewable energies. Or on the other hand, nuclear power or fossil fuel plus carbon capture and sequestration. This is a very important result, because the power generation in 2-degree Celsius scenarios goes from being
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the major source of CO2 energy emissions today to being almost completely decarbonized. So producing virtually zero CO2 energy emissions by 2050. 2. Another result going beyond power generation is of course that the emission reductions in the other sectors, so in building, industry and transport are also very substantial. So I don't want to pretend like this is only an agenda for the power sector. This is certainly not the case. The power sector needs to be at the front and center of the deep Decarbonization of energy system, that is for sure, but the energy end use sectors also need to see their emissions decreasing very significantly and very quickly. For example, in the order of 40% for the transport sector in 2050 and 70% for the industry and building sectors in this scenario. There are two things I would like to say to conclude this lecture. The first is that this global mitigation scenario as all the others, again, I picked one example, but all the conclusions can be applied to all the scenarios. This global mitigation scenario consistent with the 2-degree limit rests on the deployment of technologies that are not yet technologically mature, or that are still far too costly to achieve deep decarbonization. Examples of these technologies include carbon capture and sequestration, or nuclear force generation, or smart grids and energy storage to be able to operate the power system with high shares of intermittent. That is, intrinsically time variable renewable energy such as wind power or solar power. It is clear that these technologies will need further research, development and demonstration before they can be deployed at scale and at reasonable costs. The second thing I want to mention is that I presented you the results of a global mitigation scenario. But as we're going to see, country specific deep decarbonization strategies show a very wide variety of different approaches based on different national circumstances. These different circumstances includes things like different socioeconomic conditions or different natural resources endowments such as, well different availability of renewable energy potential, or different potential for carbon sequestration sites, or also, and it's very important to take that into account, different national preferences regarding the different technologies, nuclear or CCS or other technologies. But in the next lectures we will look in further detail at these two questions.
First, the key technological challenges that must be met to achieve deep Decarbonization and we will discuss each of them in detail, and second, we will be looking at country-specific case studies to see really concretely how deep decarbonization can be achieved within very different national contexts.
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6: The Key Technological Challenges of Deep Decarbonization
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6.1 The Need for Accelerated Development of Low-Carbon Technologies / Key technologies For RDD&D Today we're going to discuss in detail some of the key technological challenges that must be met to achieve the deep decarbonization of our energy systems. This is a very important theme of this course. And in fact, also a very important era for action at the international level because we've stressed many times now the importance of developing these new low carbon technologies in addition to the ones that are already available today and already deployed to realize the deep transformation of our energy system that is required. As I hope you remember, at the end of Lecture five I presented you the results of a global mitigation scenario that achieves a level of CO2 emission reductions consistent with the objective of limiting the temperature increase below 2-degree Celsius. And we saw that achieving deep decarbonization was certainly challenging, but also very feasible and required in particular the almost complete Decarbonization of electricity supply, the largest source of CO2 energy emissions today. But also the very significant, although less radical emission reductions in the end use energy sectors such as transport, building or industry. But if you remember correctly, I also emphasized that the implementation of the scenario depended on the deployment and the development at scale of technologies that are either not yet completely technologically mature, or whose costs are still very high. And today in this lecture, starting with this first chapter I want us to identify which of these technologies in particular are key to the process of deep decarbonization. But I also want us to go through each of these technologies one by one and review which are the main technological challenges that must be overcome if these technologies are to be eventually deployed at scale.
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Make no mistake here, many of the technologies that are required to reduce the emissions from our energy systems are already available and many of them in fact are already deployed, at least at a pretty significant scale in the global economy. And this is true by the way for each of the three pillars we said were the overarching framework of deep decarbonization. So remember, improving energy efficiency, decarbonizing electricity generation and switching to low carbon fuels. In each of these three pillars we can pick many examples to make this point. For example there are many existing technological options to improve the energy efficiency of our homes and our industries. Many options for energy efficient heating and cooling. The use of thermostat in particular can save you a lot of energy simply by turning down the temperature when there is nobody at home, or at night. Replacing the incandescent lights by light bulbs also saves a lot of energy. And there are also many options to improve the insulation of the building envelope, for example, by using double or even triple glaze windows. Appliances and electronics are also much more energy efficient than they used to be in the past. And what I'm sure you've noticed, the Energy Star label can help purchasing the most energy efficient equipment. So that was for just a few by the way of a very wide range of existing energy efficiency technology. Let's turn to the second pillar, the low carbon electricity. Here too there are already many existing options to produce electricity in a low carbon way with either low carbon sources of energy or even completely zero sources of electricity production. Example, hydropower has been used for a very long time now and is by the way one of the cheapest way to generate electricity. Many other renewable energies are also being used, although they're being used at different scales. Onshore or offshore wind. Solar photovoltaic or concentrated solar power. Some of them have even reached what we call the grid parity. What is it, the grid parity? Complex term for a very simple concept. It is the cost at which the low carbon technologies are, become competitive with the other alternative forms of energy. And some of the renewable energy, certainly not all of them, and certainly not everywhere, have reached the grid parity with some of their high carbon alternatives. Nuclear power is also used by several countries, in fact close to 40 countries to generate electricity. If we go to the transport sector to discuss some of the existing low carbon technologies, there are already a wide-range of fuel efficient hybrid, sometimes even completely battery electric, light duty vehicles. So for passenger transportation there are also vehicles using ethanol produced from biomass derived sugars and starch. Lots of them for example in Brazil. And also some natural gas or electric hybrid powered buses in many of the cities around the world and by the way,
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not only in the developed countries but also in, in large parts of the developing world already. So to summarize, there are already lots of energy efficient and low carbon technologies that are available today and deployed at some scale. It's true that they might, they might not yet be deployed at a sufficient scale to reach the challenge, to meet the challenge of the deep decarbonization of our energy system, but it's also true that they're poised somehow to achieve much higher penetration rates in the future if we are to implement the right policies to incentivize their further deployment and in particular, the pricing of carbon that will increase the price of their high carbon alternatives. And you can think of many, many different ways that we will discuss in the next lectures of pricing carbon, either directly through a carbon tax or through an emission trading system or even the implicit pricing of carbon through different types of regulations. But the point I want to make here is that the technologies that are commercially available today, alone, will not be sufficient, at least in many national contexts to achieve deep decarbonization, or at least they are not sufficient at reasonable costs. The existing technologies might be able to do the job, but they will do so at a very high cost. So the development of the new technologies, some of them we're going to be talking about in the next chapter, really offers the opportunity of lowering the overall costs, the overall investment costs of climate change mitigation. But it will require important levels of research, development, and demonstration before we go to the deployment phase eventually. And in the next chapters, we will discuss some, not all of them unfortunately because we don't have the time, but we will discuss some of the most promising technologies of the future. All of these technologies are known to some degree. It's not science fiction, not at all. But most of them are still under development of some form. Some of them have been demonstrated in pilot projects or in small commercial niches and not at very large scale. Some others are technically viable but at a way-too-high cost for their mass adoption. Some others yet the complimentary infrastructure that is needed for their deployment and yet some others face barriers for public concerns, so lack the necessary public support for their adoption due to concerns about safety, reliability or other types of environmental impacts, because it's very important of course to take a sustainable development perspective at these technologies and not to look only at their potential to reduce greenhouse gases emissions. Some of these technologies might have other important environmental risks that we need to identify and hopefully be able to mitigate. So in the next chapters, let's see how we can confront these important technological challenges.
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6.2.: Grid Management of Power Systems with High Penetration of Renewable Energies Here we're going to discuss how the challenge of managing power system, so the way we produce electricity; how the challenge of managing power system with high shares, high proportion of intermittent renewable energies can be met. So by intermittent renewable energies we mean some of the renewable energies that are intrinsically time variable in the way they produce energy such as wind power or solar energy, but I'll come back to that in a moment. The good news, to start with is that the cost of power generation through renewable energies is declining very sharply as a result of at least two different effects. The first being technological advancements as a result of research and development. The second being the economies of scale as they progressively become more and more deployed in our energy systems. The cost of the solar photovoltaic cells in particular has declined very, very sharply in the recent years as you can see on this graph. You can see on the graph that the cost per watt of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells, so that is the main technology that is being used today to generate electricity out of solar energy, that I'll discuss in a moment, which other types of technologies potentially even more could be used in the future. B ut you already see on that graph a very, very compelling decline in the prices of these cells. I mean they went from $76 U.S. dollars per watt in 1970 to $0.74 in 2013,
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some...an effect that is sometimes called the Swanson effect and that should, well ring a bell. I mean it really looks like the Moore's law in the semiconductor industry. The cost of the wind turbines has also declined, although a bit more gradually. I mean nothing as spectacular than the cost of the photovoltaic cells, but still a significant decline in the recent years. It's important to underline here that the price per watt of solar photovoltaic cells is not the same thing that the price of producing electricity through solar photovoltaic energy which is sometimes called by the energy experts, the levelized cost of energy, LCOE. And in fact the price of producing electricity through solar photovoltaic energy remains more expensive than the alternative sources of electricity production, at least in many places. It's not the case everywhere. It's true that solar photovoltaic energy has reached what we have called in the previous chapter, the grid parity. So the cost at which it is competitive with other sources of power generation. So solar photovoltaic energy has reached this grid parity in several regions and, and countries, but not everywhere and...by far. So their costs still need to significantly further decline to enable eventually their very large-scale deployment at a competitive cost. That being said, and it's an important point I want to make, going forward, the main challenge in relation to renewable energies is likely to be not their costs but how to operate power system with high penetration of intermittent renewable energy. So what is that? I mean what is really the problem and, and how do these renewable energies really differ from the other sources of power generation we have today, like coal or gas or hydro or nuclear? And why does it make the operation of the power system more difficult and more challenging? Well as I said, it's because solar and wind energy are intrinsically in a way time variable for a very simple reason, it's because wind is not always blowing and sun is not always shining. So that's a defining characteristics of these technologies. But on the other hand, the power grid needs to be able to match energy demand and energy supply on a moment by moment basis to maintain the functionality of the power system to make sure that each and every time you need energy there is an energy source to supply and meet your demand. Traditionally, this is accomplished by using large generators such as coal-fire power plants, or nuclear power plants to provide what is called base load power. And these stable base load generators are then complemented by flexible, readily dispatchable units of power generations such as gas turbines to make a system overall capable of as I said, matching supply and demand at any point in time by the addition of base load power and flexible, readily dispatchable units of power generation. But going forward, we need to find new low carbon solutions to the issue of supply and demand balancing because as you can see, we cannot in a world where we try to avoid
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the dangerous effects of human-induced climate change and therefore in a world where we try to deeply reduce the energy emissions, we cannot rely on coal powered generation and gas turbines to, or at least not without carbon capture and sequestration to ensure the balancing of the energy system and going forward, dealing with the intrinsic time variability of some of the renewable energy. So how can we do that? How can we ensure power system balancing while meeting the constraint of deep emission reductions? Well there are three main ways in which a power system with high penetration of renewable energies can be balanced while again, meeting this constraint of deep decarbonization. The first one is that the intermittent renewable energies, so again, wind, solar, typical examples, can be complemented with other stable sources of low-carbon power supply such as nuclear power, or coal and gas fired power plants, but with carbon capture and sequestration. That's very important. Not freely emitting coal and gas. Coal and gas plus CCS, or other example, hydropower for countries that have such a potential. Or we can also build a system that links the uncorrelated or that links negatively correlated sources of intermittent renewable energies because that's a way of dealing with the intermittency of each type of renewable energy; by making sure that combined, we don't have or this intermittency or at least that we reduce it. So that was for the first broad category of things we can do to balance the energy and the energy supply and the energy consumption with high penetration of renewable energy. Second, there is also great potential to better adjust the time profile of energy demand to the time profile of power supply. And this is broadly speaking what we call demand management. And the truth is that the cost of demand management technologies have declined very significantly. So it's not so much an issue of cost going forward, but the main challenges are going to lie in information management, grid management, but also in setting the appropriate economic incentives for demand management. So this is something really interesting, that has great potential to help operate power system with high share of intermittent renewable energies, but the truth is that it's not going to be sufficient. What will be absolutely critical is to improve our energy storage options. That's really important, energy storage. And there is already a variety of electric storage technologies that are known and have been demonstrated on a broad range of time scale from seasonal to daily to hourly to second by second storage, because we need all of that to ensure the functionality of the power system. For example, largescale pumped hydroelectric storage has been cost effective in many countries for decades, but the problem is that it is not available everywhere. So it will be very important to develop other storage technology options and there are currently a number of options being considered such as batteries or compressed air or hydrogen, but it's also clear that further research, development and demonstration is going to be required to determine how best to match diverse storage technology options and their cost effective applications and how to commercialize these technologies at a large scale and at a competitive cost.
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6.3 Carbon Capture & Sequestration Here we're going to discuss about carbon capture and sequestration. So what is it, what kind of a technology is that? It looks almost frightening. So carbon capture and sequestration or CCS, I'm going to use the acronym a lot because otherwise it's too long, is the capture of CO2 at large stationary point sources such as coal or gas fired power plants, oil refineries, cement plants, or steel mills. What are the common characteristics between these different types of activities? It is that they emit exhaust gases with a relatively high concentration of CO2. And it's an important aspect of where CCS could be feasible. We need to have somehow a pretty high concentration of CO2 within the entire exhaust gases to be able to operate the CCS technology. That being said, there are broadly speaking, I mean of course there are many more than that, but broadly speaking there are two different types of CCS technologies. What is called pre-combustion CCS technology and post-combustion CCS technologies. So very simply with post-combustion technologies the CO2 is captured after combustion through a chemical process that separates CO2 from the other gases. Whereas for the pre-combustion technologies the CO2 is removed from the fuels themselves through other chemical processes, but this time as the name obviously indicates, before combustion. So that's for the capture part of carbon capture and sequestration, CCS. But what happens after that, what do we do with the CO2, because it cannot simply remain in the air once we have separated it through one of these two different techniques? Well after the CO2 would be captured at the point source, it would be transported by pipeline to an appropriate geological site for storage under the ground. So what does that mean? I mean what could be considered as an appropriate geological site? I mean what are the conditions that must be met by these sites to safely sequester the CO2
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under the ground for a very long period of time? Well as you can see on the picture in front of you there are broadly speaking again, there are more than that, but broadly speaking, three main different options for the geological sequestration of CO2. The first is that what is called mineable coal beds, so it's a fancy term to speak about the coal veins that cannot be mined. The second type is the depleted oil or gas reserves. So very simply the empty oil and gas fields, ones that have been exploited where you could put the CO2 back in. And the third and in fact the most important because the scale of these third categories is potentially much higher than the other two, the third type is what we call the deep saline aquifers. So types of geological grounds that are found deep under the earth's surface. So that was for a very general description of the different steps in the process of carbon, capture, we should add, transportation and sequestration of this CCS. So where are we in the process of developing this technology? Well CCS has not yet been proved as a whole system at a large scale. But all the individual components of CCS, so the capture, the transport, the sequestration, all of them are pretty well established technologies and they have been tested in demonstration projects. And to date there are approximately 12 CCS projects that operate under the globe at stationary point sources and most of them are projects on natural gas processing plants while some others are on fertilizer production plants. So what is really the challenge going forward? I mean what are the obstacles that would need to be overcome if carbon capture and sequestration was to become a real option that could be deployed at scale in many countries? Well there are serious challenges, different types of challenges. One is costs. The other is scale. And finally there is an issue, an unresolved issue so far regarding the verification that carbon is really sequestered under the ground. So the first open question, what is the optimal power plant design to facilitate carbon capture at relatively low costs? Second open question, what is the best choice of geological sites for the storage of CO2 potentially at a very large scale? I mean we might be talking about tens or hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 to be sequestered during the coming decades. So where is the geological potential for that? I mean which sites would we select to do that? Third open question, what is the design of a reliable and economic hope infrastructure for the transport of CO2? And if you want a fourth question, what are the mechanisms for insuring that the CO2 that is stored remains permanently out of the atmosphere, a very important question indeed, because it determines the success of CCS eventually. So these are important questions. There are of course other questions. All of them need good answers. But given the importance of carbon and capture and sequestration in many of the deep decarbonization scenarios, including the ones I'm going to present
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when I discuss the results of the deep decarbonization pathway project, given the importance of this technology in so many of these scenarios there is really an urgent need to scale up the research, the development and the demonstration of CCS to test if it can be deployed at scale, if it can be deployed at, at scale safely. And if it can be deployed at scale at acceptable costs, because the truth is that being able to rely on the large-scale deployment of CCS would greatly facilitate the deep Decarbonization efforts, given what we stressed many, many times now and it is the obvious very heavy dependence of the energy systems on fossil fuels today
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6.4: Advanced Nuclear Power Here we're going to discuss about the new generation of nuclear power reactors. Today there are approximately 40 countries with nuclear energy as part of their power mix. Countries in very different situations. Some of these countries are proposing to phase out their nuclear power fleet. This is the case for example in Germany. Germany will have no more nuclear power plants in 2023. Other countries are planning to scale back, such as France. France has decided to reduce their share of nuclear energy and its electricity consumption from 75% today to 50% by 2025. But other countries are planning to expand and sometimes dramatically their nuclear capacity. This is the case for example in China. China intends to build the equivalent of the entire existing French nuclear power fleet in the coming years. There are, to be frank, serious obstacles standing in the way of the larger scale deployment of nuclear energy worldwide. And the demand to be looked carefully and to be seriously taken into account. Issues of public resistance, in particular, especially following the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. But also more generally speaking and unrelated to a particular event, concerns over the safety of the operation of nuclear reactors. Anxiety about the risk of proliferation. And worries about the issues of waste management. And also I should add, concerns over the costs of nuclear energy because grading the existing nuclear reactors or building new reactors to improve their safety following the recommendations that were made after the Fukushima accident will most likely increase their costs and probably quite significantly. So it's also important to recognize that the public support for a nuclear technology as important known technical dimensions that are therefore not easily addressed by engineering improvements.
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Different societies have different attitudes towards nuclear energy because they have different histories; they have different cultures, different belief systems. But also because the management of the inherent risks of nuclear energy require the existence of an independent safety agency. And the truth is that the conditions of the independence of this safety agency are not really met in all countries. That being said, the technical advances can play a critical role in the improvement of the nuclear reactors. And they will be needed in order for nuclear energy to remain a significant part of the power mix in some countries or even potentially to play a growing role and an important role given the need to produce low or zero carbon electricity to avoid dangerous climate change. What are these potential critical technical
advances? Well there are plenty of them, such as breakthrough in the safety systems, advances in fuel security, options for a fuel recyclingor techniques to reduce the costs. All of that will be needed if nuclear energy is to play an important and growing role in the future. The development of a fourth generation of nuclear reactors offers the prospect of addressing some of these important issues. So what is it, a fourth generation of nuclear reactors? What were the three first generations anyway? We use the term, fourth generation nuclear power to bring together different kinds of advanced nuclear fission energy technology that share a number of key characteristics.
The first is the modularity of the production systems and the building of smaller scale units. The second is the use of alternative systems for fuel repossessing or the use of alternative fuels to uranium such thorium. And the third is the design of improved automatic and even passive safety systems.
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And I'll explain in a minute what that is because it's one of the potentially most important breakthroughs of nuclear reactors in the future. What are the objectives of this fourth generation of nuclear reactors? I mean why do that, why build them differently from the previous generations? Well a number of reason. The first is that we're trying to make the nuclear reactors more simple so that the reactors are less vulnerable to construction delays and cost overruns, which sometimes have been very significant in the past and still are today. But also objective to address the proliferation concerns, a very serious concern. By making it much more difficult to divert materials for nuclear weapons at any point in the fuel cycle. And some of the fourth generation nuclear reactors address this point. But also and as I said, very importantly, almost the driving force of this fourth generation of nuclear reactors, the objective is to improve safety. And in particular, through the use of passive safety systems. So what is it? Well it means that the reactor core would be assured by physical principles to be safe from the meltdown, even in the absence of active cooling. So that's why we call it passive safety systems. So as you can see, this fourth generation of nuclear reactors offers interesting prospects. The prospect of significant improvements to the existing nuclear reactors, but they still require a high level of research and development and also demonstration before they could be eventually deployed and play a role in the deep decarbonization strategies.
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6.5: Electric Vehicles and Advanced Biofuels Here I want to introduce to the debate some of the key low carbon technologies in the transport sector, because so far in the previous chapters we've been discussing mostly about promising new technologies in the power sector. We've been discussing about smart grids and energy storage to operate power systems with high penetration of intermittent renewable energies such as solar or wind. We've been discussing about carbon capture and sequestration. We've been discussing about fourth generation nuclear reactors. So mainly technologies for the power sectors. Although that's not completely true, because carbon capture and sequestration, although its main market in the future might well be in the power sector could also and very importantly be used in industry, in the carbon intensive industries such as cement or steel for example. But as we saw when we were analyzing the results of the global mitigation scenario in the previous lecture, the decarbonization of the transport fleet is also absolutely fundamental to achieve emissions, reductions, levels consistent with the 2-degree limit. So it must start with the decarbonization of personal vehicles, but it must also extend to the Decarbonization of the heavy-duty vehicles, the decarbonization of aviation and also of ocean shipping. So how can we do that? What are the options that are available to reduce emissions in the transport sector? Well there is a very wide range of cutting edge technology that hold great potential to decarbonize much or all of the transport sector. Which are the options? It includes in particular, high performance batteries, hydrogen fuel cells or advanced biofuels or even synthesized fuels. But the truth is that most of these low carbon technologies for transport are still pre-commercial or at least they're not yet deployed at a very large scale.
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Electric vehicles in particular offer great potential, especially for the private vehicles, but also for buses and even some say, possibly for trucks. But it's important to underline here that electric vehicles can only be considered as a genuine low carbon solution for transport if electricity is produced by using low carbon energy sources. This is why it's so important to design comprehensive, deep Decarbonization strategies within the framework of the three pillars we have introduced. The electrification of energy consumption, in particular electrification of the transport sector must be combined with the shift to the low carbon electricity in the power sector. Most electric vehicles today use lithium batteries. And the performance of these batteries has already made great improvements in the recent past and it is expected to improve even further. Although the performance of that particular type of batteries, the lithium batteries is expected to improve only incrementally. But the good news is that we have many other option for electric vehicle batteries. They will be required to achieve higher energy and power density, lengthen the vehicle range and lower the upfront vehicle costs but there are many development programs currently underway. I should stress that lengthening the vehicle range in particular is really critical to the success and the large-scale deployment of electric vehicles in the future because it would make sure that electric vehicles can be used for all sorts of purposes and not only for the short distance travels that we do within our cities. It's also important to understand that theuptake of electric vehicles is also limited today by the lack of infrastructure to charge the batteries of these vehicles. So to insure the large-scale deployment of these electric vehicles in the future, the infrastructure will also have to be built and not only the technology of the vehicles be improved and the, the network of the charging stations will have to be expanded insure the success and uptake of electric vehicles. It will most likely require public-private partnerships with cities and local authorities in particular playing an important role together of course with car manufacturers and electricity companies. They should strike these partnerships to share the payment of the upfront investment costs of building this infrastructure network. So that was for, I mean one of the most promising option of reducing emissions in the transport sector through the electrification of biofuels. There is another option
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potentially which is the use of biofuels. And especially liquid biofuels. They're interesting because they offer the prospect of decarbonization of the transport sector together with the continued use of the existing infrastructure and technologies, including the internal combustion engines, but also the oil pipeline and the gas station pumps we have already built. So the fact that they use, they would use the existing infrastructure is of course a, a very big asset in favor of the biofuels. But the truth is that the biofuels also have a very clear downside unfortunately. Or at least some of them have. Because many of the existing biofuels such as a maize based ethanol produced in the U.S. compete with other critical land uses such as food production or ecosystem needs like land and water utilization. So it's a serious concern. There is potentially a solution to this problem, a response to this concern and it lies in the, the development of a new generation of advanced biofuels and, who precisely aim to overcome the issue of the competition in between the biofuels, the food production and the other important ecosystem services. There are many different types of advanced biofuels that are currently under development. Let me mention just a few. Again, it's not a comprehensive list, but you can think of the bioengineered organism such algae or bacteria used to produce biofuels. Another example is the processing of non-foodstuff from non-arable land into biofuels and, such as cellulosic biofuels produced from wood products. And there are even efforts to produce fuels directly from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide without using any biological organisms, a process which we call artificial photosynthesis. Although it is still at an early stage of research and focuses on, primarily on producing hydrogen. But overall and to conclude this chapter on the most important technologies in the transport sector, it's really important that we would further, and I would say, harder on the research, development and demonstration of these next generation biofuels to make really sure their large-scale use doesn't induce deforestation or doesn't compete with a food production which would be a...a terrible news for food security in a world where we expect to have 9.5 billion people by 2050.
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6.6: The Role of Technology Roadmaps and Roundtables To conclude this lecture, I want us to spend a bit of time discussing the mechanisms that could ensure the timely deployment at scale of some of the technologies we reviewed, but also the many others we did not have time to talk about, but which are also critical to the success of deep decarbonization strategies in our economies. Some skeptics try to discredit climate change mitigation efforts by saying that this is against progress, that this is an anti-technological innovation agenda that we're trying to impose limits to growth, that we're trying to limit the right to development. The truth is I'm not even sure if they're convinced by their own arguments. What is sure is that they're often made by the incumbents of the fossil fuel economy and it's probably not randomly, because they have a biased interest in more of the same technological innovation. I hope I've managed to convince you that climate change mitigation is certainly not an anti-technological innovation agenda. In fact, achieving deep decarbonization is a formidable technological challenge and one that will require years of sustained efforts to develop and demonstrate these breakthrough new low carbon technologies. But what is very true is that we don't need just any kind of technological innovation. We don't need new sophisticated technologies to explore always deeper fossil fuel resources and new technologies to drill under the Artic. What we need is directed and accelerated technological change. Directed first because we need technological innovation and human creativity to confront to the challenge of human induced climate change and find solution, not further add to the problem. And accelerated technological change because we have a very tight timeline to avoid the dangerous effects from human induced climate change whose effects are irreversible. So we need these critical low carbon technologies to become available quickly and to be rapidly deployed at scale. There are pretty good reasons to believe that the necessary technologies for deep decarbonization are within reach, from an engineering and a cost standpoint. But their commercial readiness needs to be accelerated by providing the adequate policy support and also by building the necessary public and private partners. Effective global
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strategies for a deep decarbonization must include strategies for promoting actively the development and the diffusion of these low carbon technology. What is interesting is that there is a great deal we can learn from the previous successful attempts to drive technological innovation in a particular direction. All these previous successful attempts share a number of important characteristics.
First, clear goals and timelines for technology performance were set. Second, public and private actors were organized around the development of long-term technology road maps. Third, the industry both competed but also cooperated to identify the promising lines of inquiry and demonstration of these technologies. Four, grants were sometimes issued on a always highly competitive basis. And five, and quite importantly the intellectual property of these new technology was frequently shared or at least open-source in between the different participants to the research and development efforts.
There is one element in particular I want to stress because I think it is of high relevance when we're talking about low carbon energy innovation. It is that technology road maps and technology round tables can play a key role in driving oriented technological innovation. They could play a key role because they could complement the more market based instruments for the transition to a low carbon economy such as putting a price on carbon through a carbon tax, or an emission permit system, or implementing all different types of regulations. It, it's very important that you don't confuse these technology road maps with rigid, central planning, because this is really not what this is about. It's very important that a technological innovation process be adaptive. It's very important that it does not preclude any promising technology from playing an active role in future mitigation efforts. We need to leave room for new discoveries. And therefore the goals that are set in these technology road maps should be frequently revised. They need to take into account the new developments from science, the lessons learned from the previous faces of discussions in these technology round tables. So it's really not an exercise to pick the winning technologies for a deep decarbonization, because eventually the market will have to reveal which are the lowest cost option. But you should look at this process of technology road maps and round tables as an essential process to make sure the market has enough winners to pick from eventually. These technology road maps have been used successfully in, in many technology eras, including a very successful one, the semiconductor industry, but also in genetics. And they were used to identify the priorities for research and, and development. It's really true that these road maps help mobilize and organize the public and private stakeholders and expert communities around the definition of shared priorities and, and really help insuring the effective use of, of scarce unfortunately, resources for research. So they will also really be a key tool in driving directed technological innovation for the low carbon technologies.
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7: Deep Decarbonization Pathways: Country Case Studies
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7.1: Why Countries Need Deep Decarbonization Pathways to 2050 Today we're going to look at some of the results coming from the deep decarbonization pathways project. We kept talking about the DDPP. This is an important step forward in this course because it means that for the first time we're going to discuss in detail the country-specific ways in which countries can transition to a low-carbon economy, deeply reduce their emissions but also continue to grow their economy and ultimately achieve sustainable development. So far we've looked at the results of a global mitigation scenario. And we have calculated by how much the emissions from each sectors, the emissions from power supply, from industry, from transports and buildings must decrease to stay within the 2degrees limit. We've also described the three pillars of the deep decarbonization of energy systems. The energy efficiency, the lowcarbon electricity, and the fuel switching, which we said represents the foundations to design successful deep decarbonization strategies. And finally, we have identified the key technological challenges that must be met through directed and accelerated technical change to meet the global challenge of deep decarbonization. But a key question remains. How can these general principles, how can these high-level strategies be applied to particular country with vastly different national circumstances? Today we're going to see what specific solutions are available to individual countries taking into account their different national circumstances. We're going to take into account their different socioeconomic contexts, their different aspirations and model of
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development going forward, but also their different natural resources endowments. And we're going to see how these country-specific solutions can be implemented. Defining country-specific solutions to deep decarbonization is really essential, because if the world collectively is to meet the challenge of climate change mitigation, then every country, but in particular, all the large emitting countries in need to have a good strategy to achieve both their economic objective, growth development, but also the global goal of deep emission reductions consistent and in line with the 2-degree limit. To do so, countries need what we're going to call in the rest of the lecture, deep decarbonization pathways, or DDPs. What is this? Well it's a road map or a blueprint if you want for each country to map out how they can transition to a low carbon economy in line with the 2-degree limit. So why is it so important that countries develop these deep decarbonization pathways? Well it's for a number of pretty simple reasons, although to be frank, they've not been fully grasped by many, but it is our hope that as a result of the deep decarbonization pathways project, each country will soon have one and that the global agreement to be reached in Paris at COP21 in 2015 will encourage countries to produce one. But we're going to discuss that in further detail in the last chapter of this lecture. Countries need deep decarbonization pathways to, mid-century, to the year 2050 because the nature and the scale of the global warming problem are such that there is unfortunately no quick or no easy fix to it. Deep Decarbonization will not happen overnight. As we've seen, the ultimate objective is the phasing out of the freely emitting fossil fuels, but that's not going to happen tomorrow. It will only happen as a result of our sustained efforts during the second half of the century. So that's a pretty long time scale. And there is also no silver bullet to the challenge of deep decarbonization. There are many critical technologies. And we've been discussing in detail some of them. Solar photovoltaic for example, wind power, nuclear for some countries, carbon capture and sequestration if it becomes available, electric vehicles for sure. A bit everywhere. But none of them is sufficient alone to deliver the necessary emission reduction. So they need to be combined all together. Deep decarbonization is not about incremental change or small deviation from business-as-usual. And if we don't design even the rather short-term climate change mitigation strategies with the view of achieving a long-term objective that is consistent with the 2-degree limit, then we really run the risk of being misled because we could lock in some high carbon infrastructures that could prevent us from reaching that longterm goal in the future. Let me simply pick one example to make this point very clear. Shifting from coal to gas as the United States is currently doing through shale gas and fracking delivers some significant short-term emission reductions, because gas is a lower carbon source of energy than coal. But it is still a pretty high carbon source of energy, at least compared to renewable energies or nuclear. So a power mix that would be primarily made of gas would emit way too much CO2 compared to the objective of deep decarbonization in line with the 2-degree limit. So the shift from coal to gas can in a way only be a matter of buying time, a bridging option if you want, towards a truly decarbonized energy system.
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The deep decarbonization pathways we're talking about therefore need to backcast from the global goal of limiting the temperature increase below 2-degrees Celsius. The need to explore the transformations that are required to reach this goal. What do I mean by backcasting? Well it's, it's a term I use to describe a process where a target is set for the future and then the changes needed to achieve that target are determined through the process of backcasting. It's very important that you don't confuse backcasting with rigid, central planning because a process of deep decarbonization must be very adaptive. These deep Decarbonization pathways will have to be continually revised and updated based on your results from climate science, new technological innovation along the way and also the lessons learned from the early implementation phases of these pathways. But it is really essential that countries explore the changes to their growth models, to their development frameworks and in particular to their energy systems to reach the global goal of staying below 2-degrees Celsius of global warming. There are also less technical, more process-related in a way reasons why deep decarbonization pathways are so important. They're important because they're an essential tool for promoting a national dialogue on climate change mitigation options, to launch what is really necessary, a process of intense and complex problem-solving. They're really a critical instrument to enable a, a public, but also a policy discussion in every country on how best to achieve these emission reduction objectives, how to understand the possible tradeoffs in between multiple objectives, but also to identify the synergies, the win-win solutions. The discussion over these deep Decarbonization pathways should involve all the relevant stakeholders, the policymakers, the business, the civil society. All the different types of expert communities with some knowledge on the issue, the climatologists, the engineers, the geologists, the economists, the other social scientists, they should all debate very intensively the best options for deep decarbonization, identify the bottlenecks and propose new approaches. In fact, you should try to develop a deep decarbonization pathway for your own country. Look at the pathways that were produced in the context of the deep decarbonization pathways project, or at other studies if unfortunately your country was not part of the first phase of the project. Try to come up with different possibly even better solutions, discuss them with your professors, other experts, NGOs, business people. Even your politicians if you have access to them. Send your proposals to us. I can promise that it will not only be a very interesting assignment but something very useful to do.
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7.2: The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project All the reasons I mentioned in the previous chapter why countries need a deep decarbonization pathway are precisely why we've launched the deep decarbonization pathways project. We've built this project as a collaborative effort to understand how countries can transition to a lowcarbon economy by midcentury and how the world can meet the objective of limiting global warming below 2-degrees Celsius. The project gathers some of the leading research institutions from 15 countries, all of them among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases emissions. Together and combined, they represent a little bit more than 70% of the global emissions. So, which are these countries? It's Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. It's a long list and I can tell you it was not easy to manage a project with so many participants scattered across the so many different time zones. The day very often started with an early Skype with colleagues in China or India and finished many times with a late call with colleagues in Australia or South Korea. But it was really great fun for sure.
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These 15 countries are at different stages of development. And that's an important point. They have different historic responsibilities in climate change, also different capacities to invest in climate change mitigation. But as I said, they represent more than 70% of the global greenhouse gases emissions. So their strong actions are really, really important to meet the global goal of limiting global warming below 2-degrees Celsius. So what was the task of the 15-country research teams. Well each of them has been developing a deep decarbonization pathway to 2050 for its country and we're going to look in this lecture at some of the key results coming from their very insightful analysis. The objective was really to take into account in detail all the relevant country-specific national circumstances. As I said, their socioeconomic conditions, their model for economic growth and development going forward, their infrastructure stocks very importantly, or their natural resources endowment. Why did, did we want to do that? I mean why be so detailed? It's really because we wanted to make a convincing case for action at the national level, because before we started the DDPP, there were already many results of global studies produced through global models showing how to achieve deep emission reductions. And the result of these global studies provide many important insights. And we have already discussed them at length into some of the previous lectures. But on their own they're a bit insufficient to make a really convincing case for action at the national level. And that's at least for two different reasons. The first is obviously because they are not sufficiently detailed. And yet deep decarbonization strategies need to be based on the most precise available estimates of the mitigation potential within countries and even more than that, in different regions and locations. But there is another reason, less technical, more process related. It's because if we want them to really become the basis for a public and a policy discussion, then the need to be developed within countries. They cannot be imposed by an international institution or by a bunch of consultants sitting in New York or Paris. They really need to be developed by local experts and discussed within countries with all the different stakeholders that have a stake in the issue of climate change negotiation. Defining country-specific targets for deep decarbonization pathways was not an easy task I can tell you, because it raises many practical, but also political issues. And in fact, the reason why the international negotiations have made such slow and disappointing progress since the entry into force of the U.N. Convention on Climate Change is in part because of a continued disagreement about how to share the global effort of emission reductions across countries. It is certainly not the only obstacle, but it's an important part of the deadlock, because countries have different interpretations of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. One of the key principles of the U.N. Convention on Climate Change, they disagree over the criteria that could be used to share global emission reductions between countries. Should we take into account historic emissions? How can we account for the fact that some countries have high emissions because they're exporting the carbon intensive products that are consumed by other countries? How can we account also for the fact that countries have different mitigation potentials and therefore different costs of mitigation, but also, different capacities to invest in these mitigation options?
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All these questions, all these unresolved issues so far have blocked the international negotiations, and they have resulted in insufficient, widely insufficient action to date to reduce the emissions. But in a way what is even more problematic is that it has prevented countries from even looking at what it would take to limit global warming below 2-degrees Celsius. The truth is that in order to stay within the 2-degree global carbon budget, every country with the notable exception of the least developed countries, but we have a full lecture dedicated to that, every country except the poorest among the poor countries will have to achieve deep emission reductions. And in particular, all of today's large emitting countries. The issue of who pays for the investment cost of deep decarbonization is of course essential to ensure that the global effort to reduce emissions is shared in an equitable manner. But before looking at the issue of these investment costs and who pays for them, it is critical to explore how each and every country can transition to a low-carbon economy. We need to identify technically feasible and sustainable deep decarbonization pathways, even before we quantify their costs and benefits and discuss who has to pay for them. So how can we do that? Well we have already explained why the convergence of per capita emissions by 2050, although it cannot be used as a criteria for the fair allocation of the global carbon budget, is still a pretty good benchmark to set the target of deep decarbonization pathways; at least one of them. It cannot be considered as criteria for the equitable sharing of the global carbon budget because it doesn't reflect some important considerations such as historic emissions or the fact that some countries export carbon intensive goods that others consume. But it is nonetheless a pretty good benchmark because very few countries will technically be able to fall below the 1.6 tons of CO2 energy per capita that is necessary to have a 50% chance of staying within the 2-degree limit, or the 1.1 tons of CO2 energy per capita if we want to have a higher chance, a higher than two-third chance of staying within the 2-degree limit. Not even the low-income countries with emissions per capita lower than this level today because the catch-up economic growth in their countries will and should drive their emissions up, even as they improve the carbon intensity of their GDP growth. So as a result a very few countries can be below the global average, then very few countries can be above. But I should say that even more important than the precise level of emissions in 2050, it is really the order of magnitude of the emission reductions that is important and that needs to be consistent with the globally agreed 2-degree limit. And this is what we've been looking at in the deep decarbonization pathways project as a way to explore the options for the deep decarbonization of each and every country and in a way break the deadlock of the climate negotiations.
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7.3: What We Learn From Countries’ Deep Decarbonization Pathways In the previous chapter I described briefly some of the key elements of the methodology we adopted in the deep decarbonization pathways project. In this chapter, we're going to look at some of the results now. So what we learned from the analysis of the 15 research teams of their respective countries' pathways to deep
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decarbonization. Well first and, and very importantly, so let me pause a moment on that. Their results show that deep decarbonization is feasible. It's a very important result. It shows that we can avoid dangerous climate change if we take strong and early action to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, if we invest heavily and rapidly also into some of the key precommercial low carbon technologies that are critical to achieve deep decarbonization at relatively low cost. And also if we more profoundly reorient our development trajectory. I must say that the DDPP is still at an early stage. We have much more research and analysis and I hope good results coming in the upcoming months or even years. So far the country research teams have only produced a first set of interim results. So the precise level of emission reductions that is reached by the different pathways and that I'm going to show you is in many ways less meaningful than simply their order of magnitude. So that's what I want you to concentrate on. The order of magnitude of emission reductions achieved by these pathways is very substantial. As you can see on this graph, it represents an absolute decrease of emissions by 45% in 2050 compared to the level of emissions in the same 15 countries in 2010. As you can see on this other graph, it also represents a 56% decrease in emissions per capita and even an 88%, so very close to 90% decrease in emissions per unit of GDP. So the CO2 energy-related emissions divided by the GDP in 2050 compared to the level in 2010. Let's look more closely at some of the results sector by sector. The results also show the pivotal role played by electricity in the deep decarbonization strategies of all 15 countries. In aggregate across the 15 countries the carbon intensity of electricity, so the ratio in between the CO2 emissions and the electricity generated, measured in kilowatt hour is reduced by a stunning 94% in 2050 compared to 2010. So that's a huge number. It means that by 2050, really electricity is almost completely decarbonized in these 15 countries taken together. As you can see on the graph, the carbon intensity of power generation goes from a bit more than 600 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour in 2010 to approximately 30 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour in 2050. So it's really, really a huge drop and it means as I said, that essentially electricity is almost zero carbon by 2050. That's why electricity plays such a pivotal role in the deep decarbonization strategy, but
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it's not the only one. There is another explanation and it's because in the meantime electricity plays an increasing role in the energy system. A higher share of the electricity consumption is met through electricity as opposed to other energy carriers. As you can see on the graph, the share of electricity in final energy consumption increases from 19% to 35% in 2050 compared to 2010. But that was for the results in aggregate, so making averages across countries or looking at the total out of the 15 countries. But what is especially interesting is that the results also show the different options that are available to the different countries, in particular, to reach that common goal of the deep decarbonization of power generation, electricity supply. It's true that by 2050 all countries generate electricity almost exclusively through zero or very low carbon energy sources, but they rely on very different options to be frank to do this, as you can see on this graph. So let me just pick a few examples. Australia, Mexico, South Africa and South Korea, for example, rely heavily on solar energy as partof their power mix. It can be different types by the way of solar energy. It can be solar photovoltaic, or it can be concentrated solar power. It can be centralized solar energy or decentralized solar energy. But all of these countries have a very high share of their electricity that is coming from solar energy by 2050 in the pathways and developed by the research teams. Wind power plays a very important role in Canada, in China, in France, in Germany, in India, in Japan and also in the United States, where there is a significant potential for wind power that can be tapped into. Hydropower plays a very important role in Brazil and Canada, also because there are large and sometimes still untapped resources of hydropower in these countries. Nuclear
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on the other hand represents a significant fraction of power production in many countries, France, the U.K., China, India, the U.S., and Russia. It plays a very little role, but, but still a role in some other countries such as Brazil and Canada and Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa. And CCS, very importantly, also plays a role in some of these scenarios. Remember as we have discussed in the previous lecture, CCS is not yet deployed at scale, even though each and every element of the technology is a proven technology, but in the project we've made the assumption that as a result of a strong and sustained effort on research and development, CCS could become available and in fact many of the countries in the project with high shares of fossil fuels, so coal or gas in their power generation today felt like it was an important element of their decarbonization strategy going forward. So you find carbon capture and sequestration in the scenarios that were developed by Canada, by China, by Indonesia, by Japan, by Mexico, by Russia, or the U.K. and the U.S. I want to mention here that these pathways and their results are of course only illustrative. I mean they shouldn't be confused with the precise reality of what is going to happen in these countries or even what should happen in these countries, because there are many different ways in which the deep Decarbonization of power generation in particular can be achieved at the national level. For example, in the project, the team producing the pathway for the U.S. developed not just one but three different pathways. Within the different pathways, higher shares of renewable energies for one or nuclear for the other or fossil fuels with CCS for the third pathway. And it's very important to recognize that the most effective but also cost efficient way of achieving deep decarbonization is of subject to debates. First within the expert community. We had disagreements first. We tried to settle in the project, but it should also of course be the topic not only for an expert discussion but it should become the basis for a political debate within each country and each society. So for sure, there are different options, different trajectories to deep Decarbonization in the future. But it is absolutely critical that these debates happen on the basis of detailed road maps for the deep decarbonization of the power sector, but also of the economy more broadly. These detailed road maps need to be based on transparent assumptions regarding the availability of some pre-commercial technologies. They need to be based on transparent assumptions regarding the projected cost of these technologies. Also, transparent assumptions regarding their resource requirements. I mean how much water do we need to use? Or, how much land do we need to use to operate these technologies? And also transparent assumptions regarding their possible side environmental and health impacts.
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There are really important choices to be made regarding the best options for deep Decarbonization based on considerations regarding economic competitiveness, energy security or public preferences. But these choices need to be made within the constraints of a global carbon budget to stay within 2-degree of global warming. The result of the pathway analysis also reveals in which sectors the emission reductions are relatively at least most difficult to achieve. Because in total, if the 15 pathways achieve an absolute reduction of CO2 energy emissions, the share of the emissions of some sectors and in particular the share of emissions from transport and industry is increasing in the pathways taken collectively. The analysis reveals that within the transport sector it is the emissions from freight as opposed to passenger transport which are again relatively more difficult to decarbonize. As we have discussed, there are lots of different technological options to achieve the deep decarbonization of the freight and heavy industry sectors. Natural gas, electric hybrid, and hydrogen and fuel cells powered trucks. Biofuels or synthesized fuels for air and ocean shipping. Electrification of heating processes but also carbon capture and sequestration maybe for industry. But it's true that the feasibility and the scalability of these options is sometimes still uncertain and their costs are also likely to be quite high. And this is why some of the teams in some countries found it difficult to build in these technologies in their decarbonization model. So to conclude this chapter, the pathway analysis that was developed by each of the country research teams and although their only at an interim phase at this stage, they already provide lots of very interesting insights on the country's specific challenges of deep decarbonization, but also and most importantly the possible solutions to them. We will revise the analysis in the coming months. We will for sure explore the potential for even deeper emission reductions because we're not completely there yet. We will test the robustness of the analysis, add some new dimensions such as infrastructure stocks and analysis of the cost and benefits, and analysis of the policy frameworks to support the implementation of these different actions. But really you should also try to think about it yourself. You should try to come up with alternatives to what we developed and who knows, maybe you would come up with even better solutions.
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7.4: Lessons for the Global Agreement on Climate Change at COP21 in Paris in 2015 To conclude this lecture, I'd like to draw some conclusions from the results of the deep decarbonization pathways project. But also from the very process of the project for the official this time, international negotiations and the agreement to be reached in Paris at COP21 in December 2015. So what are these lessons? Well in essence what the results and also the approach of the DDPP revealed is the critical importance of preparing these country-level deep Decarbonization pathways to 2050. These pathways and the discussion of their results, the discussion of their
assumptions are essential tools for learning and problem-solving. This process is absolutely fundamental to developing a long-term vision for deep decarbonization and shaping the expectations of the different countries, the businesses, the investors about what are really the future development opportunities? It really affords a unique opportunity to work together as we've done as part of the project. But we now hope this is going to become an issue for the real world. An opportunity to work together across countries to map out how the global 2-degree limits can be Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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operationalized because we have it, but it needs to be made real and achieved at the country level. More precisely it, it also highlights the need to introduce what I called long-term backcasting into the scope of the climate negotiations preparing COP21. Because as we have already pointed out, unfortunately the current focus of the negotiations is, is primarily and, and in fact almost exclusively on mitigation targets in the relatively short-term, maybe for the year 2030. Some countries are even suggesting that the focus should be on 2025 emission reduction targets. Yet, as I hope we made clear through this lecture, if countries do not work with a longer-term time horizon in mind and, and backcast from this long-term target, they're likely to adopt strategies that fall short of what is needed to stay below the 2-degree limit. So almost by its structure, by, by definition if you want, the current incremental approach will fail to consider the deep systemic changes that are needed and, and the key technologies that are still pre-commercial but that need to be developed to reach the long-term goal. Surprisingly and, and to be frank, also quite shockingly, very few countries so far have developed such long-term deep decarbonization pathways which means that very few of them have looked seriously at what it means for them to stay within the 2-degree limit. Since Copenhagen, in 2009 and a year after that, Cancun in 2010, all the large emitting countries have adopted quantified targets to reduce their greenhouse gases emissions by the year 2020. But these targets and I want to say that sometimes they have to be backed by concrete policy action plans, because it's not always the case, but even more profoundly than that, these targets are collectively insufficient to put the world on a trajectory that would be consistent with the 2-degree limit. In fact, most of the 2020 emission reduction targets that were adopted in, in Copenhagen in 2009 were framed as either incremental deviation from business-as-usual trends or rather small reductions in the carbon intensity of GD, or rather modest decrease in absolute emissions compared to a given base here most of the time in 1990. But by and large, these country targets were not even derived from an assessment of what is needed simply to stay within the 2-degree limit. So it should really not come as a surprise that their widely insufficient to limit global warming below 2-degrees Celsius, but if we want to succeed and to be frank, simply if we want to be internally consistent, if we want to have country targets that are consistent with the global goal, then we need to adopt a completely different approach to the climate negotiations on the run-up to Paris in December 2015. To conclude, I'd like to say that at least two new elements will need to be part of the global deal at COP21 in Paris. And they certainly do not cover the full scope of the agreement, in particular the need to provide adequate support, all different types of support, financial, technological and capacity building to the countries that need it to undertake the necessary mitigation and adaptation actions, in particular the poor and vulnerable countries.
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But I want to emphasize these two new dimensions as I think an essential component to the success of the global negotiations in Paris. First, we need a shared global commitment that each country will develop and, and make publicly available a deep decarbonization pathway to 2050 that is consistent with the 2-degree limit, but also with country and national circumstances. These pathways to 2050 as opposed to the targets by 2025 or 2030 do not necessarily have to be binding. I mean it's not the main point of having them. They should be predicated on a shared commitment to the 2degree limit, but also to all the aspects of the global cooperation that will be needed to achieve it in some countries, in particular the poor countries including the technology cooperation, financial support, the policy cooperation. But it's really very important that every country has one and has one soon because it's the only way to explore how you can make your economic growth, your development pathway consistent with our global objective of avoiding dangerous climate change. So that's the first element, pathways to 2050 for each and every country. The second element is that we need an absolutely massive and, and sustained global public-private effort to develop, demonstrate and, and diffuse many new low carbon technologies which we discussed and are not yet technically mature or competitive but yet are absolutely key to the success of deep decarbonization strategies. They will need to be made available to all countries, so technology cooperation mechanisms, but also fund will have to be established to this purpose. But it's also very important that businesses and governments, the national science funds for example commit to real money this time and serious action to develop these new technologies. By the time we record this course, we have already published the interim 2014 report of the deep decarbonization pathways project. The report was received by the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. We launched the interim report at a press conference in the U.N. headquarters on July 8 of 2014. We've also submitted the report to the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, who will be the president of the COP21 in Paris. And we have started to discuss about the project with many different people across the globe, in particular we have discussed the project in the context of what is called the Major Economies Forum. So that's a political forum gathering all the largest emitting countries. And we presented the results of the project to all the energy and climate ministers attending the meeting. We're very encouraged by the support that we received so far and we're clearly not there yet. It's not yet the primary focus of the negotiations. People want to understand I'd say a bit better what it really means, what it really implies and, and how it can be operationalized in the context of the agreement to be reached in Paris in 2015. But there is clearly a momentum around this new approach. Much more effort is still needed and we count on you. We count on your creativity to develop your own country deep decarbonization pathway, looking forward to receive them. And we count also on your commitment to put pressure on the political negotiation process to make COP21 in Paris a real success.
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8: Energy & Development
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8.1: Energy & Poverty Welcome to Lecture eight on energy and development. In this lecture, I want to discuss not the high income and high energy using countries of the world, but the parts of the world that are poor and energy poor, those that use very little energy, emit very little of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases per person and yet are bearing the brunt of global climate change. Today I want to talk about the poorest of the poor. The poorest of the poor are a
population of around one billion people, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of South Asia who consume very little modern energy, who emit very little greenhouse gas emissions through their economic activities and yet who ironically bear a huge
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amount of the brunt of human induced climate change. So it behooves us morally, practically, ethically as part of an overall concept of global sustainable development to focus our attention on those most in need, least responsible for global climate change, absolutely desperate for modern energy resources and right now not at the center of the negotiations certainly on climate change but needing their place at the table to say,"we're part of this, we need modern energy, we need the world to help us face the challenges that haven't come from our part, but have become our burden through what's happening in other parts of the world." To do this, let's start in lecture one on the whole question of the relationship of energy and economic development. And I'll start with this iconic picture known throughout the world. It's a great satellite shot of NASA's satellites looking at the night vision image of the earth. And of course what's shown here in the lights are the places with nighttime electricity and we have a very vivid image of the eastern half of the United States in bright lights. The western half, other than all the way on the west coast, California, being sparsely populated and America's drylands. You see the bright lights of western Europe. You see the bright lights of Japan and coastal China. And the bright lights of the eastern seaboard of Australia. And the east coast of South America stretching from Rio and Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires and the strong economic development in that region. And you also see the vast preponderance of Africa, almost without night lights. There is a very thin strip of electrification in the very north of Africa, the northern African countries of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Egypt. There is the lights evident in South Africa. But in the whole tropical band of Africa, in between North Africa and South Africa you see very little of nighttime lights. And this is an extraordinary and very vivid demonstration of the fact that hundreds of millions of people, especially in rural Africa lack access to electricity and to other modern energy services. We can see this in a less stylized and vivid way through a measure shown in this graphic of the amount of every use per capita in the world. And again, we see the very high use of energy in the United States and Canada and Australia and New Zealand, in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the whole Arabian peninsula, in western Europe. But that strong area of tropical Africa where you see the greens and the blues in this depiction show that these are the countries with the absolutely lowest consumption of primary energy per capita in the world. Now this is a quite different map, but it looks almost the same in terms of the distribution across countries. This is a map of income per capita. And just as we have very high energy use per person in Canada and the United States and Australia and New Zealand and western Europe and Japan, here we see that these are of course the
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countries with the highest per capita gross domestic product in the world. And where is the poorest part of the world? Once again, it is tropical Africa. In between the northern African countries and South Africa, we see countries that are living where half the population and sometimes more is below the line of extreme poverty drawn by the World Bank at a $1.25 per person per day. Energy use and output per person and income per person all are very, very closely aligned in this world. And one can say indeed that access to modern energy is a fundamental necessity for having a modern economy. Primary energy use, access to electricity, access to other modern energy services for transportation, for home use, such as for cooking, for use in provisioning basic services such as clean water and sanitation, it is a sine qua non of economic development. It's not surprising therefore that when we graph on the horizontal axis, again the income per person in countries and we graph on the vertical axis, the amount of energy per person, here measured as kilowatts per person, you find almost a straight line fitting through this scatter of countries. On the lower left-hand side you have the poorest countries with the lowest energy consumption. And on the upper right-hand side you have the high income countries that also have high consumption per capita. This is verified in very detailed accounts, for example, the energy data that are produced annually by the International Energy Agency. And I want to draw your attention specifically to Africa. Now in the geographic classification used by the International Energy Agency, Africa in this table includes North Africa and South Africa. In a way therefore, it will tend to overstate the energy use in that tropical band which is the poorest part of the continent. But still the numbers are absolutely telling. We see that as of 2011 in the classifications use by the International Energy Agency, Africa is roughly one-seventh of the world's population, about a billion people out of around seven billion. So Africa's population share is 15% of the world total. In terms of output, since Africa is poor, with low income per person, its total output is of course less than its population share. We tend to measure output when we want to make international comparisons at what are called purchasing power adjusted prices. So we look at the annual output in Africa or in any other part of the world, measured at international prices for the goods and services that are being valued. And when we use that classification, gross domestic product at purchasing power parity or the PPP that you see in the table, Africa's economy in total is $2.8 trillion dollars according to the measures of the International Energy Agency. For the world as a whole, annual output, the gross world product at international prices was $70.3 trillion dollars. So Africa's share of output was only 4% of world output compared to the population share of 15%. And now look at the columns on the right which measure total primary energy use and electricity consumption. For total primary energy measured as millions of tons of oil equivalent, taking all of the energy sources, putting them into an energy equivalence as tons of oil, we find that
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Africa had a total use of 700 million tons oil equivalent of energy compared to 13,000 million, 13 billion tons of oil equivalent for the world. Just 5% of the world's energy. And for electricity consumption, measured in terawatt hours, again, even less than the primary energy use, just at 3% of the world electricity consumption. And finally, not surprisingly, given Africa's very low use of electricity and low use of primary energy overall, Africa's carbon dioxide emissions of course are a very, very tiny part of the problem. They constituted about one billion tons of CO2 emissions in 2010--sorry, 2011 data--and that is out of about 31 billion tons that year worldwide. So Africa's emissions are only 3%. Fifteen per cent of the world's population, three per cent of the emissions, or one-fifth per person of the world average emissions. Think of the other end that we've been focusing on in the deep decarbonization pathways discussion. Just the five major economies of the world, China, the United States, European Union, India and Russia, just those five account for two-thirds, 65% of the world's total emissions. So a few very big, quite wealthy economies in general are at the top end of energy use and at the top end of emissions. And a very significant part of the world and a large part of the world population, in Africa, is impoverished, using very, very low amounts of energy and emitting a very small proportion of the carbon dioxide emissions and the greenhouse gas emissions more generally. Now I think it's quite interesting actually to look back historically at both how Africa's poverty in income terms and its energy poverty, the phrase that is now widely used, have been part of the long history of the continent. And through no fault of Africa, I want to stress, one of the most telling aspects of modern economic development is that it has taken place primarily in countries that had adequate domestic energy resources. The industrial revolution took off originally in England, in a place where coal resources were vast and where the creativity of James Watt in inventing the modern steam engine at the, towards the end of the 18th Century made it possible to tap this large coal resource and help propel England and Britain to the forefront of global economic development. When one traces the history of industrialization in the 19th Century, coal is a big part of the story. If the country had it there was a pretty good chance that it could achieve industrialization in the 19th Century. The United States is an example of that. Australia is an example of that. Japan is an example of that. But notably in looking at this map of coal reserves, ironically, tellingly, there were certain parts of the world that just don't have coal. This isn't a matter of their governance, their strategy, anything else, it's a matter of their basic geology. And what you can see on this map is that the continent of Africa with the small exception of the very southern tip of Africa, the part of South Africa is essentially without any significant coal reserves. This was an absolutely decisive factor in Africa's continuing underdevelopment in the 19th Century. Not only did it make
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industrialization virtually impossible in the 19th Century and even countries in north Africa that tried to industrialize found out that they couldn't do it because they didn't have access to low cost modern energy resources. But because the lack of coal put Africa in such a weak position, it also rendered the continent vulnerable to the total conquest by Europe towards the end of the 19th Century. It was one of the factors that made Africa vulnerable to imperial domination for about a hundred years from the second half of the 19th Century to the 1960s to '80s. So simply the access to energy resources was a propellant of development. And the lack of access these resources was a pretty fundamental barrier to development. Towards the end of the 19th Century, coal became less decisive because with the invention of the internal combustion engine, petroleum became a more important resource.
to
And while Africa has a few pockets of petroleum resources, we find essential the same story as we found with coal, that while Africa is a bit better provisioned with oil and there are parts of Africa such as Nigeria or Gabon or Angola with significant hydrocarbon resources, measured in per person terms and looked at in the aggregate, sub-Saharan Africa is once again, relatively on the short side compared to the United States, compared certainly to the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf region and other parts of the world. We could say that fortunately there been some important discoveries of natural gas in recent years in some of poorest parts of the world and parts notably in Mozambique and Tanzania, coast, this gives a chance for domestic-based energy in very poor countries that never had it before. the moral of the story?
have and the of Africa, off the oil
What's
The moral of the story is that Africa remains today impoverished in part because of the lack of modern energy services. In order for Africa to develop it's going to absolutely require an infrastructure of modern energy. Fortunately there are a lot more choices today for that than there were in the 19th Century, while coal was indisputably the king during the first phase of industrialization and now we're going to see that because of the advent of low-cost photovoltaics and concentrated solar thermal energy, because of advances in potential for geothermal energy, for hydroelectric power, for wind energy, Africa now has a chance to develop
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modern energy services based on a much wider array of primary energy sources than ever before. And this is extraordinarily heartening. For Africa to develop, it will need to develop the energy infrastructure. We should expect and we should build into all global forecasts and policies a significant rise of energy consumption and production within Africa to enable this part of the world, still the world's poorest, finally to escape from the poverty trap and to achieve economic development. In the following chapters of this lecture I'm going to describe in far more detail how this can be accomplished.
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8.2: A World Without Modern Energy Welcome to lecture eight, chapter two, where I want to talk about life in an economy without modern energy services. I want to do this to make it absolutely clear that for poor places in the world, our most important mission and goal is to increase access to modern energy. Sometimes people say, oh who needs electricity? Who needs all of these frills of modern life? But it's nothing like this. The life in places without access to electricity and other modern energy services are not the kind of life that people want or deserve in the 21st Century. I think about this often because I have the chance to visit and work in many very poor parts of the world and especially in very poor villages in rural Africa. And I have seen and I feel the burdens that come from that, especially when I fly home to Manhattan to an affluent neighborhood near Columbia University and I experience in daily life the benefits and conveniences that seem so remote in some of the poorest parts of the world. I'm almost, feel compelled to think about this almost every day when I get my breakfast. I get a bowl of cereal and I cut some fruit into it. Fruit from a refrigerator which has kept the fruit fresh and safe. I stick it in the microwave. Press a button and within a couple minutes, I have my breakfast. Truth be told, I press another button and there is a cup of coffee and of course that's a super convenience, but when I think about it, in five minutes I've accomplished what may take a woman, a mother in sub-Saharan Africa four or five hours of arduous labor to accomplish. A woman may start her day often walking many kilometers, carrying an incredibly heavy burden of fuel wood, which she has collected on her own. And I've tried lifting these, I can't do it. And the burdens that this woman and millions like her start the day with are startling. And there is the walk maybe two or three or four times a day to get water in a jerry can or in a, you know bucket like this, carrying ten or fifteen kilograms of water on the woman's head. Baby at the side, often a one-hour or two-hour walk to a water hole or to a water point. And often a wait of half an hour or an hour to get that water. And then the cooking starts. It's not the
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press of the microwave button. It's cooking over a three-stone stove. Arduous work. But also very dangerous. Look at the smoke in, in these two pictures of women using traditional cookstoves in, in Africa. That smoke we know from epidemiological studies claims more than a million lives a year of young children. It creates lung disease, infection and death of children from respiratory causes. Of course it impairs a mother who cooks every day under these conditions. And then after hours, the woman is out in the field. There's no machinery there. There is no tractor. She has her hand hoe and she is perhaps weeding, bent over, hunched over. Again, I've tried it and one day is exhausting. I have to say, this is a woman's life every day and it's not a matter of an option for her to feed her household, for her to ensure some minimum level of food security for her children and for her family is arduous, hours a day. It will be broken perhaps by another walk to the water hole, by collecting fuel wood late in the afternoon, by cooking again, late in the evening. Or perhaps by a long walk carrying a child to a clinic, if there is a clinic. This is a makeshift clinic of Medicins Sans Frontieres, of the famous NGO MSF, which provides emergency medical services in places that otherwise wouldn't have it at all. But in places that I have been working over the past 15 years, mothers often carry a child, febrile in their arms, ten kilometers to a clinic. That clinic when she arrives doesn't have electricity, can't run some most basic laboratory or diagnostic equipment because of, of the lack of electricity. Often there has been no cold chain maintained to preserve vaccines. And a child's life of course is repeatedly imperiled and that's why millions of children in, in such poor places die before their fifth birthday of causes that are 100% preventable at almost no cost. Think of the role of energy in all of this. No transport, no access to basic lab services or to being able to provide the medicines and this is what life is like when one doesn't have electricity. Then comes end of the day and perhaps the child's able to read and do a little bit of homework in the dark with a kerosene light. It's not only expensive but dangerous for fires inside the household. The quality of lighting on the eyes is, is not good, the fumes of course are also very debilitating. This is a day without modern energy services. And it's a day of profound hardship, a day of risk, a day when a mosquito bite can cause an end of a child's life because of lack of transport or lack of access to life-saving health services. When a bite of food can also be life-threatening because there's been no refrigeration, or proper care that could be taken to keep the food safe from various kinds of pathogens and disease. This is what it means when one lives without modern energy services. That is the grim reality still for hundreds of millions of people. But the extraordinarily positive side of the story is that advances of technology and finally some common sense and mobilization of the world around doing something about this can help people to break free of this energy poverty and by doing so, break free of the poverty trap more generally. F or every one of the problems that I just described, there are low cost solutions. And what's wonderful about them is that not only can these low cost solutions be made available to households, but if they are made available, they empower the households to be far more productive. Rather than spending hours a day in basic tasks, they Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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enable mothers and fathers to focus their attention on important, highly productive work to earn higher incomes, to improve farm productivity, to help keep their children safer and in source and thereby to provide a major lever for ending poverty once and for all. We know now through the creative design of many engineers during the past ten years much safer cookstoves. It can be still woodburning cookstoves, but with much lower smoke, and therefore, much more household safety and much less need for wood. It can be this kind of LPG, liquefied petroleum gas cooking that you see here, which is clean burning and a lot more efficient for this woman depicted here. Water can be pumped now at far lower cost and avoiding the hours that women across Africa now spend in fetching water or the children spend fetching water, rather than in being in school. Water can be pumped through low cost solar powered pumps as depicted here. And these are being rapidly improved. A lot of them are being developed in India. And they are easily adapted to the African context .And the very low wattage illumination of LED bulbs and solar power with even a modest amount of battery storage is allowing for, for illumination through electricity rather than through kerosene. And the households greatly prefer this. Gentlemen like this reports to us in a village where we're working that it has enabled him to increase his income tremendously. He can now work extra hours in the evening, productively in his tailoring activities and earn a lot of extra income and easily pay for the costs of the electricity services that he is now buying in, instead of the kerosene that he relied on before. There is a lot of small equipment appropriate for smallholder farming, such as this twowheel tractor. Again, adapted from India in a wonderful case of so-called South-South Technology Transfer, where technologies now are going to enable smallholder farmers in Africa to increase their yields, to cut back dramatically on the backbreaking labor and by doing so, to find their way out of poverty for the long term. I can't help thinking about this every day. I hope that you will think about it as well. There are more than a billion people in the world that lack access to electricity. There are a billion people or more that lack access to safe cooking energy, cooking services of one form or another. And yet the solutions are at hand. And as I'll describe in a later chapter of this lecture, there is now fortunately, not only the technology available but there is the growing political will and the realization that by ending energy poverty we can also help end income poverty once and for all.
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8.3: Energy for All in Africa Welcome to lecture eight, chapter three. I'm continuing on the discussion about energy services for the poor. How to end energy poverty and thereby to help end poverty overall. And I'll continue with the focus on tropical Africa which we've seen is a region that has a lot of poverty, but also a lot of potential where technology is now enabling Africa to break free of its chronic low levels of modern energy services. And in this chapter I'd like to discuss some of the continent scale solutions that can be at hand given the advances of energy technologies. If you look at the maps here, you see a depiction of energy potential from four types of very much underdeveloped energy resources within the African continent. In the map on the upper left we see the hydropower potential. And I want to draw your attention to the country right in the middle of the continent, the one that is shown as having the highest hydro potential. That's the Democratic Republic of Congo with the Congo River that offers a potential for a vast supply of hydroelectric power, but a supply that has not yet been tapped given the poverty, the disorganization, the chronic wars and violence and the difficulties of regional cooperation. I'll return to that shortly. If you look at the upper right-hand map, you see a corner of Africa, especially in the northeast, where there is considerable wind power potential. And some of that wind power is now being developed. If you look at the northwest corner, of Morocco, you see another place with tremendous wind power, even enough wind power not only to meet Morocco's own needs, but potentially to export to Europe
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through long distance power transmission. On the lower left-hand side, the continent is filled with high potential to solar power. Not surprising. Africa is tropical, it has a tremendous amount of solar radiation. And much of Africa is a dryland climate, meaning that cloud cover is relatively low and therefore solar radiation and the potential for solar energy is commensurately high. And solar power is perhaps one of the greatest breakthroughs that is possible in some of the very, very poorest parts of the world, and especially in west Africa, the Sahel, a region that we'll look at in just a moment in more detail. And then finally and very interestingly, if you look at a, the band of countries from Egypt in the north of Africa, shaded here in light blue, through Sudan, through the great lakes region, including Kenya, the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and going down into southern Africa you see a potential area of high geothermal energy. What is that region? That is the Great Rift Valley of Africa. It is part of the spreading continental plates that open the access of countries along the Rift Valley to potentially very large amounts of geothermal energy. And this is now beginning to be tapped in very promising ways in Kenya, in Tanzania, in Rwanda and a lot more can be done. All of this is to say that while Africa was poor in coal resources, the decisive primary energy source of the 19th Century and relatively poor or at least with undiscovered potential of hydrocarbons during the 20th Century, because of technological advances in renewable energy, in wind and in solar power, in geothermal, and because of increased know-how and potential on hydropower, Africa has within the continent itself a tremendous potential for a massive advance in electrification. This is a picture of a, a power generation, hydropower at Inga Falls along the Congo River. There is a small amount of electricity being produced at this site of high hydropower potential in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But since the mid-1960s it's been recognized that if this hydropower were tapped in full, there's actually one of the world's largest hydroelectric power potentials available at the Grand Inga Falls. Current
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estimates say that between 40 and 50 billion watts of hydropower are potentially available here. And by developing this hydropower, Inga Falls could transform the prospects of central Africa, of the Democratic Republic of Congo, of the Republic of Congo, of Rwanda, Burundi, and other neighboring countries that have been largely bereft of modern energy sources and electrification, but could tap into a regional grid. Of course it's a big project. It's a project that perhaps requires 50 or 60 billion dollars of investment. That's not a huge sum in macroeconomic terms. Projects like that are developed all over the world. But it is a lot of money to flow to central Africa which is a region of poverty and of instability. It's an example of a highly promising, but rather complex project which would require regional cooperation, a regional power transmission system, regional governance because it's pretty clear that investors are not going to turn 50 or 60 billion dollars over to the DRC or to any particular government in the region. But it's an example of the kind of project that if we think in a creative way, with the design of creative, multinational institutions, could get developed and could make a, an absolutely decisive difference in the, for the economies and the people of the region. It turns out that when one maps the potential for such large-scale projects throughout Africa, they now exist in many places with the specific local energy context taken into account. In this map created by my colleague, Professor Vijay Modi of Columbia University, he's analyzed the areas of high potential hydropower, shown in the big blue circles, the biggest of which is Inga Falls. Of wind power shown by the green circles on the map. And the regions of high solar energy. And across that oval of the Sahel, Professor Modi is indicating the extraordinary importance of solar power for that long stretch of very impoverished, semi-desert countries of west Africa. Mali, Niger, Chad are countries that have very, very low access to electricity but the one thing they have complete access to is sunshine. And the potential now to tap the solar power of the Sahel, both at a very small scale in highly distributed microgrids or even individual solar panels for individual households and on large grid basis using concentrated solar thermal technology or massive arrays of photovoltaic fields is now at hand, given the dramatic changes of prices that have occurred for solar energy in recent decades. Remember that the cost of a one-watt solar cell has declined from about $77 per watt back in the late 1970s to about .70cents per watt today by a decline of a factor of 100. And this makes it possible that in a
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very poor region with massive solar radiation like the Sahel there could be a mass electrification just in a few years. One of the most exciting discoveries of resources in Africa in recent years has been findings of natural gas deposits off the coast of east Africa. Normally I wouldn't be so thrilled with another hydrocarbon find. We've been emphasizing that we can't use all the hydrocarbons we have in the world. That many of the hydrocarbons, the unconventional oil and gas and the, the preponderance of coal can never safely be used in the world, certainly not within the 2-degree Celsius budget. But when we're talking about impoverished countries that contribute basically nothing of significance to the global scale challenge, a find of energy resources in those places that would enable impoverished economies to escape from the trap of poverty must be greeted with enthusiasm. And I think that the world as it negotiates next year at COP21 will have to be clear that while many fossil fuel resources will have to be stranded, that should not occur and certainly not be mandated in the poorest of the poor in the world, when these resources make possible a decisive breakthrough out of extreme poverty. Well the, the biggest of these finds has been in that green circle that one sees off of the east coast of Africa, Mozambique has been identified as a place with the, perhaps, a hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore and available for development. And this again, like the Inga Falls project or like the large-scale solar energy potential of the Sahel, will require a complex analysis and project design and implementation to make it possible to use these resources for Africa's true long-term benefit. Why do I say this? Because the natural thing to do when gas or oil is discovered off the coast of an impoverished country has been to develop that resource and ship it off to a major market. And indeed, the first impulse of the oil companies that have discovered these large natural gas deposits off the coast of Mozambique and Tanzania has been to say, well let's bring it to shore in a pipeline. We'll liquefy it, put it on a tanker, and send it to China. And the idea has been that with these vast gas resources, that that can be another resource for China. We know the problems of that. We know the problems of emissions. But the other problem is that when energy is not used for domestic development but merely becomes an enclave economy for export to high income markets, the contribution of these energy resources to Africa's own development are likely to be lost. And so on second thought, some of the...these companies such as Eni, the Italian large oil and gas company has thought perhaps we ought to be thinking much harder about how those natural gas deposits can also be used fruitfully for east Africa's own development. And with the Professor Modi having a close look at this, he's identified
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ways that natural gas could play a role, fundamentally in enabling modern energy services throughout the entire eastern coast of, of Africa, running from Ethiopia and Somalia through Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and, and other countries. Natural gas offers the potential in this region for electrification. It enables the potential for a petrochemical industry around fertilizers desperately needed by the poor, smallholder farmers of the region. Transport, instead of being dependent on import of petroleum, can run on natural gas. And of course safe cooking stoves to replace the three-stone cookstoves used throughout this region, could enable families to enjoy modern cooking services without the devastating smoke inhalation and lung disease that accompanies the, the daily cooking chores, currently. The point is, think creatively. In this case, we worry less about the carbon dioxide emissions per se because on a global scale they'd still be very small. But the transformative potential for this region of economic development is absolutely huge. And that's why when we're facing the challenges of the poorest of the poor, we have to give due attention to the core of their economic development needs. For those places in, especially in rural Africa, far from pipelines and, and grids and even potentially so, we also have highly distributed energy potential now such as depicted in one of my favorite projects of Professor Modi, the shared solar system where a village has its own power generation in a microgrid of solar panels depicted here, shown here in one of these microgrid systems. And from those solar panels there is a distribution throughout a village, connecting 20, 30, 40 households in the village and enabling those households to have electricity, to power lights, to power perhaps small refrigerators or food processing units, a sewing machine. Other small appliances. To charge a mobile phone. To become more productive. To increase the quality of life. To share in the benefits of modern energy services even when living in remote rural areas. If we put the pieces together, tropical Africa, the region of the world that is the poorest and that suffers chronically from energy poverty has the potential for huge breakthroughs. And we see here three and we can add the fourth. In the yellow oval across west Africa there is the vast potential for large-scale solar. In the blue circled in central Africa, there is the potential to tap into the massive hydropower of Inga Falls and other hydropower projects. And in the large pink oval, in the east of Africa there is the potential to tap into the large-scale natural gas reserves that have been discovered off the coast of east Africa.
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Add to that the fourth potential for highly distributed renewable energy through solar power, wind power, geothermal and other potential and we see that we are on a threshold in which energy poverty can be brought to an end and thereby help Africa to bring overall income poverty to an end once and for all.
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8.4: How Climate Change Threatens the Poorest of the Poor Welcome to lecture eight, chapter four. And we continue on the discussion about energy poverty, overall poverty and how energy services can help Africa in particular escape from chronic poverty. Now I've been privileged to be special advisor to first United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and now to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals. The commitments that were made in the year 2000 to help Africa and other poor regions of the world end extreme poverty. And I have been every day trying as best I can to make the point that ending Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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poverty is within reach. And it should be both a moral and practical commitment for the world. In recent years I've been emphasizing also the importance of the battle against climate change. And it's been interesting for me that on occasion I've been asked, though less frequently now than say a year or two ago, why am I putting emphasis on climate change, why not continue to focus on poverty? Don't dilute the message, I've been told. When the sustainable development goals were first proposed some poverty activists said, let's not go there to sustainable development, environment and other issues. Those are not our priority, our priority has to be to end extreme poverty. Well I want to spend a few minutes in this chapter explaining why that point of view is understandable, but not correct. And indeed once one reflects on the enormity of the burdens that climate change is already imposing on the poorest people in the world and on the devastation that climate change can potentially impose on the poor regions of the world, you come to a very, very different conclusion. And the conclusion is, even if you're focus is only on ending extreme poverty and that's a pretty plausible focus of high moral and practical priority, climate change should be front and center of your concern. I'll put it this way, there is no way in the world that we're going to end extreme poverty and no way in the world that if we even temporarily end it that it will stay gone if climate change runs rampantly out of control. If we exceed the 2-degree Celsius limit, if we continue on the business-as-usual path, I shudder for the consequences for Africa. All of the hopes of the Millennium Development Goals, all of the progress that is being achieved now will easily be swept aside and tragically be swept aside by the consequences of climate change. This is not a hypothetical warning. And it's not one that I make casually or idly or because you're taking a class on climate change. It's because I see it with my own eyes and of course it's not just me, it is Africans who are feeling already the derangement of their climate and the incredibly severe consequences that result from that. It's quite obvious that if you live on the edge of survival, that shocks can push you right over the edge. And when you see the consequences of a drought such as the Sahel experienced in 2012 and such as is seen by this farmer standing by a dead camel who died of lack of water in Chad and this view, this, this scene has been repeated so many countless times across the region, one begins to understand the reality. All through Africa and especially through the drylands, which are the most vulnerable part of the world to climate change in this phase that we're in right now, places that already by virtue of their longstanding climate always have the risk of drought and famine, are being pushed into disasters of increasing frequency and intensity. And
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moreover, because of rapid population growth in these countries, demographic pressures that are rising and rainfall that is declining is cutting these societies. Like the blades of a scissors, they're caught between these two very powerful trends. And the result is a tremendous amount of dislocation of populations. Here are refugees from the Sahel drought and with the tents set up of migrants trying to escape from the drought in Niger. But this kind of phenomenon of people on the move, trying to survive in the face of ecological shocks is something that we have seen repeatedly and with the devastation in many parts of drylands Africa. Somalia. A country that is so bereft of basic resources with water at the start, and energy resources next, that it has not even been able to maintain a government intact for more than two decades has faced repeated droughts in recent years. Part of a long-term decline of overall rainfall and because of warming temperatures and overall increase of evaporation of the water and therefore the drying of the soil moisture. In 2012-13, there were more displaced populations. This is a Somali mother and her children that have fled across the border to Kenya. They're in a refugee camp, waiting for some emergency help. And this massive stream of refugees across the Somalia border to Kenya has been very destabilizing. We work in northeast Kenya in a village area near the city of Garissa. There is a tremendous increase of violence, of lawlessness, of theft of livestock, of insecurity. And this is the pervasive spillovers when one experiences famine and drought and populations on the move as a result of this. This is a map of the United Nations. It's an unfortunately and increasingly typical map. It shows the extreme drought conditions in two 2011 in Somalia, in the horn of Africa. This kind of map is of the Office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian Assistance, OCHA. And it's the basis typically of an emergency appeal. We need a hundred million, three hundred million dollars to help people survive the, just the latest ecological catastrophe. Well the experience is that the world doesn't respond. Sometimes it's called donor fatigue, although I'm not so sure how much fatigue you can get if you don't try very hard. But the fact of the matter is that not only are these shocks coming in increasing frequency, but they are not met with the kind of emergency response that is commensurate with the scale of the challenge. Now the climate science tells us that it is these dryland regions that have already experienced significant declines of soil moisture, significant increases of drought frequency and severity. Declines in many cases of overall precipitation levels. And this is one example of very notable study of a
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few years ago of changing drought conditions using something called the Palmer Drought Severity Index, or PDSI. And this is showing increasing drought severity during the historical period of 1950 to 2008. Look at how much of Africa is covered by pinks and reds and purples, signifying a chronic increase of drought severity during this period. When climate models are used to project forward, the likelihood of drought severity, the picture is absolutely terrifying. These models measure estimated changes of precipitation, or projected changes of precipitation. And changes of soil moisture as the result of the higher rates of evaporation and transpiration of water in the soil. Transpiration means the water that exits the leaves of plants, sometimes the evaporation and the transpiration are combined into the term, evapotranspiration. And what we have is declining precipitation, declining rainfall and rising potential evapotranspiration, meaning that whatever comes to the ground returns as water vapor to the atmosphere much more quickly. And the result is a chronic drying of the soils. And that chronic drying of the soils of course can have devastating effects on crop productivity. So many studies now take the climate estimates of temperature and evapotranspiration and other climate phenomena, for example, likelihood of heat waves, or likelihood of
dry spells and use those data to with the, the randomness and the uncertainty attached to them as inputs to estimates of crop production, through so-called crop models. And those then give us a sign of where we should worry about changing crop productivity. And again, here is a map based on such a study which starts with the climate change models and then feeds them through crop models. And where you see red, dark red means a decrease of crop production with high confidence of the model, saying that the model is really signaling with very high probability a decline of crop productivity. Or in just a bit lighter red, a decrease with medium confidence. And you can see that a very large part of tropical Africa is caught in that band. Not just tropical Africa, we see that large swaths of South America, of North America, of India, Australia, the Mediterranean basin, are all facing these challenges.
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That's why we're here trying to understand how to stay below the 2-degree centigrade. But it's why the idea that climate change is extraneous or ancillary or secondary to the concern about poverty misses the point. How is Africa going to feed itself in a world of unconstrained climate change? The answer is there is no good answer. This map that you're looking at is for the 2030s. Let me forward towards the end of the century on a business-as-usual trajectory. It's terrifying. It's terrifying because many of the food centers of the world show up in bright red. What the models are telling us is that the decline of soil moisture combined with the direct effects of higher temperatures, which by themselves reduce the photosynthetic productivity put in realistic possibility a massive crisis of food production. Step back and remind ourselves that we're at 7.2 billion people now. But the world population is continuing to rise by 75 to 80 million people every year. And by the 2080s or 2090s, we could well have 10 billion people in the world, facing a food production catastrophe coming from unconstrained climate change The point I think is clear, there is no way to fight poverty except by also fighting climate change. We need to put these two core needs and imperatives for the world together. That is the whole principle of sustainable development. We need a holistic approach and it is only by a holistic approach that we can find our way through this very serious bottleneck. If we do so, there is high potential at the other end with all of our technologies the ability to escape from poverty is in hand, but only if climate change is brought under control.
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8.5: Sustainable Energy for All Welcome to Lecture eight, Chapter five. We've been talking in this lecture about the challenges of energy poverty and how they relate to the challenges of poverty more generally. We've also discussed the imperative of combining the fight against poverty and the fight against uncontrolled climate change. These can't be put in chronological sequence or prioritized that fighting poverty comes first and climate change comes later, because as I emphasized in the previous chapter, if climate change runs out of control, if we continue with the business-as-usual path, our hopes of even basic food security, much less an escape from poverty are going to be dashed. I've emphasized therefore the importance of putting the poverty agenda within a context more generally of sustainable development. Fighting poverty is part of the larger cause of sustainable development. And in this chapter I want to put it the other way, that fighting climate change also is part of that larger effort. To have success in 2015 in COP21 in Paris, we're going to need success at the United Nations in September 2015 in adopting a set of sustainable development goals or SDGs, which will frame exactly that holistic approach in which fighting poverty, fighting for social inclusion of women and minorities and the poor, and fighting against uncontrolled climate change are all combined into an integrated and holistic framework. 2015 is indeed a period of extraordinarily interesting and complex negotiations. Remember, you're going to be a delegate to the climate negotiations in the global online negotiation that will take place at the beginning of 2015. But let's note that there Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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are three big negotiations that need to be completed successfully in 2015 and each plays off of the other and depends on the success of the others. Paris we know comes at the end of the year. Before Paris comes the negotiation on sustainable development goals in 2015 in September at the United Nations. And even before that, in July 2015, will come the first major summit, diplomatically for next year and that is the Conference on Financing for Sustainable Development which will take place in July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. What is that conference about? That conference is to help find the ways that poor countries can access electricity, the ways that we can help to finance the research, development and demonstration of new technologies for lowcarbon energy. The way that we can help to compensate countries that experience significant climate losses, a principle that was agreed in COP19 in Warsaw, last year, that losses and damages from climate change should be compensated. So we'll have a conference on finance, we'll have a conference on sustainable development in general and then we'll have the COP21 in Paris at the end of 2015. I'm excited about sustainable development being the overarching framework. I think this is right. And I think that it is a proper intellectual framing of our interconnected challenges, but also a proper framing from the point of finding a way through the complexity that confronts us now. Of course the idea of sustainable development has been around for a quarter century. And I'm delighted to have an online course available for your viewing pleasure, The Age of Sustainable Development, to look at this concept in more detail. But here in chapter five of lecture eight I want to stress how the framing of sustainable development will help to shape the climate and energy discussions in the coming year and then of course in the years beyond. Back in 2012 at the twentieth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, remember that the Earth Summit is where the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change was first adopted. On the twentieth anniversary the conferees looked at the results of the UNFCCC and of the other two big treaties that had been adopted at Rio, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification and they said, these are good documents, we still live by them, but we're not getting the, the global buy-in, the political will, the public energy and commitment that's needed really to implement these three treaties. And they looked at the quite different process of the Millennium Development Goals which are not legally binding; they're not a treaty. They were adopted as a spirit of the world, as a commitment of the world, but not in a legally binding way back in September 2000, at the start of the new millennium. So in 2012 the conferees at the twentieth anniversary of the Earth Summit said, hmm, if those MDGs are, they're working.
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They're drawing the world's attention to the plight of extreme poverty and to the ways that we can address and solve and overcome extreme poverty. Why don't we use a similar mechanism, not to replace the Framework Convention on Climate Change, not to undermine the treaties, but to complement the treaties by helping to bring the challenges of sustainable development more generally to the world's attention. And they called on the U.N. General Assembly to adopt a concise set of sustainable development goals that would cover the three main dimensions of sustainable development. Fighting poverty and promoting economic development, dimension one. Promoting social inclusion of women and minorities especially in insuring the human rights of all individuals, of access to public services as number two. And environmental sustainability of which controlling climate change is by far the most urgent as number three. And those three dimensions of sustainable development, they noted back in 2012 need to be girded by a fourth crucial dimension and that is good governance and global partnership. So in that spirit, the 2012 twentieth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit passed the baton to the U.N. General Assembly and said, come up with a concise set of sustainable development goals that will incorporate the fight against poverty, the fight against climate change, and the other crucial aspects of sustainable development. I'm happy to say that the U.N. General Assembly took this challenge on fully and has now been in two years of intensive analysis and negotiation about the sustainable development goals. And there is a, an increasingly strong chance indeed that a concise set of SDGs will be adopted in September 2015, just a few months ahead of the Paris COP21. For a while it was thought, hmm, this could conflict, this could make things complicated. But I think by now the governments understand that the two processes are complementary. They're not contradictory. And climate change will be part of both the sustainable development goals and the COP21, not that one will negotiate different targets and different ambitions, but rather within the sustainable development context the world will reconfirm its commitment to the framework convention and to the decisions that are to be taken in Paris to ensure that in the 15 years between 2016 and 2030 in which these new sustainable development goals are the world's guideposts, climate change will be one of the headlines of that new global commitment. So we are now in the middle of the process of adopting sustainable development goals and I think the process is working well for exactly the themes that I've been discussing in this eighth lecture. Recently the working group of the General Assembly has put out a provisional list of some of these sustainable development goals. And while I won't go through the whole list, I want to highlight some of the main conclusions of the two years of negotiation that have been underway. First, there is general agreement that goal number one of the SDGs, SDG number one will be end poverty. End poverty in all its forms by the year 2030. And specifically in terms of measurement, what this means is that the World Bank's poverty line which is a $1.25 per person per day for extreme poverty. That using that line we should be able to get to near zero in terms of the proportions of households still stuck below poverty from the roughly one billion people today under the World Bank poverty line to near zero. But helpfully, as with the Millennium Development Goals, these sustainable development goals will define ending extreme poverty not only income terms, but in many other forms as well. In terms of food security, health security, schooling for children, access to safe water and sanitation, access to modern energy services, these will all be part of the commitment to ensure that everybody's basic needs are met by the world economy as of 2030, whether through markets or whether through
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government or other kinds of social help, the basic needs of everybody should be met and achieved by the year 2030. Goal number two on this new list of the U.N. General Assembly open working group is to end hunger, to ensure food security. Now remember, as we just discussed, if climate change is running rampant; this is going to be an absolutely forlorn and failed ambition. We're going to have to improve productivity of agriculture but at the same time, ensure that the consequences of runaway climate change are, are not seen. Goal number three of the proposed list is to ensure health for all. That's access to health services. That means electricity in the health clinics. It means emergency transport to those health clinics. It means modern information systems, also requiring electricity,so that those clinics can run effectively. It means environmental health as well. It means that people are not choking and dying of indoor air pollution or the particulate pollution of coal fire power plants and the smog of Asia's cities. And so again, the interconnection of the health agenda and the safe energy and climate change mitigation agendas. Goal number four, ensure inclusive and equitable education for all children. Again, information technology, electricity in the classroom can play a very, very big role in this. And there are lots of innovations possible to bring education and information to places that right now don't have a book but could have the world of online information opened to them. Goal number six proposed by the open working group is to ensure access to water and sanitation. Once again, modern energy services of pumped water, solar irrigation, solar systems for water safety, even for desalination in some locations will be part of water security and therefore intertwined with energy services. Proposed goal number seven of the open working group is specifically about universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. This is good. Energy is put straight on the table. And the commitment to ending energy poverty as one of the most powerful tools to raising human well-being and ending other forms of poverty is now clear and it's linked also strongly to climate change mitigation through the very strong emphasis on renewable energy sources, energy efficiency and cleaner fossil fuel technologies, perhaps carbon capture and sequestration or other, other potential solutions. But the point is, energy for all in a way that is compatible with the 2-degree centigrade carbon budget. Notably, proposed goal thirteen is on climate change itself. This is extremely important as I've been emphasizing, climate change is one of the absolute core aspects of sustainable development. This was contentious within the open working group. For a while many governments said, "don't put in a separate goal on climate change because we have the climate change negotiations that will come just after the sustainable development goals are adopted." But that was not really the correct way to think about this challenge. The sustainable development goals will apply for a 15-year period, for the years 2016 to 2030. Therefore, during that whole period the signal, the message much go out to the whole world that to achieve sustainable development we need to achieve climate change mitigation. We need to honor the 2-degree centigrade goal. And the governments came to understand that the sustainable development goals are not the Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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place to negotiate the climate change details. There'll be enough negotiations under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, thank you, during 2015 not to confuse the negotiations with yet another venue. But the governments did come to understand that of course climate change needs to be a headline within the sustainable development goals because the sustainable development goals are not legally binding treaties, they're not the UNFCCC substitute. They are the guideposts. They're the compass for the world. And climate change must be there to remind the, the world every day that to achieve sustainable development, we must achieve climate change control. And finally, I want to emphasize that the poor countries have been saying throughout these negotiations, "well that's all fine and good, we like that goal on ending poverty. We definitely want energy services. But how, how is this going to be done?" And the poor countries have insisted therefore that one of the goals be on what is called in the jargon, the means of implementation. And this is the same jargon used in the climate negotiations as well. Where is the money on the table when it's needed? How will research and development be financed? How can we ensure that impoverished populations, that by themselves cannot afford crucial needs on a market basis, are nonetheless availed of those needs whether it's healthcare or access to energy, that through public services as a crucial way to meet their human needs. And so the commitment needs to be made together with the broad aspirations that the ways to actually achieve those goals is found in terms of financing, in terms of requisite technology, in terms of building local capacities and expertise and education of the next generation of sustainable development leaders, of trade policies that facilitate these solutions, of the partnerships that are needed and of systems of data monitoring and feedback to make sure that we stay on track and when we get off track, the alarm bells go off to say we're not achieving the goals that we have set ourselves, we have to push back onto that path. And these are the same means of implementation that will be needed in Paris in December 2015. It will be one thing to state goals; it will be another thing to lay out pathways on how to achieve the goals. But then there will have to be clarity about how those goals, those aspirations, those pathways can actually be achieved and issues of finance, trade, monitoring will be front and center on the climate negotiations just as they are on the sustainable development goal negotiations. Finally, let me talk about the means of implementation specifically on energy for the poor. One thing is clear from the experience of bringing healthcare to all that has been very successful during the Millennium Development Goal period. For the poorest of the poor, we need to give a bit of help. For people who have nothing, asking them to buy the energy services that they need or the healthcare is a route to failure. We need to recognize that for the poorest people in the world, an added hand-up, a helping hand, to achieve these goals is vital. In the case of healthcare, a big innovation was to create the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria back in 2002.
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That provided some of the financing to ensure that even impoverished populations could gain access to lifesaving health technologies. I believe that we need a similar global fund for energy for all. That the idea that this will come only through market forces could be right for even sixsevenths of the world's population, but for the poorest of the poor, we're going to need to do more. We also know in the context of climate change mitigation, but also in the context of overcoming energy poverty that research and development is crucial. And research and development intrinsically is both a public and a private initiative for some of those breakthroughs in off-grid, or microgrid energy, or in tapping geothermal power, or in new forms of mobilizing solar power for irrigation and so on. Research and development can lead to significant advances and this needs to be on the list of the todos to end energy poverty. We know that we're going to need large-scale investment, $50 or $60 billion dollars for example for Inga Falls. That's not going to come out of public money, that is going to come out of pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance company funds. And so we're going to need institutional cooperation to channel private sector funds, perhaps with some public guarantees or some public insurance or some public sector participation in order to be able to fund the large-scale solar grids of west Africa or the large-scale hydropower grids of central Africa or the large-scale natural gas networks that could power east Africa in the coming decades. And finally we know that all of these efforts require both the market forces, companies out for a profit, companies out to look for new innovation through market-driven incentives, as well as the cooperation of government and civil society, guided by these broad global goals. In other words, projects like Inga Falls or projects like overcoming extreme energy poverty in Africa are complex tasks that require a considerable amount of project design, a high degree of cooperation across every major stakeholder group from the local communities, the national governments, the African Union, the international private sector, international financial institutions and the U.N. agencies. It's a hard job. That cooperation is vital for success. It's at the heart of the call to end energy poverty; it's at the very heart of the challenge of sustainable development itself.
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9: Main Challenges of Climate Change Negotiations
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9.1: Efficiency & Fairness Where I want to talk about the concepts of negotiation. We're entering a negotiation among the parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 193 parties. A few are very decisive parties to the convention, the largest economies, the largest emitting countries. They're going to be bargaining with each other. And the question is what is the nature of that bargaining? What are the problems, the challenges, the obstacles? What's the right way to reach a cooperative agreement? What are the barriers to reach cooperation? That's the subject of this lecture. I'm going to ask you to bear with me as we introduce some economics style diagrams. You'll have a chance to practice those in some assignments and some special problems to hone your skills on these kinds of diagrams that are standard for economic analysis. The lecture is about the, two crucial concepts of negotiation, efficiency and fairness. And it's important to keep these concepts distinct. And I'm going to use a lot of examples to highlight the differences of efficiency and fairness. We'll start with a, an economist's diagram that links the amount of mitigation that's undertaken, that is the reduction of CO2 emissions shown on the horizontal axis and measures for any given level of emissions, the cost of an incremental increase of mitigation or an incremental reduction of a ton of CO2. What you see here is a rising curve, essentially drawn as a line. The more mitigation that's
undertaken, that is the more reduction of CO2 emissions compared to business-asusual, the higher is the cost of each incremental tone of carbon dioxide that is pulled out of the emissions or sometimes it's called the marginal cost of the emissions. And when you see a rising curve or a line such as this, it means that the marginal cost of mitigation is increasing.
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The first few billion tons of CO2 that are reduced compared to baseline don't cost very much, maybe it's a bit of insulation in, in the homes, a bit of energy efficiency, turning off the lights when they should have been turned off in the first place. Improving some of the efficiency of industrial operations. But if you want to get deeper reduction of CO2, you have to introduce new technologies, maybe not just efficiency but substituting coal fired power plants by wind or solar plants. Now those can be cleaner, they can be environmentally safer of course, but maybe they're more expensive to implement than a standard baseline traditional coal fired power plant. And so to implement that next stage of emissions reduction or that incremental mitigation of emissions, it's going to cost more to reduce that extra ton of CO2. If you continue and we want to drive carbon emissions way, way down, perhaps using really very fancy technologies, the direct air capture of carbon dioxide in the air and then sequestering it geologically, at least with the technologies we have right now, each ton of carbon dioxide that is removed from emissions using that technology would be very expensive, perhaps hundreds of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide reduced. The result is this upward sloping schedule or curve as we would say in economics, linking the extent of mitigation on the horizontal axis with the cost of each incremental ton of carbon dioxide removed from emissions compared to the baseline. Those are the costs. What about the benefits of doing this? Well that's a different kind of curve. Again, we put on the horizontal axis, the extent of mitigation compared to a business-asusual trajectory and on the vertical axis we measure in dollars per ton of carbon dioxide reduced emission, now much benefit there is. Now why is there a benefit of lower emissions of CO2? Well that's what we've been talking about for many lectures now. The climate will be safer. And the idea is that at a low level of mitigation compared to baseline, we would have a huge increase of temperature. The baseline, the business-as-usual remember is an increase of temperatures of maybe four or even six degrees Celsius. So at that point, incremental warming is disastrous. We're already suffering massively and any further warming adds to the disaster. That means that the benefits of mitigating carbon dioxide, of reducing
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emissions are very, very high. That's why the curve is at a high vertical point at low levels of mitigation. But suppose we're successful, we have deep Decarbonization and a lot of carbon dioxide is reduced from the emissions flow because of a successful change of the energy system? Suppose that we reduce carbon dioxide enough so that the temperature increase is held even to one degree Celsius or one and a half degree Celsius, a very deep decarbonization of the energy system? What would the gains be of a further reduction of carbon dioxide at that point? Well maybe because the climate is already stable, if there has been a lot of mitigation, an incremental reduction of yet another ton of CO2 wouldn't really get too much benefit for world society. And so the amount of benefit shown on the curve for a high level of mitigation, that is the marginal benefit of an extra ton of carbon dioxide removed through further mitigation would be a quite low level. That's why a marginal benefit curve or schedule as is sometimes said in economics would be downward sloping. At low levels of mitigation, in other words, being close to business-as-usual, every ton of CO2 is really a burden for society. But for very high levels of mitigation, so that the climate is already in the safety zone, further extent of mitigation would not add so much benefit. Now the trick of economics always is to put a cost and a benefit schedule on the same graph as is done here.
And the miracle of economics is where the two curves cross. Why is that? Again, on the horizontal axis we have the extent of mitigation, on the vertical axis, the costs and benefits of an incremental ton of carbon dioxide removed. Whenever the benefit curve is above the cost curve, which is towards the left-hand side, it means that the cost of removing one more ton of carbon dioxide is less than the benefit that society enjoys by that carbon dioxide being pulled out of emissions.
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In other words, the climate safety that is the result is worth more than the direct extra costs of undertaking that mitigation through some kind of deep decarbonization program. On the right-hand side, where the cost curve is above the benefit curve, it means that further units of carbon dioxide reduction are more costly per ton than the benefits that society enjoys by having that extra ton of CO2 pulled out of the emissions stream. Everything measured compared to the business-as-usual. Well What is the social optimum? What is the optimal extent of mitigation? It is where the marginal benefit of removing an extra ton of carbon dioxide equals the marginal cost of removing the extra ton. And that's shown in this case at a level of mitigation of 20 billion tons of CO2. Think of that as the reduction in the flow of carbon emissions, say in the year 2050 and on the vertical axis, that cross occurs at a level of $50 per ton of CO2. What does that $50 signify? It signifies that in terms of the cost of mitigation that is the cost incurred for that last bit of mitigation undertaken at a level of 20 billion tons CO2 removed and it signifies that the benefit of removing that CO2 is the same, also $50 per ton when you factor in how much climate damage is avoided by having that extra ton of CO2 removed. Now we give a name for that equilibrium point. That is called the social cost of carbon dioxide. It is the measure both of the benefit of removing that ton of CO2 and in a social optimum policy, it is also the cost, because you want to go just to the point where the extra benefit and the extra cost or I should say, the benefit of the extra ton removed and the, and the cost of the extra ton removed are just equal. Now does society benefit from undertaking that level of mitigation? It sure does, because for that level of mitigation effort, removing 20 billion tons of CO2 per year, the costs of removing that CO2 is less than the benefit, unit by unit, just up to the last ton of CO2 that's removed. And you can compare the benefit level for an incremental unit of mitigation on the upper curve with the cost of reducing that level of CO2 on the lower curve and that vertical distance is the net social benefit, the benefit minus the cost of undertaking that level of mitigation. Well if you add up all of those units of mitigation effort up to the 20 billion tons removed, each one of them has a benefit level higher than the cost level. Add up all of those and you get the area between these two lines.
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When you take the total area, as we would in basic geometry, you can say, that's the sum of society's gains from this mitigation effort. And in the particular diagram that I have here, that would add up to one trillion tons, that's the area of the triangle shown as the difference between the marginal benefit line and the marginal cost line. So far so good. This is the basic economics of why we want to undertake deep decarbonization in the first place, because the benefits of the safer climate, unit for unit of emission reduction or emission mitigation are higher than the costs, unit by unit of CO2 emission reduction. Now comes the big issue for negotiations. If we were just one person or one country, we'd probably work out more easily, okay, let's have a 20 billion tons reduction, our society is going to benefit and we'll undertake these costs, the benefits will be bigger than the costs and we'll figure out how to do that. But now suppose we have two countries, or two regions or the developed world and the developing world. Of course it's even more complicated. We have a 193 countries that are party to this negotiation, it's a little hard to draw with 193 countries, so I'll stick with just two negotiating countries. Think of them as the developed countries and the developing countries. And think of these on the horizontal axis for the moment as country one or region one. And on the vertical axis is country two or region two. And for simplicity, think about this as the income or the well-being of these two groups. Now before we undertake the optimum deep decarbonization, there's a certain level of income of country one and country two on the baseline or the business-as-usual trajectory. Of course that's a path of incomes over many years but I'm compressing this to just one point of time, just to give us clarity of the discussion. And if we graph the level of income of the first country and the level of income of the second country, just on a, a normal plane, we'd have a point which is shown as the business-as-usual point. Now we can do better than the business-as-usual. That's the beauty of the fact that at low cost we can reduce carbon emissions and enjoy benefits, for instance, more productivity of agriculture, better human health, more safety as a result of that reduction. So we can actually have both country one and country two enjoy higher income than in the business-as-usual point. And indeed we can draw all of the potential levels of income of country one and country two on a downward sloping line that says if the world income is allocated all to country two, the point would be on the vertical axis, country two would have all the income, country one would have no income. That would be pretty miserable for country one. On the other hand, if all the income is allocated to country one, we'd be on the horizontal axis down in the bottom right of that curve. And more normally, both country one and country two would have some level of gross domestic product. And the beauty of climate mitigation is that both of these countries can be better off than they were at the business-as-usual level. So start at the business-as-usual income point for these two countries and there is a range from point A to point B of what's possible for how to share the improvement from climate control. And point A, country one is made a lot richer through climate control Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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and country B is left off just as it was in the business-as-usual baseline. At point B, country two reaps all the benefits from climate control and country one is left just as it was in the baseline, the business-as-usual path. Country C is the sweet spot. It is the cooperative agreement of both country one and country two to say, let's share the increased well-being that will come from undertaking an optimum global mitigation effort. We'll share the burden, we'll both benefit from a safer climate and we'll both be left better off than we were in a business-as-usual trajectory. That is what's called in negotiations, a Pareto improvement. Pareto is the name of a great Italian economist and sociologist at the beginning of the 20th Century, Vilfredo Pareto. And Pareto said, an improvement in a bargaining situation is when all parties of that bargain are better off than they were in the baseline or in the business-as-usual situation. So shifting from BAU to point C is a Pareto improvement. Now let's try to understand how this will work at the country level. And we're going to see a problem now. I'll start with a simple case and then we're going to go to a more complicated problem. Let's start with a symmetrical situation where these two groups of countries have the same technologies, basically the same income levels, the same potential for mitigation, the same gains from successful climate control. So the first country, we'll call it the developed country group, has a mitigation, SDG, like the one we saw that's shown here. And this is a schedule of mitigation costs up to ten billion tons per year, reduced by the developed countries compared to the baseline. And I'm going to draw this curve backwards for the developing countries. Now you go from no mitigation in the bottom right-hand origin of this curve. It's now reversed in direction. And as you move to the left of that diagram, there's more mitigation being undertaken by this second group of countries, country two,which I'm calling for our purposes, the developing countries.
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If I superimpose these two figures and say that the world as a whole is going to undertake the optimum level of CO2 reduction of 20 billion tons, the one we found in the earlier diagram and we superimpose these two symmetric cost curves they meet right in the middle, where the developed country group reduces by 10 billion tons, the developing country group reduces by ten billion tons and the marginal cost of mitigation for each of these countries is the same, $50 per ton of CO2 reduced. That's also the social cost of capital in equilibrium for the whole world. So we have a situation where there is one social cost of capital that applies to both negotiating parties. They each mitigate in this case, half of the total world need. They share the costs. They have equal benefits. And if the world were so balanced, we probably wouldn't have any difficulty in reaching such a symmetric, balanced, obviously fair equilibrium. Now here's a problem. What if the cost curves are very, very different? And different in a way which is, I'm going to put it in a way which some people will object to, but actually could be realistic. Suppose that mitigation is actually more expensive in the high-income countries and less expensive in the low-income countries? Why would that be? Well the high income countries like the city of New York where I'm sitting right now has an infrastructure that was built 50 years ago or a 100 years ago. To retrofit that is incredibly expensive. We spend billions of dollars to add a kilometer of subway miles in this city, whereas if you're building a system from the beginning, it's much less expensive. For a developing country that is fast-growing, but is building its infrastructure for the first time, it may be much less expensive to build a green field plant that is clean and low emitting than to retrofit an old plant.
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The result is peculiar because now we have a steep marginal cost curve of the high income, or the developed countries, that's shown starting from the left-hand side of the graph and the upward sloping line that is quite steep. And we have a relatively flat marginal cost curve of the developing countries signifying that the cost per ton of carbon dioxide reduced just doesn't increase all that much for the developing countries. Now here is the paradox or the problem in terms of fairness and efficiency. What would be for this kind of world, these two blocks of countries with these distinct cost curves the least cost way of reducing total emissions by 20 billion tons? It would be where the marginal costs for the two groups of countries of mitigation are equal. That's where these two lines cross. And interestingly, because it's cheaper and the marginal costs of mitigation are lower in the developing countries, the least cost worldwide formula for reducing 20 billion tons of CO2 emissions is no longer symmetrical, it's that the developing countries should do the hard lift. They should do 15 billion of the 20 billion tons of emission and the developed countries, only 5 billion of the 20 billion tons. That way the total cost that the world would bear in reducing the emissions, which comes out to a total cost of $600 billion dollars in this example would be minimized. But the developing countries would say, are you crazy? That is so unfair. Yes, of course we could do it more cheaply, but take a look Professor Sachs, you're asking us to bear $450 billion dollars of the $600 billion cost, whereas the rich countries who are richer to begin with would only be bearing a $150 billion. Why should we be the ones to undertake all that mitigation? That's not fair. So
perhaps developing countries would suggest, even given the asymmetry of costs, a solution like this. Some negotiators might say, look, fair is fair, we'll each do ten. We'll do half each. The rich countries mitigate by ten billion tons, we'll mitigate by ten billion tons and that will be it. Now if you look closely at this graph, the problem is that this is a very expensive solution for the world as a whole, though it is cheaper for the developing countries. In this case, the rich countries are spending a tremendous amount for those incremental
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units of mitigation, the amount of mitigation between five and ten billion tons that they are bearing compared to the previous diagram. In fact, if this equal division is taken then in this case the developed countries would have $600 billion dollars of mitigation costs, the developing countries, $225 billion, the world total cost of undertaking climate change mitigation would therefore be $825 billion dollars compared to what was $600 billion dollars before. Fairer? Absolutely fairer in some sense, but more expensive? For sure. So not very efficient but perhaps more equitable. Now the rich countries would say, okay, that's not equitable, you're making us pay a tremendous amount for this. Yes, it's divided 10 and 10, but you understand, we have to retrofit. You have green field, how about if we each bear an equal share of the costs? Well if you get out a pencil and paper and take the specific assumptions and solve a little quadratic equation, it turns out in the example of this diagram that the equal cost sharing would have the developing countries mitigate 13.2 billion tons and the high income countries reduce 6.8 billion tons for that total worldwide reduction of 20 billion tons. Each of the two groups would be spending about $347 billion dollars or about $695 billion dollars for this total effort, $95 billion more than in the first example where the developing countries do more. So you might say, well that's fairer. It's a little bit less imbalanced. I suppose you can see where I'm about to go and that is that in some circumstances it's possible to eat your cake and have it too. And that is, it's possible to combine both efficiency and fairness in the negotiations. How can that be done? It can be done through side transfers. The idea is that countries agree on a deep decarbonization pathway that minimizes the global costs of mitigation, but then countries make side financial payments to share the burden in a fair manner. So if we go back to the low cost solution where the developing countries put in 15 billion tons of mitigation, the developed countries only 5 billion tons, remember that that is the minimum cost solution for the world, 600 billion in total, the least cost all the examples. But since the rich countries bear only a cost in that case of $150 billion and the developing countries, $450 billion, one way to equalize the burden, I'm not saying it's the only to judge fairness, but one way to equalize the burden would be for the developed countries to say, let's do it the least cost way and we will transfer a $150 billion dollars per year to you, the low cost countries to compensate you for having undertaken the extra heavy lift. And in that case, each country ends up bearing a $300 billion dollar cost. The total costs are equally divided. And the total cost that is shared equally among the two sides is thereby minimized. Here is the bottom line. The
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bottom line is that because climate change is a disaster for the world, there are benefits, net benefits, economic gains to mitigation. That's the whole point of this course and it's the whole point of the framework convention on climate change. Those benefits should be shared among countries. The idea of Pareto, that these can be benefits in which all countries gain is an important idea. So that every country sees the benefit of moving from the baseline. How do share? Well one can separate two concepts. The efficient mitigation is the way of reducing emissions at least cost for the world as a whole. The fair way is to share the costs appropriately. We can do both if we're smart, by having a least cost mitigation strategy worldwide and then having side transfers from rich to poor countries, if the poor countries are bearing an unfair burden in the least cost construction. This I think I, and I hope gives some sense of the complexity of the challenge but also of the nature of the negotiations. Countries need to formulate pathways so that we satisfy the 2-degree limit and then they need to formulate financial transfer programs so that the cost of achieving those pathways is fair.
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9.2: Basic Principles of a Global Agreement We're talking about the concepts of the climate change negotiations. It's a more abstract lecture than the others. The numbers that I'm giving are made up. Of course I'm trying to use numbers that are illustrative but they're mainly illustrative of concepts. And though it's somewhat abstract, I think these concepts are important. We discussed in chapter one the concepts of Pareto improving negotiations, the concepts of efficiency and of fairness or equity as distinct aspects or gauges of a negotiating agreement. I want to review many of what you could call as the headings or the chapter titles of a negotiation agreement. Again, not in the literal sense of how the negotiations will be written down, that we're going to do in the global online negotiations next semester, but more in the conceptual sense. What are the headings that negotiators need to be attentive to reach a fair, efficient, meaningful agreement?
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So let's start with the essence of this course. The agreement has to move the world to deep decarbonization. Our theme is that when one looks at the costs of mitigation and the benefits of mitigation, staying under the 2-degrees Celsius limit is absolutely imperative. The damages of going beyond that are so great, the risks are so high that the marginal benefits of mitigation drive us to ensure that we stay within the limit. And the technologies that we have available and that we can develop to reduce carbon emissions are sufficiently good that it makes sense for the world to negotiate on the basis of its commitment to 2-degrees C as absolutely the upper bound, the limit of climate safety. A second standard which we introduced in last lecture is efficiency. And that is that if we're going to undertake deep decarbonization, this should be done in the least cost way. The world shouldn't waste resources arbitrarily in reducing carbon emissions, it should find the way to move from the business-as-usual to a safe, deep decarbonization pathway in an overall, least cost manner. But we also discovered that simply applying a naive efficiency criterion alone isn't enough because efficiency might leave the burden of adjustment unfairly on one particular group of countries. So we need to introduce concepts of fairness alongside concepts of efficiency. Efficiency think of as low cost, least cost, but fairness is who actually bears that cost in the end? And since countries can make financial transfers to each other, that's one way of reallocating across countries some of the economic costs associated with climate mitigation. Now a phrase that has been central to these negotiations from the very start of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change is common but differentiated responsibilities. This is the concept that the world as a whole has a shared responsibility of climate safety. All countries signed onto that from the poorest to the richest. But these are differentiated responsibilities and CBDR, (common but differentiated responsibilities) conveys within it not only different capacities, different marginal costs of mitigation, but also fairness, that countries have different responsibilities to justice, globally. Rich countries have more financial capacity, more economic capacity, more historical responsibility and therefore they should pay their fair share. That's not the end of the negotiations. If this were a one-time exercise, one moment of negotiating, say a purchase and sale of a house, we might stop there, what's efficient, what's equitable? But we're talking about a complex process over many, many decades and therefore it's not surprising that there are other headings of the negotiations. One key concept is that what we know about what to do and how much to do and the ways to do it will evolve over time. Our understanding of the science, our understanding of the risks and crucially our technological options are going to evolve over time.
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So one heading of the negotiations is about updating. We have to go into these negotiations understanding that this is a dynamic process, it's an adaptive process. Adaptive not in the sense of adapting to climate change, but in the sense of adapting to change in global realities more generally, new information, new technologies, new awareness, new science, new understanding of what should be done. So we need systematic updating. As the climate science changes, we may come to understand that 2-degrees centigrade is too much. Maybe we really have to aim for one and a half degrees Celsius for the true margin of safety. This is something that climate science might reveal to us in the coming years. Alternatively, we may find that 20 billion tons of CO2 emission relative to the baseline per year is too low because wonderful breakthroughs occur in solar or wind power and electric vehicles or in carbon capture and sequestration or fourth generation nuclear power that allows us to go even farther than that. And so we need that kind of updating, resolution of uncertainties, learning and investing in new knowledge, especially investing in new technology. And a technology blueprint process, creating a roadmap and investing in the research and development and the demonstration and the diffusion of these improved technologies will be a crucial part of any successful agreement. More generally the parties to the Framework Convention talk about the means of implementation. They say, okay, this is all fine concepts. Two degrees no problem. They don't say, no problem, but they say, yes we understand the concepts, we understand the concepts of sharing the burdens. But what are the real means of implementation? What do they mean by that? They mean first, what policy instruments are going to be chosen? Will there be common worldwide instruments? It's been a dream of some, not one that I share, but it's been a dream of some that there should be one global market of emissions permits. And that that would set one social cost of carbon and that would drive an efficient, lowcost solution. That is an example of trying to put one single policy instrument inside the negotiating framework perhaps to reach a desirable outcome. Another example that's suggested is a single price on carbon in the form of a carbon tax. Or it could be a single regulatory standard which says, no country shall engage in the construction of new coal fired power plants unless they are fully equipped with carbon capture and sequestration technology. So policy tools are one part of implementation. Leave them to the countries or have them at a global scale. A second of course is financing, who's going to pay for all of this? What's going to happen with the poor countries? How can countries that need technologies that are owned by businesses in other countries access those technologies? Do they have to pay large royalties? Do they have to pay monopoly rents to a monopoly holder of such technologies? Then another aspect of implementation, absolutely central is of course developing the technologies that enable us to stay below the 2-degree C limit as Emmanuel Guerin has emphasized and put into tremendous detail in earlier lectures. There's also the question of capacity building which has been part of all of the agreements.
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Some countries simply need help technologically, not in the form of what's embodied in machinery, but in the form of training of local engineers, local regulators and so forth in order to be able to implement a program or a new system or a new technology of lowcarbon energy. And then finally one needs to remember that these negotiations cover not only mitigation, not only moving from the business-as-usual trajectory to the 2degree centigrade limit, but also must cover all of the challenges of adaptation. Increasingly the treaty has incorporated concerns of adaptation. How to help countries adapt to the ongoing climate change? How to become more resilient? How countries can be insured in a way for losses and damages that they incur when they're hit by a massive tropical cyclone or a massive inundation, or a terrible drought that, whose frequency and intensity is being increased by the ongoing climate change? So the adaptation agenda is another chapter of the full agreement. You see we have the hands full, with all of this countries are asking what does this mean for us? What are we going to have to do? What burdens are we signing up to? Can we actually meet those responsibilities technically, legally, economically? And who's going to pay for all of this? Just ourselves? Will we get help? What's the basis for that kind of sharing of the economic and the financial costs? We now turn in more detail in the next chapter to this question of fairness.
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9.3: What is Fair? We're discussing climate negotiations, but at an abstract level. The concepts of efficiency, of fairness, of uncertainty, learning, adaptability of the framework. In this chapter we talk a little bit more about fairness. Fairness is a big important concept and it's a loaded one because of course fairness is in the eye of the beholder very often. What's fair, by what standards? How can we judge? And when it comes to climate there has been no shortage of debate over these concepts. I suppose the most intuitive and basic standard of fairness that has been presented is that countries should share equally in some sense, perhaps equal per person in the amount of the atmosphere that they fill with greenhouse gases. So if we have a carbon budget, that carbon budget should be an equal allocation across countries. We saw in the first chapter of this lecture that as a strict operational guideline, that could be quite problematic, because if each country is imposed upon, to have a very particular level of emissions per capita or an equal level of emissions per capita or an equal budget of rights for emission, the costs of honoring the 2-degree Celsius carbon budget could be extraordinarily high, much higher than they otherwise would be. So we already modified the strict equality of emissions which of course needs a lot of more detailed definition to account for the fact that negotiations should aim in some way to minimize the economic costs incurred in reducing the carbon load, but at the same time there should be side payments from some countries to other countries in order to share the burden in a fair way. Perhaps some equal sharing per person could be viewed as fair. On the other hand, there are so many footnotes to defining equal emissions that we quickly enter a quite complicated and though well-trodden terrain. For example it was pointed out by the government of Brazil and others many, many years ago that since the greenhouse gases are long-lived, the flow of emissions is not really a measure of allocation, rather the cumulative emissions or the stock of carbon dioxide associated with emissions from one country or another should be taken into account.
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And this means that many countries and I think it's a, plausible argument though one not accepted on the other side that countries like the United States which historically have been the very large emitting countries is terms of fairness have a historical responsibility that reflects the fact that the U.S. has used up a significant part of the carbon budget in the past. But there are other
complications as well. Today, many of the major emitters are industrialized middle income countries, of course China is the world's largest emitting country. And one can point to China and say, It's only fair now for China to cut emissions significantly. Now this is certainly true from an efficiency point of view because without reductions of China's emissions there's no way to stay within the 2-degree Celsius limit. But China has another point in terms of the burden and that is China says, yes we are emitting lots of CO2 when we produce the products that you like so much and that we export to you. Why do you attribute the carbon dioxide of our industrial products that are for your use, to us? Why not attribute the carbon dioxide products to the ultimate beneficiaries of products? This has given rise to two of classification of CO2 emissions, those basis of geography of production and the basis of end use.
from
our those columns on the those on
They say that if Americans import an industrial product from China and enjoy that industrial product, the emissions that were part of the process of producing that product should go into the tally of the U.S. column, U.S. responsibility, as, as opposed to China's column. So already we can see from historical responsibility, physical geography the net trade that countries have somewhat different ideas about what is fair. Some countries say, look we have no way to undertake this, these emissions reductions because we lack the kinds of renewable energy. Our mitigation curve is very, very
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steep. Don't ask us to do much of anything. That may be again, part of an efficiency argument. What responsibility do those countries have however from a financial transfer point of view? This again shows the difference of who undertakes which technology and systems measures and who pays for them? That can be two distinct concepts. Many developing countries say, you miss the whole point, this is all very particular and rather arbitrary to judge fairness on the basis of accounting of carbon emissions, whether by production or consumption, historical cumulative or annual flows. We demand in fairness our right to develop. Here are rich countries that are saying we need a more expensive energy system, but we're poor. And we feel that fairness ultimately is about our right to develop, not our sharing of a particular level of burden of mitigation. And there's also a strong point here and that's why putting the climate change negotiation within the broader framework of sustainable development and within the broader framework of the sustainable development goals is important because the right to develop is part of sustainable development. Poor countries need to be assured that the climate negotiations are not slamming the door on their ability to get out of poverty or to narrow the income gaps with the rich countries.
But there are many, many other areas of fairness that need to be considered. What about the fairness between the present generation and the future? You might say that the current generation is being unfair in leaving a very dangerous climate to future generations. There is a lot of truth in that. On the other hand, members of the current generation, that would be us, might say, well why should we undertake all of the costs of emissions for an improved environment for future generations? Let the future pay part of the costs that we incur today. Is that possible that we incur the costs, but the future pays for them? Well it is in part, if we finance some of the mitigation efforts Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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through public debt rather than through current outlays. In that case, future generations through their own taxes will be servicing the debt that was used to finance the current mitigation. So we have a question of fairness between the present and the future which goes in two directions. The argument about who's really being fair to whom, or unfair to whom is a very interesting and, and obviously extremely pertinent question. There's another question that's almost not asked at all by many countries but it's of great concern to a few and that is what about fairness to countries that produce and export oil or gas or coal? Is it really fair just to close up our market, to crush our economy? Don't we need some kind of compensation? If you say, that the world can all benefit from climate mitigation, what about us in the Arabian Peninsula where we have an economy that depends on oil and gas? Or what about Australia or Canada or the United States? Or Venezuela? Or Angola? Or Mozambique? Or other fossil fuel producing and exporting countries, should there be fairness for them? Or should the mitigation efforts which will limit the demand for fossil fuels and thereby lower their market price, at least in tendency, just leave those countries worse off, maybe even crushing their economies? Or should fairness also apply to the balance of gains enjoyed by the consuming countries and the producing countries? When we allocate rights as it were per person, we're not taking into account that issue at all. And many oil exporting countries say, no thank you. They're also saying by the way, we're not even going to agree on this unless there is a Pareto improving outcome of the negotiations. Why should we absolutely suffer massively for the sake of other countries? Let's enjoy the spirit of global cooperation where we can all benefit. So this is a kind of fairness that typically is not being discussed. What about the fairness regarding companies? We have a couple of dozen oil, gas and coal giants that are responsible for a huge proportion of the emissions in terms of the fossil fuels that they produce. They're often just on the sidelines. What is the fairness vis-á-vis Exxon Mobil? What's the fairness vis-á-vis Chevron? What's the fairness vis-á-vis any of these big companies, BHP Billiton or Peabody Coal and others? Don't they have responsibilities? Isn't it fair for them, these companies that have reaped huge profits over past decades, vast shareholder wealth, but imposing huge costs, or at least their products are imposing huge costs to bear some of the burden? It could turn out even to be a legal burden, not only a moral negotiating burden. Often companies that have products that cause large damages, say the asbestos companies in the end face huge liabilities. These cigarette companies have paid huge damages, rightly so, it's a killer product. And they've ended up paying very large taxes as what's deemed to be both efficient in reducing cigarette smoking and fairer in terms of allocating the costs and compensating some of those who have had family members die as a result of smoking addiction or lack of awareness and, and so forth. So the questions of fairness also come in at the individual country level. And poor countries have a different position on fairness. Their argument is we're poor, we need help. There is a lot of merit in that. I would say every great religion in the world for 2,000 years or more has emphasized the moral commitment to help the poor. And here we have a challenge of higher costs or additional efforts needed to have a cooperative global agreement. The poor countries need help, the rich countries have acknowledged Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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this. They've already promised a $100 billion dollars per year by 2020 in transfers from the rich countries to the poor countries, but they haven't said yet, how, in what way, what specificity. And interestingly, recent, in a recent meeting a delegate from China said in the context of negotiations, well many countries are calling for legally binding commitments on mitigation, what about legally binding commitments on financial transfers? Isn't that also part of the fairness? So you can see that that also adds of course a, a huge layer of complexity. Now if you are the Philippines or Haiti or Honduras or other parts of the world in the line of fire of tropical cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, or if you are a country like Syria or, which has faced human disaster, geopolitical disaster, ecological disaster, because of increased drought frequency, all this talk about fairness limited to who is emitting what and who is mitigating what also seems beside the point. What about the damages? What about the costs? Some countries will face costs that are rather modest. Other parts of the world will face enormous costs, even within a 2-degree Celsius limit. And that's why at COP19 in Warsaw at the end of 2013, governments said that part of fairness is compensation for losses and damage. But they haven't defined the mechanisms and the specificity. All of this is to suggest that when we enter into the hardcore negotiations that are coming up and we're looking at efficient ways to stay within the 2-degree Celsius limit, we're looking at effective ways to learn, to adapt, to develop new technologies and we are looking for standards of fairness. We're going to have to keep an open mind because fairness has many different dimensions, many different aspects. It includes the right to development, it includes the right for compensation of losses and damages. It includes responsibilities of companies, not only countries. It includes historical responsibility. It includes the obligation towards the poor. And all of these aspects of fairness are legitimate, they're part of the global discourse and they will absolutely be part of the negotiations in the coming year up to COP21.
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9.4: Making an Agreement Stick In this lecture we're discussing the concepts of negotiation: how to have a Pareto improving outcome, where all of the parties to the agreement are better off than they would be in the business-as-usual trajectory, how to have an agreement that is efficient, mitigating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions at low cost, how to have an agreement that is fair, that allocates the costs and benefits in a fair way, recognizing how many standards of fairness we want to apply, and how to have an agreement that is a true learning agreement, adapting not only to climate change but adapting to new science, new technology, and indeed actively promoting learning of new ways to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. In this chapter I want to talk about another specific aspect of negotiations and that's how to make an agreement stick. What are the problems and challenges when an agreement is reached in enforcing that agreement and again I am going to be discussing this issue at a conceptual level, at an abstract level, because I think that the abstractions are quite helpful. And I will take the most important abstraction of game theory or negotiating theory of the last half century to illustrate the issue, and that crucial abstraction is known as the prisoner's dilemma: a framework of interaction that
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will be known to many students but that is important for everybody to have some exposure to. So in this framework we talk about strategies of the parties to a negotiation or to an interaction and we model or map those on a 2 by 2 matrix or a 2 by 2 table. For the rows we have the strategies of the first country, say the developed countries, and they in this simple example can adopt one of two strategies: either to have business as usual energy policy or to have mitigation policy and for country two, those are the columns of this 2 by 2 matrix, and country two, say the developing country group, also has two possible strategies: business as usual or mitigation. The assumption is that when both parties to this interaction choose to mitigate, they're both left better off than in the business-asusual. That of course is the underlying assumption of climate change and the assumption that we have strongly represented throughout this course. Now in basic game theory or in a representation such as the one you're looking at, we can use the outcomes for example as a single number to suggest again what happens when various mixes of strategies are followed. And in this two by two box, the first number in each box is the outcome. Call it the gross domestic product for example of country one, or group one, the developed countries. The second number refers to the gross domestic product of the second country, the one whose strategies are represented by the columns of this two by two matrix. So look at the box of mitigation, the one that is circled here in which both country one chooses mitigation strategy and country two chooses mitigation strategy. In that case, each has a gross domestic product of 130. Again, an arbitrary number, but for purposes of illustration. Now go directly northwest to the business-as-usual, business-as-usual box. Where country one has not undertaken mitigation policy and country two has also followed suit and not undertaken mitigation policy. In that case, the gross domestic product of these two countries is a 100 and a 100. They're worse off by virtue of the fact that they have failed to mitigate CO2 emissions. Well so far so good. Clearly moving from the northwest box to the southeast box according, down that diagonal is a Pareto improvement. Both parties are made better off. It's like the graph that we looked at earlier, depicted in a different way where one moved from the BAU point to point C, the cooperative point. Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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And both parties to the negotiation are left better off. You might say, that's the end of the story. Unfortunately it's not quite the end of the story. Consider the situation where both countries have agreed to mitigate and they then go home and plan their national policies. And country one follows through and says, we have a good agreement, we'll mitigate. Country two says, you know mitigation is pretty expensive actually. And we get some of the benefits of our mitigation, but so does the other part of the world. It spills over. What happen if we reneged on our and we decided that would carry on with business-as-usual. we'll give some nice about the importance of our agreement, but we'll with the old energy
would actually promise we Maybe speeches carry on policy?
The outcome is then shown in the lower left-hand side of the box, in the southwest corner. In this case, country undertakes the extra cost of mitigation. Country two does not. And according to the illustration that I've made here, country one ends up with a GDP of 80 because it's made a big outlay of mitigation and the other country has still contributed to wrecking the climate by not undertaking and following through on what it promised to do. The other country is left at a 150. Yes it bears the climate damage, but it has not undertaken the added expenses of the deep decarbonization. The outcome from a world point of view is worse. Total output is 230, adding 80 and 150. The world suffers as a whole compared to the 260 gross world product of the all mitigation box in the lower right-hand corner. But the fact that country two reneges on its commitment has left it actually better off and left country one materially worse off. And so one would say, this is not such a stable equilibrium after all, because once the agreement is struck, if it's possible for country two to wriggle out of the agreement then we would have as you see, a kind of arrow from the lower right-hand box to the lower left-hand box, from the southeast to the southwest. And country two is made better off. Ah, but of course it won't stop there. Country one asks itself a question, I have followed through, we have honored our agreement, country two has not, should we continue to follow through or should we revert to a lower cost strategy? Yes, leading to worse climate outcome, but enabling us to avoid this very heavy and very unfair burden that we're now bearing. And so country one asks itself, what will happen if we now move to business-as-usual contrary to our agreement? Aha, now it's true the climate is worse off even more but we also thereby escape this heavy burden of deep decarbonization and so we too are going to move from our mitigation profile to a business-as-usual profile.
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And that leads the arrow up from the southwest to the northwest. And where does the world end up once again? In the business-as-usual scenario. It seems paradoxical. Both countries are worse off than if they had followed through on the cooperation. But this is the essence of the prisoner's dilemma. If there is no way to enforce an agreement, even a Pareto improving agreement that leaves the world with 260 in world product and leaves countries much better off in both cases compared to the business-as-usual where the gross world product is only 200 and each country is worse off than in the cooperative agreement, nonetheless it doesn't stick. What is said in formal game theory parlance is that the business-as-usual path or decision-making is actually the dominant equilibrium of this game. Country one best chooses business-as-usual, no matter what country two does. Country two best chooses business-as-usual no matter what country one does. And lo and behold, both countries end up with a wrecked world climate and a wrecked national environment. It's paradoxical, but it is the paradox of the prisoner's dilemma. The question therefore in cooperation in many, many circumstances is not only to identify the Paretoimproving pathway, but to insure that countries, once they reach the agreement cannot renege on it. Now there are many circumstances where this kind of game theory, prisoner's dilemma structure might apply. And we've not been powerless in the face of this challenge. There are examples one can draw in arms control for instance where both countries are better off if both sides agree to limit their armaments. But the tendency is for one country to renege on its arms control promise if the other is reneging. And both end up being driven to a continuing arms race even though both countries would be better off with a firm and solid and enforced agreement of arms control. Does this mean that arms control is impossible? No, not at all. It means that one needs to add provisions for monitoring, for verification, for checking on interim steps, for transparency, for closing down various options to renege on an agreement, for institutionalizing a pathway of arms control in that instance or of mitigation in our circumstance so that it's very costly for countries to make a U-turn or they are quickly exposed and quickly denounced, or in certain circumstances, there are penalties. Now when two parties make a contract in their economic affairs, a supplier and a buyer for example, and they sign a contract that leaves each better off, perhaps there also would be an incentive for one or the other or both to renege on the contract. But when it's a commercial contract, typically there's a court of law in which one party can sue the other party and get enforcement. And that is a basic mechanism of enforcement s rule of law and a third party enforcer. Perhaps in the end, the sheriff, the prosecutor and a jail sentence for violating a, a contract, or a massive fine. In the international setting when 193 governments are going to agree on climate terms in Paris, there isn't a sheriff, there isn't a prosecutor, there isn't an international court that can enforce a decision, so we need different mechanisms. What are some of the mechanisms in international treaties, whether it's arms treaties or climate mitigation treaties?
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Well there, there can be penalties imposed in some circumstances. Even financial penalties for example in violating certain trade agreements. There can be opportunities for countries to retaliate. If one country reneges on a promise, the rest of the countries can say, we will not import goods from the country that's not undertaking climate change mitigation. We're going to put on border taxes for example. So there are many proposals that are under consideration right now, either for penalties, for forms of retaliation, for trade policy that can help to enforce agreements. Of course even more important than this typically is the transparency and the reputation of governments and the fact that any kind of U-turn requires a tremendous publicized effort that gives the rest of the world the opportunity to say you must not do that. It's not foolproof for sure, after all, the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol, though it never ratified it. Other countries that signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol didn't live up to it and they were not hauled off to court because there was no court to haul them off. This is a reality therefore and it is the reason that I want to emphasize that another consideration in addition to efficiency, fairness, adaptability, flexibility is the question of enforceability, reputation, even punishments or retaliation if countries don't follow through. We'll be discussing those options when we talk about these issues in the global online negotiation early next year. It's not as if there is any ironclad principle in this. But the question of enforcement absolutely will be present because countries will be making socalled legally binding contributions under COP21 and the question is what are they really binding to?
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9.5: Problem-Solving Versus Negotiating I want to talk about the, the nature of the negotiating process and more generally, the nature of the problem-solving process of the 193 governments that are party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Let's go back to picture, really the logic of itself. we talked the first chapter lecture, the negotiations improve the all the parties relative business-as-
an earlier the core of negotiation Remember about, in of this idea that are to situation of negotiating to the usual.
It's to move to what we called a Pareto improving outcome. In this diagram from the business-as-usual point that is lower in possibilities for all countries to the cooperative equilibrium "C" in which both groups of countries shown in this figure are better off, and because climate change is, after all, potentially such a calamity, moving to a situation better than the one that we are facing in business-as-usual terms is evident, evidently possible. And yet, the negotiations have continuously proved to be extraordinarily difficult; that's why we're aiming for a real solution at COP21 that we might have thought would come in COP1 in Berlin in 1995 or COP3 as was attempted in Kyoto or COP15 in Copenhagen when it seemed that the world was coming close to making a meaningful breakthrough.
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What are the reasons why it has proved so hard to go from that BAU point to the point "C", the cooperative Pareto improving negotiating outcome? I think that there are at least eight reasons that make climate negotiations just incredibly hard compared to almost any other kind of negotiation that one might consider, and it is worth it for us to think about those difficulties, those uncharacteristic difficulties making this issue so distinct in order to overcome these obstacles. The first problem is that going from BAU to "C" is not an immediate process. Sometimes when you negotiate you're better off when you get up from the table and you say, "ok we've made an advance", but when it comes to climate change we're talking about a transformation of the economy, of the energy system, of our technologies, of our behaviors stretching over decades, and we're talking about seeing gains from that that also will show up mostly over decades and so negotiating over a very long-term process is inherently more difficult than negotiating over an outcome that gives the immediate gratification of an improvement relative to the status quo. There's a related but distinct second challenge and that is that when it comes to the actual improvements, that is why C is "better" than BAU, we're not going to see those improvements for a long time, not just that it is a long time to realize the change, but the costs of action will be borne predominantly within the next two or three decades, whereas the benefits will be felt predominantly in decades to come. And so we have the costs up front, the benefits later-delayed gratification; not the simplest thing for humanity in general for any of us and certainly not the simplest thing for politicians to manage. They are immediate gratifiers to the ultimate extent; they want to win an election; they want to stay in power, so they're looking at the short term. But, we have compressed in that negotiating diagram short- and long-term and saying that going from BAU to C is an improvement is simplifying a much more complicated situation where costs come early and gains are likely to be felt only much later. A third problem that is obviously fundamental is that in many negotiations when you shake hands and have reached an outcome, you know clearly you're better off, but when it comes to climate change there are enormous uncertainties, not the uncertainties that justify climate denial--this is pure anti-science—the basic science is overwhelming. But, there are uncertainties about technologies, there are uncertainties about future costs, there are uncertainties about the specific timing of climate events, there are uncertainties about the capacity to adapt to climate change rather than to mitigate climate change. This is technically, scientifically, socially one of the most complex issues that humanity has ever faced because it's global scale, because it goes to the heart of the economic system, because it involves a complex planetary dynamic, and these uncertainties, of course, enable doubt to be magnified, to be manufactured as has been said, into paralysis. Of course, there is uncertainty. This doesn't mean a failure, that we should fail to act, but it is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to act. The fourth element is that with the timeline and the timing and the uncertainties, the transition required in going from BAU to C is not simply stated. It is not self-evident and transparent, nor is it the product of a small number of actions.
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We're talking about transformation of the core of the energy system. We're talking about changes of land use on a global scale. We're talking about changes in agriculture that engages hundreds of millions of people around the world. There is nothing simple about this. We're talking about an enormously complex process of change even if we could agree fully on what needs to be done and how to do it, we would then, and we will, I hope, face the challenge of implementation that itself will prove to be one of the most daunting aspects of this whole issue. The fifth aspect that makes this so hard is the, the little fib that is shown in the simple diagram of going from BAU to C. I've drawn that picture of two symmetric negotiators, and the improvement is also symmetric. The arrow points up on a 45 degree line from, from the origin of the, of this graph. In other words, the countries are sharing equally, and it's pretty easy to define in this simple diagram what equal means, but there is nothing equal about the status of the countries that are at the table.
There are huge, powerful asymmetries around the table. Some countries are fantastically rich and others are desperately poor. They have very different points of view. The rich countries often think, "we can impose a solution on the poor", and the poor countries think "why are we even here being asked to do something when the rich have caused the problem and have the means to solve the problem." There are big differences in how countries are feeling the advent of anthropogenic climate change. The small island states know, they know in their gut their country could absolutely disappear under the waves. With rising sea levels, countries are threatened with their very survival, the case of some of the small island states. Some of the big, northern, more temperate zone economies, Canada or Russia, may feel a little bit warmer, well, maybe not all bad; we're a pretty cold climate much of the year. The sense of peril may not be felt, may not even be as dramatic as is experienced in an island or in a dryland country or in a tropical setting. Countries really differ by the nature of the damages and harms, though it is absolutely the case no country will be able to stand-alone in a world profoundly perturbed and disrupted by large-scale climate change. Countries also differ, of course, tremendously in the ownership of energy resources, especially fossil fuels. Some countries are fossil fuel-rich, and they are typically saying, "we plan to use those fossil fuels, thank you". Other countries don't have fossil fuels; maybe they even have vast renewable alternatives and they're saying, "stop the fossil fuels. Let's move to alternative form of energy". It's easier for them to say that, more convenient. Not only do they not feel the lobbying pressure from the owners of the fossil fuels, but for countries that don't have their own fossil fuel resources, the alternatives look more promising and more secure.
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This are just some of the very strong asymmetries that make negotiating more difficult, that make defining a fair or focal bargain that says "yes that's the point on which we should all agree"--a more daunting task. This comes to another point, what is fair? If we were all the same and symmetrically placed around the table, fair would be quite obvious. If a group of individuals is dividing the cake, and there's no other reason, in terms of division, to do otherwise, you try to divide the cake in as close to equal pieces as possible. But, because of the asymmetries, every country has its own standard vision of what's fair. Poor countries talk about fairness in terms of wealth and poverty. The highly vulnerable countries, like the small island states, understandably, talk about fairness in terms of impact of climate change. The fossil fuel-owning countries talk about fair in terms of the right to use their own resources. Other countries talk about fair in terms of an equal allocation of the atmospheric space for greenhouse gas emissions, and so on. These are all aspects of fairness, and the fact that there are so many different
perspectives, of course, means that reaching an outcome--not that it's impossible because countries could all say, "even though we differ in our moral judgments, ethical judgments, sense of fairness, we're all better off at the following point", but it does make it harder to find that point. Then, as we discussed in the case of the Prisoner's Dilemma, there's a huge problem of trust. "Okay, we could agree, but how do I know you're really going to carry that out. I have to go back to my parliament or my congress or my party and explain what
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I've committed to and they're going to say, 'you committed that when the others are not really going to follow through.'" This is a standard problem of any kind of agreement. In an arms agreement, the peace negotiators may come home to find huge objection by saying, "you have entrusted our country on the basis of a promise that will not be fulfilled by the others." So, the whole question of finding a binding solution, one that can be monitored, one that can be verified is a part of negotiations. Here just as it has long been a major part of arms limitation agreements and other kinds of geopolitical negotiations. And then the eighth point is, of course, very particular, powerful interests. Some of these interests are enormously concentrated. Some of the big oil companies, of course, face almost an existential question, "if we're going to have a 2-degree C limit, what happens to us? What happens to our multi-gazillion dollar capitalization in the marketplace? How will investors value us?" What will happen, asks the CEO, to my wealth, to my income, to my pension, to my position? And, put it the other way, some of these interests are extraordinarily powerful. They're major political powers in their country, and they are able to shape the political discussion and the national negotiations. And, of course, individual countries around the table also can play that role. It's probably the case that if there's a vast consensus about what to do, to unanimity, will not be the rule. But if any of the major countries--China or the United states or India or the European Union--say, "No way!" that makes a deal extraordinarily difficult, and so individual countries can play a pretty decisive role in blocking an agreement even one that has been agreed by dozens and dozens of other countries. you might say, "that's pretty exhausting", and it has been exhausting because we have gone through 19 Conferences of the Parties. We'll have the twentieth in Lima in December and the twenty-first in Paris in December 2015 and still no breakthrough. But, it may be in part because we have been looking at this whole issue in the not quite correct way. If the negotiations are viewed as a largely zero-sum game that "I can't make a concession because you're going to get the big prize" or "you do more, I do less" or "you pay for it, I don't pay for it" or "you have your historical responsibility, I don't have to participate"; when it's viewed as one versus the other, then all of these problems that I have discussed are brought to the fore. If, however, the sense of the discussion around the table were somewhat different starting from the point "we are collectively in a mess; it is a horrendous problem facing everybody in the world, and we're all in this together", then the spirit of these discussions could be quite different. And I would compare this in the following way. One might view this as a poker game. Each negotiator is holding their cards, looking across the table. The US negotiator is looking at China; "what are they doing? What are they promising?" The Chinese negotiator is looking back at the US and casting a glance over to the European Union. Each side is wondering who is going to take the pot; how are we going to divide this? But a quite different view would be the same group around the table; the men and women's sleeves rolled up saying, "My God, what are we going to do? This is a Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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horrendous problem. We've got to figure this out." So it would be less of a poker game and more of an intense brainstorming and problem-solving; the kind of thing you'd see in a movie as world leaders get together pondering what to do about the asteroid coming towards the earth or the alien space invasion that suddenly unites all of humanity into a common force because the problem is external, shared by everyone, and requiring creativity, fortitude, bravery, brainstorming, far-sightedness. And yet another analogy that I find very important and compelling is the idea of an orchestra; brainstorming, sleeves rolled up and trying to figure this one out. An orchestra is trying to make beautiful music together. In other words, trying to implement a solution. The solution could be a wonderful symphony or the solution could be deep decarbonization. Now, one might immediately ask, "if it's an orchestra, if the world's to make beautiful music together, where's the conductor? How is this going to be brought about?" And that in recent years is drawn my attention to a phenomenon known as the conductor-less orchestra. Here, you're looking at Olin conductorless orchestra. They are a chamber orchestra playing beautiful music together; well worth listening to on Youtube. There's no conductor. There is no single individual. There is, however, a score. They all have the score in front of them. They're playing to the same sheet music. That I believe is the closest analogy, at least that I can come up with, to what we ought to be doing. We do have the same sheet music; we have the 2-degree centigrade limit. We know what we need to do in terms of the global performance. We could have in front of everybody's stand the respective deep decarbonization pathways that each country is playing its music, is pursuing its own designed deep decarbonization pathway. There is no single conductor, but in the aggregate, the music makes sense; it does keep the world safe. So I believe that we are too much thinking of poker players, too little thinking of the brainstormers or the conductorless orchestra, and when it comes to the poker playing what really worries me is that the players around the table are not only looking at their hands, actually all of their cards are blank. They don't know what's on their cards or what's their national interest. What can they be doing? They don't necessarily know because they haven't made the analysis of a deep decarbonization pathway. They may think they're defending their national interest, but how can you know the national interest unless you have investigated the real benefits and costs of alternative pathways, and alas, that has not happened. And one of the reasons that has not happened is that the players around the table are not quite the right players. That chamber orchestra would not be quite so interesting if every musician was playing a violin. It's the mix that's crucial to get the right music, but who's at the table? The table is the government. Of course, it's the diplomats; they are not technologists; they are not engineers; they are negotiating very much from the point of view "don't make concessions, have the other country make concessions." Not, "how are we going to get carbon capture and sequestration working more rapidly?" Who should be around the table for this kind of problem solving and implementation? Well, the politicians should be there; they represent the governments that put the public policy into place but also the technologists, the engineers, the scientists who can say carbon capture and sequestration--this can be done if we can overcome the following technical obstacles.
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Or look at the possibility for energy storage with this technology if we can just push it over the boundary to commercialization then we'd all have much more running room. The companies should be there as well. Both the established companies and the startups. Now, you might think if the companies are there that's all lobbying, but I actually want the companies pulled to the table. What are the oil companies doing outside saying, "This isn't our responsibility." Just making huge amounts of money, lobbying behind the scenes perhaps to slow things down but not being at the table. When recently some of the big oil companies, Exxon Mobile and others, said, "We don't believe in the 2-degree Celsius as a feasible goal." I think that is pure moral hazard or immoral behavior. It's not for a company, which is a major emitter and a beneficiary of inaction, to decide by itself what's feasible or not; it has to be there exercising responsibility and indeed following public policy. And citizens more generally need to be at the table, and that's why I am going to emphasize shortly in the final lecture the role of global goals that are clear, that are succinct, that are understandable by everybody; this is not a technocrat adventure; it's not a political insiders game; it's not a business deal or a lobbyist's dream; this is a citizen's issue of the first-order of importance for the world. In the DDPP itself, in our Deep Decarbonization Pathway Project, as Emmanuel Guerin described to you, we had our own brainstorming and negotiating and thinking and working together across 15 countries, we realized, even as a group of strongly motivated, environmentally conscious, determined to help fight climate change group, it's not easy to get to 2 degrees C; it's going to require a huge effort even in the modeling itself, much less in the actual implementation. Even within a project, therefore, you see that the brainstorming, the idea that we need to find our way, step-by-step together to meaningful solutions applies. And that needs to be the spirit around the table as world leaders from business, civil society, government, academia, technologists help to find a path forward. In the next lecture, I'll talk about how we could help to make the negotiating process fit that purpose and do so in time for success in COP21.
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10: Towards a New Climate Agreement Based on 2-Degrees Celsius
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10.1: The Three-Tiered Structure of Mitigation Commitments Welcome to theglobal online negotiation will put you at the negotiating table as a delegate to work out with fellow citizens around the world a meaningful climate agreement for 2015, one that I count of us being able to deliver and to say to the world leaders, here it is, here a kind of agreement you should have and if you don't come up with it, well the world's citizens have. So I'm looking forward to participating together with you as delegates to the global online negotiation next semester. And therefore in this tenth and final lecture of this semester, I'd like to talk about the structure of the negotiations at COP21, how they can produce a meaningful agreement, an agreement to achieve the 2-degree Celsius limit on mean global temperature increase. And to do that in this chapter one, I want to talk about a kind of structure, a three-tiered structure for an actual agreement. Now these three tiers are not the only parts of a climate agreement, indeed, in further chapters of this lecture I'll talk about some of the other parts of an agreement in terms of financing for instance. But here I want to talk about the logic of an agreement on mitigation. What would it mean to agree to a 2-degree Celsius limit for the world as a whole? And for that purpose let's go back to the three kinds of interactions that I discussed in lecture nine. The poker game, the brainstorming around the table and the conductor-less orchestra, because I think that all three have some role in the negotiations. What's being discussed now mostly is the poker game. That's been the tradition of the negotiations up until now. What are we going to agree to? How do I make sure as representing country one that I'm not giving up something relative to country two? And we're going to have that kind of bargaining no doubt and we'll have absolutely that spirit to some unavoidable extent, also to some logical extent to make sure that the commitments are shared.
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The first tier of any agreement is likely to be some legally binding contributions or commitments of countries in the relatively short-term. Say up to the year 2030, the agreement to be reached next year will only take force most likely by around 2018 and maybe begin its period of implementation around 2020. And perhaps the next phase envisioned within an agreement would be 2030. Governments are saying to others, what are you ready to put on the table that is a firm commitment on emissions levels across the greenhouse gases and that can be monitored, reported, verified and that will be binding for you? Now that's the poker game. It is not going to deliver a 2-degree Celsius ambition. Why? First, it's too short-term for that. In order to deep, deeply decarbonizes, we're going to need decades, not decade, so any real deep decarbonization program needs to have a horizon well beyond 2030 to mid-century and even beyond because we know that if our goal is to reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide by 2050 to say between 10 and 15 billion tons, we're going to need as a world to reduce net emissions to nearly zero or to zero net emissions perhaps by 2070 to 2080. So the second tier is going to have to give us a longer-term framework to begin with, 2030 can never do it. The other problem with focusing only on the short-term in that baseline poker game is that it can, it can trick you. It can lead countries to short-term improvements hat are kinds of dead-ends, that are limited progress but have a lock-in effect that don't allow the countries to go further. This is evident in the United States with some of the sentiment right now to shift from coal fired power plants not to wind or solar or nuclear or zero emitting electricity, but to natural gas. And the argument is, well that's an improvement. Going from coal to gas, that's a good thing. And that would be built say into a 2030 scenario. The problem with that however is that while gas burns more cleanly than coal, an economy based natural gas is not an economy consistent with the 2-degree C limit. It would be emitting far, far more than would be permissible under a carbon budget of 2-degree centigrade. So the second tier has to be longer-term. And of course given our experience in the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, we feel quite strongly from our own experience and from the logic of the project itself that every country should put forward a deep decarbonization pathway, at least to the mid-century. Those DDPPs are a little bit like the score that is on the musician's stand in the conductor-less orchestra, that is the music that will be played. It's not music under a contract that says, you play that, that's legally binding and verified. More, it is the, the theme music that together around the world countries will play in order to make the sounds of, of 2-degrees C. In other words, to make the music that can really change the direction of the, the temperature and the energy system. It is to put it in other terms, part of that thinking through and implementation process, how can we really get to where we need to go? Now there's a third part of this puzzle around the table and that's the fact that we don't have solutions at hand that are quite good enough for what we're going to need. Again, in the Deep Decarbonization Pathway Project, many country teams had a very, very difficult time to have their models combine the assumed quite rapid economic growth for the developing countries for example and the deep decarbonization together with that growth. And when the models were pushed on that, the models said, our technological assumptions are rather cautious, rather static. If we're going to be able to decarbonizes more deeply, of course we're going to need breakthroughs on technology.
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This should be the third tier of an agreement. If the first tier is for the short horizon, legally binding, the second tier is the pathways for the middle of the century. The third tier or component of an agreement is a serious worldwide effort to make breakthroughs on technology. What is called the RDD&D framework. The research development demonstration and diffusion framework. This is not the kind of agreement unfortunately that has been negotiated in the past. When one looks at the Kyoto Protocol or the drafts that were circulated for Copenhagen, or even the discussions that are underway now, the components that I've just outlined of short-term, legally binding contributions, intermediate run pathways and a major constructive effort on technology has not really been a framework in place. And one can see in the tensions that result, the failure to have that integrated frame has made it very difficult to reach agreements on any particular component. Countries resist being pushed farther in terms of legally binding commitments beyond what they feel is already sure and available technologically. Without the technology building component, we also will not develop those improvements that will open up the space for much deeper action. And yet without the pathways that guide us and tell us that it's not enough to go from coal to natural gas, but we have to go from coal to zero carbon electricity, or nearly so, without those pathways, then we don't even have guidelines on what the technological needs and obstacles that we must overcome really are. So it's that integrated framework that is the kind of framework that can carry us forward. In the next chapters, let's look more deeply at the issues of technology, the issues of finance, and the issues of public mobilization and support of a bold agreement.
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10.2: Technology RDD&D Where we're outlining how the negotiating process and agreement could bring us to a meaningful 2-degree Celsius framework for the COP21 agreement. And in this chapter I want to talk about the technology development that needs to underpin an agreement. Of course we have many powerful technologies that we have already talked about, renewable energy, other low carbon energy sources, even advanced technologies like carbon capture and sequestration which are already deployed at a very small scale that can bring us forward and help to reduce carbon emissions. But as this whole course has shown and as the Deep Decarbonization Pathway Project has made very clear in detail for 15 major emitting countries, we will need improvements in low carbon energy and in energy utilization, in energy efficiency, in urban planning and design in order to be able to combine the economic development and growth that we aspire to, the population increases that are underway and the significant reductions of global carbon dioxide emissions. How are we going to get those technological improvements? Sometimes it's said and argued that technology comes from the business sector, it comes from inventors and entrepreneurs who see an idea, develop it. Maybe a team of scientists with a new discovery looking for profitability under patent protection. And that is a model for certain kinds of incremental technological changes. In our patent system, which is now a worldwide patent system, an inventor of a new useful technology or, or process can file their invention and have a exclusive right to use that new product for example or that new technology for a period of twenty years from the date of filing.
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That's like a temporary monopoly. It means if this is a really good idea, that the demand will be high, the inventor or the holder of the patent will be able to charge a monopoly price. The argument is that granting that monopoly price while distorting the market by reducing the use of that technology relati veto what a competitive market would allow is an important incentive for the invention in the first place. The monopoly profit that comes during the twenty years of the life of the patent is what gives the incentive in this vision to the invention in the first place. No doubt some part of technology advances that way. But for the kind of massive changes of technology that we are going to need to achieve the 2-degree C limit, we're going to need to have a faster pace of technological change and a more directed path of that change as well in order to overcome identifiable obstacles that are preventing for example the large deployment of electric vehicles more in, on a more speedy basis or the large deployment of carbon capture and sequestration, or are leaving the public with such high anxieties about nuclear energy that even though it's a zero carbon energy source, in many countries there's strong public resistance to the deployment of more nuclear power. In order to get the technologies where they are going to need to be for their rapid scale up and worldwide dissemination, we're going to need to target the technological change, not leave it to the market alone. The market will still play a role, private companies will still be looking for the profits that they can earn under patent protection for discoveries that they make. But we're going to need to go farther in directed technological change. Do we know how to do that? The answer is and I think it's a surprise to many people, that is an absolutely normal way for technology to change, especially for important classes of technology. Throughout the centuries governments have been driving technological change. There's a famous book that many people know called Longitude which is a story of how the British government offered a prize for inventions that could help sailors and especially the British navy know the longitude of the ship, which was otherwise very difficult to do. And in order to direct technological innovation towards being able to determine the longitude a prize was given and that was an added incentive for invention. The outcome was a remarkably accurate clock that could be used to keep exquisitely precise time on ships despite all the rolling of the vessels and by knowing the time at the ship and knowing the time in London and knowing the declination of the sun, it was possible to measure longitude more precisely than had ever been done before. It's an early example of governments using their financial power to direct technological change. Well the 20th Century is absolutely filled with stunning examples, both led and very often they have been led by the military as well as for many, many kinds of civilian use or in some cases, originally for military purposes and, and then it turned out that the civilian use became an enormous part of the contribution or the, the predominant part. Perhaps the, the most striking and famous of such cases in the Manhattan Project, which was the, the crash effort of the United States government to bring together the world's leading nuclear physicists to develop an atomic bomb at a, in what was thought to be a race with Nazi Germany. And from a technological scientific point of view it, it's an astounding historical experience, because in a few years atomic science, the ability
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to harness the new quantum mechanics, the remarkable innovations of technological advance in managing uranium based fuels and fuel processing all took hold and of course the atomic bomb was developed. It's perhaps not the most heartening example from the point of view of, of military application when we're talking about saving the world from our own destruction through human induced climate change, we obviously are looking at a peaceful imperative. But still the Manhattan Project tells us something very important about directed technological change, about the capacity to push a major technological advance in an extraordinarily short period of time, in that case, by recruiting some of the world's greatest geniuses and under the pressures of war. Well I grew up as a young boy in another such example of a massive government led effort. My childhood was spent listening to the radio or watching the television of one space shot after the next, from the earliest days of the Mercury mission that put an American astronaut into suborbital flight, chasing the Russians who had gotten into space first and then following President John F. Kennedy's call to go to the moon to bring, to have a man travel safely to the moon and return safely to earth before the end of the 1960s. And in really what is an absolutely astounding demonstration of what was the U.S. extraordinary engineering technological and scientific capability of that decade, from 1961 to 1969, a government led mission, led by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, succeeded in putting a man on the moon, Neil Armstrong and several others that followed and bringing the astronauts back safely to earth, all within a very short period of time, a little over eight years. It was a massive outlay. It required tremendous technological advances, but it was done within the course of a decade. The list is long. One can include the internet itself which began as a project of the U.S. defense sector to find ways to protect computer information in the event of nuclear war. It aimed to allow computers to share information with each other. It became the global internet over time, but it was directed technological change, again, harnessing engineering brilliance and within a few decades it created a technology and an industry of such transformative power that it is felt in every sector of the world economy as our most fundamental technological driver of our time. And with the advances of the internet, the computer industry pushed again by the U.S. and other governments through massive public-private partnerships. We've had advances in almost every other major area of science in human health and in biology. Of course the genetics revolution has been a partner and close part of the overall information revolution. And it's notable that once again the United States government set a goal in what became known as the Human Genome Project. Said, within 15 years we should sequence the entire three billion base pairs of a human genome. And they did it well before the end of the 15-year period. It was a public-private partnership. Private companies were involved. Public laboratories at U.S. universities, international universities. In the end there was a bit of a race to the finish line between the National Institutes of Health and a private company that said, we know how to do it better and faster and that competition was also exhilarating and made important breakthroughs in genomics sequencing.
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And interestingly after the first human genome was sequenced at the cost of many billions of dollars and after a bit of experience, in 2001, the National Institutes of Health of the United States came together with leading scientists and said, what should our next goal be on the human genome? Now they were in 2001 and the cost of sequencing the genome at that point was estimated to be about $100 million dollars. Around the table the scientists said, let's aim for a $1000 dollar sequencing protocol and system. One thousand dollars when you're at a hundred million? They said, yes we can reduce the cost dramatically and if we succeed in doing so we'll have enormous benefits for medicine, for personalized healthcare, for many biological discoveries, for many advances in other biomedical technologies. And you know within 14 years that effort succeeded as well and the $1000-dollar per genome sequencing is now a reality. It didn't just come through market forces, through patent protected rights. It came through a race towards that goal that was instigated by the National Institutes of Health, that was heavily funded by the U.S. government that said, benchmarks, timelines and scientific expertise in order to accomplish the goal. Well my list that you're looking at on the screen is a long one. Fundamental particle physics, identifying the Higgs particle, one of the most important scientific discoveries of modern times about the nature of, of matter itself was a huge intergovernmental effort that cost billions of dollars and made a transcendent scientific finding as a result. We live off of Moore's law, that is the improvement of semiconductor capacity that's allowed for a doubling of the number of transistors on an integrated circuit, roughly every two years since the late 1950s. That's why our phones have computers more powerful than NASA had in the 1960s, why we'd had about a billion-fold reduction of the cost of process of storing and transmitting data. That didn't just happen by itself. Of course private companies like Fairchild or Intel played an essential role. But there was a strategy to it, there was industry-wide road mapping. There was a cooperative effort to set milestones and find technological solutions and create industry-wide standards to keep Moore's law going decade after decade after decade, giving us the information revolution All of this is to say we need the same kind of directed technological change for low carbon energy, as we have had in these other areas. It's a proven process. It's breathtaking in the creativity and the excitement and the advance that can be unleashed. It includes the public sector, the private sector, the foundation sector, all as partners in such an effort. It means setting goals and technological specifications. Setting milestones and timelines for technological advances. Of financing that comes from multiple directions, from the government, from the private sector, from philanthropists. And one final point that I would note is it is expensive. These technological breakthroughs don't come for free. We have to invest in them. But when we're talking about a $90 trillion dollar world economy that could lose significant output value, not to mention loss of life on a large scale, we should be ready to undertake expensive investments in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars if necessary in order to make the breakthroughs in the coming years that will be necessary. What are those areas going to be? Well Emmanuel Guerin has gone over them in detail. Let me just mention them very briefly again. We need to test the feasibility of large-
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scale carbon capture and sequestration. We need safer nuclear power and nuclear power that is perceived to be safer by the public and therefore publicly acceptable. And we need good solutions for the storage of intermittent wind and solar power and for regional grids that are heavily dependent on large penetrations of wind and solar and other intermittent renewable energy sources. We need high quality electric vehicles. We have many already but we need them at lower cost and with an infrastructure that leads to very large-scale consumer acceptance, so that by the 2030s the entire light duty fleet of the world is electric vehicles. We need important breakthroughs in decarbonizing key industrial sectors which as we've noted in this course are some of the most recalcitrant in terms of getting the CO2 emissions down. Iron and steel, cement, petrochemicals, pulp and paper. And we're doing to need technological efforts on agriculture, land use and forestry to help support more biological storage of carbon dioxide and thereby shift the balance from the current direction of carbon emissions from the land use sector to carbon storage in the land use sector in the decades ahead. And technology can play an important role in that process. These ideas should be incorporated in a quite fundamental way in the COP21 agreement because in that way we will overcome hurdles and also give confidence to the countries of the world that if they chart deep decarbonization pathways the means
to accomplish those pathways will be at hand.
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10 3: Climate Financing I want to say some words about a very complicated and unsolved and unsettled area: climate finance. This is a complicated topic because it covers a tremendous range of issues, but involves broadly speaking the question of how the world both individually as governments and collectively through international organizations and institutions and through market forces internally within a country and internationally will finance the transition to a low-carbon world economy and also will finance other parts of the climate challenge including adaptation to ongoing climate change. There are many categories of need and many issues about how this financing can be allocated, who's to pay, who would be the recipients, what are the terms of the financing? There are many kinds of financial instruments that might be considered and there are aspects of financial regulation as well. All of this points to the underlying fact that the category of climate finance is a big one and it means a lot of things and a lot of different things to a lot of different groups. I want to sort out some key aspects of the climate finance issue, but don't pretend in any way to find a clear bottom line because as of now there are still too many issues in play and not yet the clarity of either concept or magnitude of financing that will be needed for the whole transition process. Well what are the kinds of areas that need financing when we consider the transformation to a low-carbon economy and when we consider life in the midst of anthropogenic climate change?
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The first category is the core financing of our energy-related infrastructure. This is the biggest single item of finance. It is a multi-trillion dollar amount of financing each year. Remember that we are in a world economy of nearly a $100 trillion per annum at this point. And the economy globally continues to grow at around three to four percentage points per year, meaning that it doubles roughly every twenty years. Maybe by 2035 or 2040 it will be at a scale of $200 trillion. Typically, infrastructure would be a few percentage points of that. That means the investments in power generation, in transmission, in roads, in rail, in airports, in port facilities and in other physical infrastructure, dams, levees, coastal protection, inland waterway infrastructure and so forth might total somewhere between three and five percent of the world economy. So we're talking about total investments on the order of roughly three to five trillion dollars a year. And that's why when we think about climate finance, which does not include the totality of infrastructure, but certainly includes power generation, the transmission grid, the road and rail network which constitutes the core of the domestic transport, ports and airports, those are expensive and large amounts of investment. And in this sense, climate finance is a trillion, trillions of dollar a year activity. Many questions are raised as to how this financing will get done, especially given the fact that we're going to have to direct a lot of that financing towards investments that may be at a higher market cost than traditional investments, in other words, costs of power generation that may be more expensive apparently than investing in a coal fired power plant, but less expensive when we take into account the social cost of carbon. And so to direct massive amounts of investment to sustainable low carbon infrastructure will require all of the normal means of financing, budgets of the government, state financial institutions, the private capital markets, the retained earnings of private companies that may be generating power or managing rail and so forth, plus new instruments of regulation and carbon pricing such as of course tradable emissions permits or a carbon tax. But the basic idea is that this universe of trillions of dollars of infrastructure finance must continue, but change course under the pressures of regulation, carbon pricing, and other systematic parts of the deep Decarbonization pathway and be directed towards a low-carbon core infrastructure. This is one part of the overall climate finance puzzle. Some of the others of course are ways to pay for other categories of activities that we've been talking about at length. Another part of the climate financing is the financing of the research, development, demonstration and diffusion of low carbon or zero carbon technologies. So this is another category, the RDD&D financing. Then there is a category of financing which is financing for infrastructure in part, but is directed towards the needs of the poorest countries. And here the Green Climate Fund that has been established under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change is under the agreements that have been reached by the parties to be a major instrument for financing infrastructure and climate adaptation of low-income countries. It is to be one of the main ways that a specific pledge of a $100 billion per year from high income countries for low income countries should be implemented. But the details of the role of the Green Climate Fund and how it will be
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financed, which countries will contribute, whether it will go to the market and how are still being debated and, and are as yet unresolved. Then it's been recognized under the Framework Convention that in addition to the financing of the new power sector or a new low-carbon transport there will have to be considerable financing for adaptation itself. Some of that is for the soft infrastructure of behavior and redesign of settlements ensuring that people are living outside of what will become new flood plains under changing climate conditions. But also the hard infrastructure that protects low-lying areas such as The Netherlands, or New York City which are each implementing very large scale, tens of billions of dollars hard infrastructure. And I've just added a picture for you of many of the socalled Delta Works for this most famous of low-lying countries, The Netherlands, the low-lying lands of Europe, which has been battling the sea level for all of its existence, but as ocean's levels rise and as storms become more intense, The Netherlands, which is perhaps the world's leader in the technology of adaptation to sea level pressures has, is now implementing a project of more than a hundred billion dollars over the coming decades to protect itself against the changing ocean conditions. This famous Delta Works program is cutting-edge technology. It includes dikes, dams, levees, storm surge barriers of tremendous innovation and creativity because the designers and engineers are always balancing the physical protection with the protection of the ecosystems as well. Now in New York City, we don't have Delta Works quite in the same way, but Manhattan and other parts of New York City are also low-lying coastal zones that experienced a tremendous flooding during Super Storm Sandy. And in response to that, the New York City government under former Mayor Bloomberg put forward a twenty billion dollar plan like Delta Works, just illustrated in part here with new flood walls and surge protection barriers and so forth, showing that the adaptation agenda is partly behavioral and it's partly hard physical infrastructure and financing of adaptation is going to be also a very pricey item given of course the fact that the climate related hydro meteorological disasters are now claiming also massive, massive losses of infrastructure and not to mention lives per year. This brings us to another category of funding, agreed, but still not designed for losses and damages, experienced especially by poor countries. We don't have an adequate global insurance system against hydro-meteorological disasters. The low-income countries demanded it, they got assent in COP19 in Warsaw. And such a financing of losses and damages is now on, on the table for design. We also need financing for more general ecosystem protection and resilience. And here the global environment facility, which was created in part under the Framework Convention and partly under the Convention on Biological Diversity plays the unique role in the official world of financing resilience and protection of natural ecosystems and also human managed ecosystems. Well I hope that the list makes clear how complex this topic is from hard physical infrastructure of power generation and transmission and roads and rail to ecosystem functioning, protection against storm surges, research and development, help for the poor and compensation for losses and damages. The climate finance agenda is obviously extraordinarily complex. What does financing even mean in this context? Of course it means financial resources devoted to these challenges, but the nature of those instruments is also extraordinarily Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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varied and heavily debated I might add. The rich countries have promised the poor countries a hundred billion dollars in finance by the year 2020. But what do they mean by that? Do they mean private sector financing? Do they mean foreign investment? Do they mean loans? Do they mean grants? There are many categories of finance and some require repayment, others are essentially transfers. And when it comes to something as significant as the hundred billion dollars promised by the rich to the poor countries, the answer is we don't know because it hasn't been negotiated yet. And there are very, very different opinions about it. I mention here some of the categories of finance, hardly exhaustive. Of course grants mean direct transfers of money that don't need to be paid back. Loans are moneys that require repayment. The interest rate on those loans can be below market at which, in which case these loans are called concessional loans, or they could be at market terms. There are also ways to extend guarantees to an agent, could be a city government that wants to borrow on the market in order to build infrastructure. And an outside entity, say the World Bank or the African Development Bank or another government could say, we will guarantee the repayment of the loan so you can borrow that funding on preferred terms. And there is neither a grant, nor a loan but a credit guarantee which may come to almost the same thing as a loan. There can be insurance protection against various kinds of risks. There can be liability protection where a government says you build the carbon capture and sequestration facility, we will bear any of the liability that results if there's an accident, if there is leakage, if there is loss of life. If there's some other industrial problem, we'll bear the responsibility. This is a, a big issue for nuclear power also where often governments take the liability of nuclear power even though the power company itself is in the private sector. There are specific instruments on a flow basis where governments may say, we'll buy directly from you a renewable energy producer at a preferred price, a so-called feed-in tariff. This is another powerful instrument of financing, it's using the public purse itself, not in handing out a loan or extending a grant, but in paying for a service. And government procurement of machinery or government procurement of infrastructure or government payment for energy services is also part of climate financing. Project financing means to finance a complex project such as the grand Inga Falls that I discussed earlier where perhaps $50 or $60 billion dollars could produce a 40megawatt, sorry, gigawatt facility in.of hydropower in Central Africa. And that kind of project financing is itself a very complex challenge with multiple kinds of financial instruments included within the single project and the money coming from all different kinds of partners. And as I discussed briefly about public-private partnerships for research and development, in general RDD&D programs are also multi-stakeholder. They have their own distinctive financial arrangements. Sometimes an inventor is given a prize, sometimes an inventor is given a patent, sometimes an inventor is told, if you make this invention, we extend your patent on another invention. Sometimes an inventor is just given a grant, use this money, hire staff and run your laboratory. So there are many, many ways to finance research and development programs.
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All of this is to say that when we think about climate finance, not only are there multiple categories of financing, but there are many instruments of climate financing as well. And finally I want to emphasize how many potential actors there are in financing, in providing in essence the saving that will go into the new low-carbon infrastructure and other low-carbon systems that are part of the deep Decarbonization pathways. So some of the actors of course include the private sector, the financial sector which raises bonds or equity for private investors. A lot of the financing is public. For instance the role of the public in building roads and rail in most countries and power in some countries. In the United States the power sector is heavily private, but in other countries the power sector is largely public investment. Then there are many international financial institutions whose job it is, backed by governments, to provide funding to member governments. And the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IBRD, colloquially known as the World Bank is a major funder of infrastructure projects in its developing country member states. Other multi-lateral development banks include the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank. And now there are some new development banks that are started also. The BRICS Infrastructure Bank that is being created. So there are many multilateral players as well. Many countries have national development institutions which are specialized institutions, either for tapping the market or collecting deposits where the loans are for usually public sector infrastructure. And this form of institution will play a major role as well. There are the new sovereign wealth funds, especially of natural resource exporting countries that collect their revenues in, at a very large scale and invest these public revenues in the private international marketplace. And sovereign wealth funds command vast, vast sums now, some of which will be directed towards the low-carbon infrastructure. There is the new Green Climate Fund which I mentioned briefly just a moment ago which has been established under the Framework Convention to Finance Low-income Countries. The Global Environment Facility which I mentioned earlier. And distinctively within the private sector financing are a set of institutions that are almost by nature oriented or at least should be oriented towards long-term investments. These are institutions that take not the site deposits of a commercial bank, but longterm inflows that don't pay out for decades to come. Pension funds would be the quintessential example of this. And pension funds have vast asset bases at this point of trillions and trillions of dollars. And they are natural investors in long-term infrastructure such as low-carbon power generation or electric public transportation and so forth. Similarly insurance companies that are providing for example life insurance would take in vast sums and make investments for the long-term. And they're another candidate for transforming long-term international saving into the long-term investments that will be required for financing a low-carbon infrastructure. The final point that I want to mention about climate financing is it's not only about the money, but about the rules for deploying the money. And one of the most interesting and perhaps powerful ways that funding can be directed towards low-carbon projects and away from high-carbon and high climate risk projects is through new reporting and disclosure requirements on the private sector itself.
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Many companies bear a tremendous amount of climate risk that isn't necessarily exposed to the marketplace. An oil company bears the risk that it may end up having to strand its res...its, its oil reserves because as we've discussed, we can burn all of the oil, gas and coal reserves that we have, but those reserves are typically reflected in the market capitalization of companies. And there is now an effort to say to companies, you must disclose your vulnerability to assets being stranded. There is an important carbon tracker initiative which is battling out in, in public right now with the different companies saying, your assets are at risk of stranding and your investors need to know it. And the companies often come back and say, we're going to burn all that we want or we're going to ship all that we want. But in fact there is a carbon budget and investors are going to need to know about it and the oil companies are going to be priced with an appropriate understanding of the true carbon budget. More generally, even outside of the fossil fuel sector companies have a lot of exposure. They may be big carbon using countries--companies and big CO2 emitting companies. And in the event that the price of CO2 charged to these companies goes up through a carbon tax or through a tradable permit system, or implicitly through regulation, companies that are big energy users are going to find that also they are going to bear the cost of their heavy CO2 emissions. And a number of disclosure initiatives such as the Carbon Disclosure Project are saying to companies, you must describe your CO2 emissions in detail so that investors know what the risks are. And very recently the large-scale global insurance and reinsurance industry has said the same thing, companies must disclose their risk to climate-related disasters, both so that insurance can help to cover those risks so that investors know what the potential losses are and so that investments that shouldn't be made in flood plains or in areas of great risk of drought or great risk of other kinds of extreme events shouldn't be undertaken in the first place and disclosure can warn away investors who otherwise might naively invest in such projects. I wish I could draw a bottom line. The only bottom line I can tell you is that we have tens of trillions of dollars of investment at stake over the coming decades in climate financing. This is a highly varied, very complex, a multiple actor framework that we're going to need. A lot still needs to be built. A lot of new institutions will form and a lot of thought is going to have to go into ensuring that the financial resources are available to carry out what the world needs to accomplish and that is the transition to a low carbon world energy and infrastructure system.
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10.4 Can Everybody Win? Should Everybody Win? We're discussing in this lecture the structure, the shape of COP21; of the agreement and the premise of a negotiation in general as I've emphasized is a Pareto improvement, that the participants in the negotiation come out of the negotiation feeling that they're better off than they were in the business as usual trajectory and the question that I'd like to ask is can everybody really win in a climate agreement and an important second question is should everybody win? It all depends I suppose on one's perspective. I've emphasized repeatedly now that there are many different divisions at the negotiating table. There are the divisions of the rich and the poor countries. There are the divisions of the fossil rich and the fossil poor countries. There are divisions between producers of the fossil fuels and the consumers of the fossil fuels, not as countries but as players in the market, and here I'm thinking about the private companies, the big oil companies Exxon Mobil or Chevron or BP and others versus the consumers on the other side. Not only the consumers of their products but people who will then experience the results of climate change. And another division which I've emphasized although only briefly is the different perspectives of the present and the future generations. Now here we have a little bit of an advantage. Only the present generation is present right now. The future generations don't get their direct say, but they do have a strong interest. They're not really at the table except through us, except through our logic, our moral commitments, our cultural imperatives, but we need to understand that future generations really are at the table. They have interests and the question is, are they winners in this process? Under business as usual, they're surely losers but how can both the present and the future generations be winners in the process? Well, let me come back one more time to this
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basic diagram that I introduced earlier where on the horizontal axis we had the income of one group of countries and on the vertical axis the income or the well-being of a second group and I'm imagining that these two groups are negotiating with each other for an agreement starting from inside the potential well-being line at business as usual and trying to reach the cooperative point. Now in this final use of this curve I'm using the country one grouping to be the oil exporters. Countries like the Gulf states, Venezuela, Canada, Australia, which are significant exporters of fossil fuels. And I'm using in this case on the vertical axis the oil importing or the fossil fuel importing countries that are buying these carbon rich energy supplies from the first group of countries. And as usual, both groups are at the bargaining table and in principle one could have a Pareto improving outcome in which both the oil exporters and the oil importing countries are better off. But think about the ways that the policy choices are typically discussed. Well, we've not focused in this course on the details of policy choices of how to move to the low carbon economy. At this point emphasizing mostly how does one achieve a lowcarbon economy. We know that to move from coal fire power plants to wind and solar power or to move from internal combustion automobiles to more expensive electric vehicles something has to be done through regulation or through emissions permits or through carbon taxation to tilt the balance in the marketplace towards the lower carbon option. And remember of course that the whole theory of this is that we should be willing to spend a bit more of our resources than we're now spending on the carbon rich infrastructure to spend it on a low carbon infrastructure because we're going to come out way ahead in the long term by avoiding climate disaster and so the idea is that while the alternatives right now may look more expensive when you add in the social cost of carbon to the market cost of carbon then these alternatives either are or through research and development could be made to be the best cost alternative. But how do you tilt the consumers or the market behavior in that direction. You may regulate, no more coal fired power plants without carbon capture and sequestration. No more internal combustion engines after 2030. You can only buy light duty vehicles that are...have zero tailpipe emissions. That's one way to do it. And the other way we know is to tilt the market prices through corrective pricing. For example through a carbon tax that's levied on the use of coal, oil and gas. And suddenly wind and solar power and electric vehicles look like the better deal. Suppose we go that second option which has been the preferred option in the European Union for example to use a tradable permit system. We know that the implication of that kind of policy or not an equivalent but closely related policy of putting on a carbon tax is to raise the price of carbon fuels to the consumer but by driving down demand for those carbon fuels to lower the price received by the producers. So the typical strategy right now not necessarily wrong in any way but the typical strategy is let's push demand away from coal, oil and gas by creating a price wedge between what the consumers pay, a high price, and what the producers receive, a lower price and that will move the economy to a safer, lower emitting, 2-degree C limit kind of economy of our pathways. All fine and good; absolutely right from a climate point of view but what I'm illustrating here is one absolutely plausible outcome that the world thereby moves to a higher Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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aggregate level of well-being by avoiding climate disaster but it does so with a big improvement of the oil importing countries because they not only have a safer climate but they now pay a lower market price, not as consumers but the price that is actually net of tax paid to the oil exporters. They get a double benefit. Whereas the oil exporting countries, say Saudi Arabia or Australia or Canada would face a lower world market price because demand for their products from other countries has gone down. Yes, they're compensated by a safer climate, but maybe they've taken a big hit in their revenues and the way that I've drawn it here is that instead of reaching a Pareto improving outcome, that is along an arrow that goes from the southwest to the northeast, maybe the arrow goes to the northwest, that the oil importers are way better off but the oil exporters while living now in a safer climate also have seen their market really, really cut sharply and therefore they would say that's not a mutually beneficial outcome, that's just a punishment of the oil countries. Now what could be done? What could be done for example would be a transfer of income. Let's say that the oil importers impose a carbon tax and that has the effect of shifting us to a safe energy system but the losers are the oil exporters and the oil importing countries that have collected this tax on oil use could transfer some of the revenues to the oil exporters. That probably would seem a little bit shocking to a lot of people. Indeed, when I once proposed it they said you're heretical. How dare you give money to the oil exporters, they're damaging the world. We're not going to pay for them, we're not going to compensate them. I mention this to raise the point. Can everybody benefit from an agreement? Should everybody benefit from an agreement? Should is on the basis of principle, ethics, morals, legal judgment, responsibility, can is more of an economist's question. I can tell you it's possible to compensate oil exporters, even oil companies for a loss of their market income that may come from putting on a carbon tax. The should is another question. Is it really true that every party to the negotiation should walk away feeling better off? Maybe some of the oil exporters should walk away a bit unhappy that well, there goes our market, only compensated by the fact the climate will be safer and they were the polluters in the first place. My point is that there are different standards of outcome. You might say a Pareto improving outcome is what we're after. You might say no, no, polluter pays, I'm not interested in the polluter being compensated in any way. They're both absolutely pragmatic and sensible standards. They contradict each other. And from a practical negotiating point of view it's complicated. Because it could be that the oil exporting countries become a blocking coalition to say well, these negotiations are all fine and good in saving the climate and saving the world along with it, but why should we be the big losers in all of this? We'll stop that until we're compensated. This is for us to discuss and debate in the global online negotiations next semester. This is for the world to discuss and debate. But as a practical matter, let me make a point. The oil exporting interests have been a blocking coalition in practice. Maybe not in the literal way that I've just described it, but there's no doubt that the resistance to strong climate action has been greater among the net fossil fuel exporting countries than it has been among the net fossil fuel importing countries. By and large, with exceptions within the European Union, most of the European Union is a net fossil fuel importing region and it's also a region experiencing a lot of climate Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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devastation. On both counts, the European Union is the world leader in saying we must take climate action. But in other parts of the world where countries are fuel exporters, for instance Canada and Australia, the politics is much, much less interested, let's put it that way, in a climate agreement because the real weight of the politics is powerful interests of the fossil fuel industry who are saying why should we bear that cost? I'd say the same is certainly true in the case of Russia. A massive fossil fuel exporter and so far not so interested in a strong, low-carbon climate deal, perhaps because of the specific interests involved. And so it's worth us to ask the question who are these big fossil fuel entities, what kind of role do they play in the negotiations, are they a blocking coalition, what kind of sharing of the costs and benefits would be a reasonable approach to reaching a full deal and I just want to share with you a few tables showing how concentrated in fact the fossil fuel resources are. Coal, for example, is so concentrated that five countries alone have about threequarters of the total world's coal supply, the U.S., Russia, China, Australia and India. And you can imagine within each of those five countries there are very, very powerful lobbies, politically influential that say don't go there to a low-carbon agreement. On the next graph, I show the oil reserves. Same story, actually. If I take groupings of countries, the five big groupings constitute in fact the three-quarters of the total proved oil reserves. These are the Gulf countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), that's Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and neighbors, it's Venezuela with its vast oil and unconventional, both conventional and unconventional oil reserves, it's Canada with its massive unconventional heavy oil, the oil sands of Alberta, it's Iran and Iraq. And these countries obviously also have very, very strong interests in the market price and the future use of petroleum. And if I turn to the next of the three resources, natural gas reserves, once again there is tremendous concentration of the proved reserves f natural gas. Again, the Arabian peninsula is so central to this story of course, next comes Iran, Russia with its vast natural gas deposits, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. Combined these five countries, the top five holders of natural gas reserves, account for two-thirds of the total reserves. So we see that this is going to be complicated, these negotiations, and there is a question about what these countries will demand, that's perhaps more evident. What they might receive, what they should expect on a practical and on an ethical basis in a worldwide transition to a low carbon economy. One thing we can say for sure, and I would like to point it out to all of the oil countries and oil exporting countries and companies, if carbon capture and sequestration works, then the space that is opened up in the carbon budget is expanded and this is why all of the fossil fuel producers have an enormous stake in proving and from their point of view demonstrating if it's right, the feasibility of large scale carbon capture and sequestration. And it's why that group of countries and the companies that I'm going to introduce at this moment also should be major financiers of the testing, the research, the development, the demonstration and if successful the diffusion of carbon capture and sequestration. Now I've talked about the oil reserves and production in terms of countries but of course there's some very, very major players in the world. Those are big oil companies. Some are privately owned, others are state owned and they are Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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extraordinarily powerful actors in the world scene. They're among the major largest countries it's almost right because of their scale, but companies in the world and they are absolutely in my opinion the most powerful political lobby in the world. They're an enormously successful industry. Massive in scale, massive in wealth, massive in technological capacity, massive in determination for more than 100 years the oil companies have basically gone anywhere to the most remote places to the...to Siberia, to the middle of rain forests, to absolutely difficult terrain to the deep oceans to extract oil and sell it and they've made vast fortunes doing it but one has to marvel at the technological might and fortitude of this industry. But when you look at the bottom line, the bottom line is absolutely amazing. Fortune 500 has its list of the top companies in the world measured by revenue and take a look at the top ten. Wow. Of the top ten, number one, number three, number four, number five, number six, number ten are oil companies. Extraordinary. And number seven is the power distribution company of China, so you have Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Sinopec, China National Petroleum Corporation, British Petroleum, the State Grid Corporation of China, and Total. Giants in the world, the biggest companies in the world. Seven of the ten Fortune 500 companies are in the oil sector. They have a voice, believe me. Two of the remainder...remaining countries...there I go again...two of the remaining three companies in this top ten list are automobile companies. Major users of petroleum. We have number eight, Toyota, and number nine, Volkswagen. It's fair to say that nine of the ten companies in the top ten of the Fortune 500 are therefore basically in the petroleum sector and it's not surprising how powerful this sector has been and continues to be. It has to be at the table in my view in these negotiations, it absolutely has to put its vast financial might into the research and development of carbon capture and sequestration because that is ultimately its long term license to operate. The tenth remaining company on this list is Walmart a retail giant of phenomenal reach. It's interesting that Walmart has been pursuing a strategy of trying to press tremendous energy efficiency through its supply chains and it's been involved very much in...in trying to bring its supply chains in agriculture as well and there as a consumer facing company where consumers are saying what are you doing for the environment? Walmart perhaps feels that more directly than the big oil giants. Here is a...an undeniable story and reality that we absolutely need to face and to understand in the coming months of negotiation. We're talking about the core of the world economy when we talk about the energy system. We're talking about the very biggest companies in the whole world. We're talking about major countries that have strong national interests, reasons of state and a massive part of their economies involved in energy production and in the export or import of primary energy resources. In other words, the stakes are very high if the logic is of finding a way to create an agreement in which there is widespread benefit shared in a way that is...that enables us to get to that agreement, we're going to have to face the realities of this concentration of fossil fuel resources and fossil fuel
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economic and political power in the coming months.
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10.5: Achieving Large Global Goals We are in a challenge unique in history, unprecedented, to bring a global scale, environmental threat under control. And unfortunately for the reasons that I ticked off earlier, the eight extraordinary features of this challenge, this is one of the toughest challenges that humanity has faced as a peacetime challenge. So we have our work cut out for us. Some people are pessimistic, are cynical, believe that the vested interests will win, that the short-sightedness is inevitable, that politics can't agree on anything much less something as complicated as this. Or that it's humanity's fate to have to suffer massive climate derangement cause we don't pay attention and we don't take care of ourselves. I think we need not believe any of that kind of pessimism or cynicism. And we do need to take heart, again, as students of history in the fact that good things happen. Big changes do take place. Social movements can be successful in creating very largescale, indeed global, very positive change. And this is really the topic that I'd like to explore with you in this final chapter. How we can help to bring about large-scale social change, that is the change to help make the world safe, to respect the planetary boundaries, to achieve sustainable development, generally and specifically to honor the 2-degree Celsius limit as a limit of safety, a guardrail for the world environment? To do that the basic lesson of social change is that not only are governments needed at the table, businesses needed at the table, academics, scientists, experts needed at the table, we as global citizens are also needed at the table. Large-scale social change occurs ultimately through large-scale social movements. It's the public, it's civil society that raises its voice and says, we need to be heard because it's our safety, it's our children's safety, it's the safety of future generations that we care about that need respect and need attention now. These social movements often start with small groups of very dedicated, committed and very brave people, but they
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do tap into a moral spirit widely shared. They tap into a knowledge base that can be demonstrated and proved and by being based on fact as well as based on ethical values, widely shared, they can turn into very large-scale social change. I think about some of the most important of these movements in the last couple of centuries. Think about the fight about ending slavery. Slavery was pervasive. It was the norm at the end of the 18th Century. A small group of committed activists in Britain at what was becoming the height of the British Empire, said, this is morally wrong, abominable. We need to end the...first the trafficking and then the presence of slavery in the British Empire. It may seem obvious to us, how could anybody defend slavery, but slavery was strongly defended within England itself, of course with the huge slave industry and in other parts of the world. But Wilberforce and Clarkson and others persisted over the course of decades. And quite astoundingly and wonderfully the moral case became the dominant social reality and then the political reality. And slavery was ended in the British empire in 1833. It took a war in the United States to end slavery. Step by step slavery was seen as the abomination that it was. And by the end of the 19th Century in most places, but still not in every place today, slavery was eliminated. But this is an example of how a moral principle can finally turn into a political inevitability. Ending colonial rule was seen as something impossible to achieve when Gandhi began his campaign in India in the early 20th Century. And by the end of the century it was again, a near inevitability. Not complete, not total by any means, but the mindset, the ideas about what is right and wrong about one people politically dominating another had changed fundamentally in the course of the 20th Century. The civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement similarly required the bravery and genius of a Martin Luther King, Jr. and a Nelson Mandela, but those ideas became widespread ideas. And when one looks at social attitudes today in places that were virulently racist a generation or two generations ago, social attitudes also do change over time. And now we're in a battle for women's rights, for the freedom of sexual orientation, new social mores that come through brave people saying, this is right, this is our moral stake in this, this is something which society more generally needs to embrace. And I think the evidence is that these magnificent and large-scale social changes, starting with very brave, small groups of people but through persistence finally spreading through society can fundamentally change the direction of the world as a whole. In the last 14 years I've been very privileged to be a part of what many of you are also part of and that is the fight to end extreme poverty. The idea that extreme poverty is an anachronism, absolutely needs through directed efforts brought to a close of human history is an idea that was adopted by world leaders at the beginning of the new millennium in the Millennium Development Goals. They have not ended extreme poverty by any means but they have played their role and extreme poverty is coming down as a proportion of the world's population and in the new phase that will follow the Millennium Development Goals, it's within reach for governments to say, we can end extreme poverty. The idea is there, the progress is there, the momentum is there and the moral commitment is increasingly taking hold around the world. Climate change and sustainable development more generally is another case where we need a worldwide reorientation of what we do, how we live, and the morals with which
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we live. And it was interesting and not just interesting, I would say notable and very important that when the world leaders came together on the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit, as I described earlier, at the Rio+20 summit in June, 2012 in Rio de Janeiro. At that point, they looked at the Millennium Development Goals and said, that is social action that's working, we have treaties, we have law, we have negotiations but they're not working as they need to, we need to look at the lessons of the Millennium Development Goals. In other words, we need to bring society to the table of sustainable development. And in the outcome document of Rio+20, the conferees made a very valuable contribution and I want to read it. You see it here on the screen. We recognize that the development of goals could also be useful for pursuing focused and coherent action on sustainable development. These goals should address and incorporate in a balanced way all three dimensions of sustainable development and their inter-linkages. By that they mean, economic, social and environmental. We'll also underscore that STGs should be action oriented, concise and easy to communicate, limited in number, aspirational, global in nature and universally applicable to all countries while taking into account different national realities, capacities and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities. We are in that sense part of a new social movement. The public is coming to the table, the sustainable development goals of which one headline goal will be a safe global climate, gives us the opportunity to help create a worldwide public understanding and public demand for climate safety and for the other features of sustainable development. It's in that context that the DDPP, the Deep Decarbonization Pathway Project arose, because Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in the aftermath of Rio+20, we need a global network of problem-solving. And he created the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the SDSN. And I'm very privileged to be the director of that. He created that network in order to bring together scientists, engineers, business leaders and civil society leaders, precisely for the kind of problem-solving in which we're engaged. And the DDPP is a great flagship of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It's an example of civil society, in this case experts from around the world, largely from academia and from other knowledge-based institutions, coming to the fore and saying, here is how this particular problem of deep decarbonization can be solved. And we've learned a lot that we've been emphasizing through these lectures, through the DDPP process. We've learned a lot about problem-solving itself because we've had to solve the problem of how to make our process work, which is not an easy...easy process by any means to actually find these pathways in a constructive manner that can help the world move towards a meaningful climate agreement. We've identified in the SDSN and in the DDPP some of the strategies for success in achieving big social goals. The first part of success is set goals. This I think is absolutely fundamental, because without the goal we have no direction. With a goal, stay below the 2-degrees Celsius in order to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system, we have goal. We have something we can hold onto. And as President John F. Kennedy said about setting goals, "By defining our goal more clearly, by helping it seem more manageable and less remote we can help all
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people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it." So not only do we need goals but we have to define the goals more clearly, make them seem more manageable as we hope the DDPP process is doing. And specifically to make the goals seem more manageable we have to identify pathways o achieving those goals. What we have called backcasting. Look at 2050, where we need to be and ask, how are we going to get there from where we are today in 2014? We need R&D roadmaps, a point that we've emphasized to overcome existing hurdles. We're going to need to demonstrate successes of some of these technologies. We're going to need to build momentum of civil society. And then rapid scale up, mass public education and of course, deepening the political and the institutional framework by reaching meaningful agreements in COP21 and similar kinds of frameworks in other areas. It's obviously a huge undertaking, but sustainable development defines the most important agenda of our generation. Earlier generations faced their specific challenges, ours is the challenge of a very crowded planet, pressing against planetary boundaries, threatening survival itself of millions of species, the well-being, the survival of humanity itself. And so we must take on this challenge. And we must take heart from the success of earlier vast social change actions as I've noted. It may see awfully hard to accomplish this. Some of the technological challenges seem absolutely daunting. Can you really take the core of the world energy system and within 25 or 30 years change it to a low carbon energy system? The answer, the evidence says, is yes, if we really work at it. If we direct our attention and direct our technological change in the needed area. As I've said, I was inspired in my youth by the moon shot. By President John F. Kennedy standing in Congress and saying early in 1961 that he recommends that the United States accept the challenge of putting a man safely to the moon and bringing him back safely to earth by the end of the decade. And what's absolutely interesting about that among so many other things is that when President Kennedy made that call to action, there was no plan to do it. He wasn't referring to the accepted engineering reports that said exactly what the blueprint is. It took NASA more than a year to come up with the, the basic ideas and then it took brainstorming and problem-solving and heroics and brilliant engineering, a lot of resources and a major sustained commitment through the entire process. In 1962, in talking about this attempt to go to the moon, President Kennedy said something that I believe resonates today in the spirit of the challenge that we face in climate change and in all of this deep systems transformation and technological change that we're going to need to undertake, he was talking to a public that was asking, is this too hard, can we do it? And President Kennedy said, "We choose to go to the moon." We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win, and the others too. And I can tell you as he spoke at Rice University in a vast open stadium that day, the applause were phenomenal, because the public rallied to this. They said, this is, this is something we can do. This is a challenge we are willing to accept. Fundamentally we need the world around the table. We need the experts. We
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need the engineers. We need the governments. And we need us as civil society. And we need to do this at a time that is extraordinarily difficult, because we're talking about climate change at a time where we're also facing a lot of war, a lot of conflict, a lot of battles that are not only devastating in and of themselves but taking up the energy, taking up our attention, turning us away from what really counts for our long-term survival. And so fundamentally we are going to have to find a way to cooperate on what is important, find a way to turn away from the violence and the war and find a way to cooperate peacefully for decades to come. And as I close the course I want to close one more time with President Kennedy who pursued peace in 1963 and very much with a vision that by doing so we could turn to science and to the arts and to cooperation and to public health and to other goals. And he faced a big challenge then. The world was deeply divided then as it is now. And he had to urge Americans and the world about the capacity to cooperate. So I want to close with my favorite lines of President Kennedy about cooperation itself, but you'll see that they really resonate when it comes to our specific challenges, fifty years later. President Kennedy said, "So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures and we are all mortal." Thank you for being in the class. I look forward to being together with you in the next semester.
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Bibliography
1: Towards a New Climate Change Agreement UNFCCC (Full Text of the 1992 Convention) Kyoto Protocol Byrd-Hagel Amendment 2: The Basics of Climate Change Science IPCC AR4 WG1 Chapter 1: Historical Overview of Climate Change Science IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers 3: The 2-Degree Limit 2014 DDPP Report Chapter 1 IPCC AR 5 WG2 Summary for Policy Makers World Bank: Turn Down the Heat. Why a 4°C warmer World Must be Avoided, Executive Summary Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, Executive Summary Bill Hare: The EU, the IPCC, and the History of the 2°C Limit 4: The 2-Degree Carbon Budget 2014 DDPP Report Chapter 2 Le Quere et al Global Carbon Budget 2013 Carbon Tracker Unburnable Carbon: Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble? IPCC AR5 WG3 Summary for Policy Makers 5: Deep Decarbonization of Energy Systems 2014 DDPP Report Chapter 3 International Energy Agency 2013: Redrawing the Climate Energy Map IPCC AR5 WG3 Chapter 6: Assessing Transformation Pathways IPCC AR5 WG3 Chapter 7: Energy Systems James H. Williams, et al. The Technology Path to Deep Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cuts by 2050: The Pivotal Role of Electricity 6: The Key Technological Challenges of Deep Decarbonizatio 2014 DDPP Report Chapter 4 International Energy Agency: Energy technology Perspective 2014, Executive Summary IEA smart grids, CCS, nuclear, electric vehicles and other roadmaps WBCSD Enabling Frameworks for Technology Diffusion: a Business Perspective 7: Deep Decarbonization Pathways: Country Case Studies 2014 DDPP Report Chapters 5 and 6 Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 5 winter 2015
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2014 DDPP Report Country Chapters 8: Energy and Development Introduction to the Energy Access for Development Chapter in the Global Energy Assessment Report Vijay Modi: The Economics of Clean Energy Resource Development and Grid Interconnection in Africa 9: Main Challenges of Climate-Change Negotiations Kal Raustiala: Form and Substance in International Agreements Part 1 of the DIE paper on: Different Perspectives on Differentiated Responsibilities
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Heranças Globais Memórias Locais é uma revista semestral que apresenta os resultados do projeto de investigação ação em curso no Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra financiando pela FCT com o nome “Heranças Globais: a inclusão dos saberes das comunidades no desenvolvimento integrado do território” (SHRH/BPD/76601/2011).
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Apoios: Muss-amb-iki –
espaço de memória e saber
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