By FRED PEARCE, Environmental Consultant to New Scientist His steely
eyes and jutting jaw speak of his determination. His medal-festooned
uniform underlines his power. Rear Admiral David Titley is a sea
warrior, but also a scientist with a passion.
He is the U.S. Navy’s chief oceanographer and director of its climate
change task force. Yes, the U.S. Navy has a climate change task force.
With 450 staff.
‘We in the U.S. Navy believe climate change is real,’ Titley says.
‘It’s going to have big impacts, especially in the Arctic, which is
changing before our eyes.’
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Hot topic: Climate change activists protesting in Cancun. Nobody agreed
to do any more than they promised in the disastrous talks last year in
Copenhagen
He predicts an ice-free Arctic in late summer by 2020. Without a shield
of permanent ice, the fabled north-west passage, the graveyard of Arctic
seadogs for centuries, will become a maritime superhighway.
And, with the shallow Arctic seabed cluttered with oil rigs, he predicts
the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia ‘will have the same
strategic significance at the Strait of Hormuz’ – the entry to the oil
states of the Gulf.
As a military strategist, Titley is planning for this. But he also fears
a warmer world. He fears more failed states, chaos if the monsoon
switches off and hundreds of millions of Asians go hungry, and rising
sea levels resulting in millions of angry migrants washing round the
planet like environmental flotsam.
He said all this in the U.S. government pavilion during the climate
negotiations in Cancun earlier this month. The U.S. Navy top brass
showed up in force in the Mexican resort.
Whatever sceptical Republicans back in Washington may think, the
Pentagon is deadly serious about global warming. It even has its own
targets for cutting emissions of the greenhouse gases. Titley says he is
fighting a new war – to protect America from climate change.
Somehow, that is reassuring. At least someone in authority seems to be
taking climate change seriously – because over two weeks in Cancun,
the diplomats charged with putting together a new UN climate treaty to
replace the Kyoto Protocol’s current emissions targets, which expire at
the end of 2012, seemed to be living in a cocooned universe, where words
were all that were needed to save the world.
They don’t get the science in the way Titley does. For them, it was a
triumph to fly home from the Moon Palace, a sprawling golf resort near a
lagoon outside Cancun, with a piece of paper everyone could sign.
Climate peace in our time – even if the agreed text ducked all the
controversial issues, promising to discuss them at some future date.
In Cancun, nobody agreed to do any more than they promised in the
disastrous talks last year in Copenhagen. And Japan and Russia will do
less, having announced they will accept no more targets.
Now, none of the six biggest polluting nations – China, the United
States, Japan, Russia, Indonesia and India – will accept legally
binding targets on their emissions.
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Prophet of loss: A protest against the World Bank’s role in the climate
talks
Unless that changes – and nobody in Cancun could say why or when it
might – then the UN climate negotiations, which have stumbled along
for 18 years since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, are doomed.
Yet somehow, the climate diplomats convinced themselves, as the sun rose
over the lagoon last weekend, that they had conjured up a triumph to
make the world forget about Copenhagen.
The conference chairman, Mexican environment minister Patricia Espinosa,
basking in 5am applause, called it ‘a new era of international
co-operation on climate change’.
Nonsense. This was worse than Copenhagen. It was Copenhagen without the
sense of failure. Without a sense of reality. Plan A, the UN plan for
new legally binding emissions targets, looks headed down a blind alley.
So are we doomed?
Does Titley have to tell the Pentagon to prepare for war against future
generations of climate terrorists? Maybe not. Because, as Plan A
stumbles, Plan B is up and running. And Plan B may save us.
Plan A, the UN process, assumes that fighting climate change is a big,
expensive burden that all countries must share. But divvying out burdens
is hard. Nobody wants them. That’s why negotiations grind on year after
year. Plan B is not about burden-sharing. It is about profit-making,
green growth and new technology. It is built on optimism rather than
pessimism. And Plan B is taking off.
I was in Cancun for the talks. But as the days passed, I spent less and
less time chronicling the blather of the diplomats. It was moonshine at
the Moon Palace. Instead, I cruised the numerous side meetings, where
experts were discussing deeds rather than words.
And what I heard was staggering. People you would never suspect of being
wedded to fighting climate change – rear admirals and farmers,
shipping magnates and loggers – were all discussing their plans to cut
their pollution and create a new low-carbon world, without the UN or any
other global agreement. Because they wanted to, and because it will make
them money.
Many environmentalists hate them for it. They want burden-sharing and
hair shirts. They insist we must all suffer to fight climate change. But
the truth is we are at a tipping point where green burden-sharing gives
way to green profit-seeking.
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China won’t accept legally binding UN emissions targets because it can’t
stand the rich world telling it what to do
Green technologies will soon be cheaper than dirty technologies.
Consumer power means companies need a clean image to sell their
products. And governments are making big pledges to cut their emissions
unilaterally, regardless of the UN.
Take China. It won’t accept legally binding UN emissions targets because
it can’t stand the rich world telling it what to do. But it is doing
more right now to cut its carbon dioxide emissions than the UN would
dare to demand.
In Copenhagen, it promised to improve the carbon intensity of its
economy by 45 per cent by 2020. That means it will cut by 45 per cent
the amount of carbon dioxide it emits into the air for every dollar of
GDP. Now that target is cemented in the next five-year plan, which
starts next month.
China is now the world’s biggest producer of wind turbines and solar
panels. Green technology is its entry point into another global market.
Soon it will be top in electric cars, too.
You won’t spot it from the rhetoric coming out of Washington, but the
United States is racing to catch up. President Barack Obama’s hopes of
getting climate laws through Congress are dead, but America is the
world’s top spender on research and development for low-carbon energy
technologies. And the world’s largest wind farm is in the oil state of
Texas. Spinning windmills are replacing nodding donkeys.
OK, Americans haven’t given up their gas-guzzling cars. But California
and many other states have their own anti-carbon legislation that is
making them a lot cleaner.
Two years ago, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger passed into law
‘cap-and-trade’ legislation – providing economic incentives for
reducing carbon emissions – that comes into force in 2012.
Then there is Brazil. After China, it is the world’s fastest growing
economy. Brazil is a staggering economic success story built on wrecking
the nation’s natural resources – such as trashing the Amazon
rainforest and ploughing up its vast grasslands, known as the cerrado.
But here is a statistic you probably won’t know. In the last six years,
Brazil has reduced the rate of destruction of the Amazon by 70 per cent.
It has satellites surveying every hectare and public prosecutors taking
action against every fire-setter, illegal logger and chain-saw-wielding
cattle rancher.
In Brazil, there is a hugely influential zero-deforestation campaign.
Manufacturers and retailers of everything from leather shoes to beef
steaks and garden furniture are demanding raw materials untainted by
deforestation.
Last week, the country’s largest bank, Banco de Brasil, announced it
will refuse credit to soya bean farmers invading the forests.
Brazil is the cutting edge of a global transformation that has seen
deforestation decline by 40 per cent in the past decade. Its
contribution to carbon dioxide emissions may now be below 10 per cent.
In Cancun, I heard Brazilian ministers give the details of a government
plan to cut CO2 emissions to 39 per cent below business-as-usual levels
by 2020. They will do it by ending deforestation and turning tens of
millions of hectares of farm soils from carbon emitters to carbon
absorbers.
Environment minister Izabella Teixeira’s boffins detailed schemes for
absorbing carbon by rehabilitating cattle pastures and growing crops
without ploughing – just planting the next crop in holes drilled into
last year’s stubble.
Brazil has probably the best agricultural researchers in the world. They
have turned the country into the world’s biggest exporter of sugar,
coffee, soya, beef, poultry and orange juice. So they will probably do
it.
What else is coming down the track? Europe has already passed into law
its 20 per cent emission cut. Mexico, Ethiopia, Indonesia, South Korea
and many others have serious carbon reduction plans.
During the economic slowdown, shipping line Maersk, the company with the
huge container ships that bring our Christmas presents from China,
started sailing its vessels slower. There was no hurry. Slow speeds
turned out to cut emissions by 20 per cent.
Now Maersk says it will stay slow even as the economy speeds up. Cutting
emissions also cuts fuel use – just one example of how carbon
efficiency equals economic efficiency.
In Cancun, an organisation called the Carbon War Room, set up by Richard
Branson, published the emissions figures for almost the entire world
fleet of commercial vessels – 60,000 ships.
With the UN talks again failing to find a way to include international
shipping and aircraft in future national emissions targets, the aim is
to get the world’s shipping lines to go green by showing it is more
profitable.
Next up at the war room: aviation. Then other energy-guzzling industries
such as steel, aluminium and cement. Branson, with his nose for the
essentials, says we have to prevent 17 gigatonnes of carbon emissions by
2020 to keep the world on track to stop two degrees of warming.
Only big business, acting in its own self-interest, can close that
‘gigatonne gap’. Plan B says it will.
British climate economist Lord Stern says the world is entering an era
of ‘low-carbon growth’. A UN deal could help provide sticks and carrots
– like a carbon trading scheme to boost the market forces needed to
close the gigatonne gap. But it could also hinder.
The endless talk from the UN roadshow as it has moved from Nairobi to
Bali to Poznan to Copenhagen to Cancun, with Durban next year and
probably Doha the year after, seems to be getting in the way of
progress.
And we badly need progress. For the nightmare scenario is that, if we
face millions of starving people and billions of climate refugees on the
march, not all the ships and missiles in the U.S. Navy will save us.
Fred Pearce reported on the Cancun conference for New Scientist
magazine.