Sailing into a 'climate crunch'? (COP 14)

01 Dec 2008 – Geoff Lye

Yvo de Boer was reported by Reuters yesterday as saying he would prefer a broad “ratifiable” deal with a “subsequent process of fleshing out the details”. Given the Bali conversation, I think I know what he means, but as always the devil will be in the detail. More topically, he also said that the world risked a second financial crisis if governments reacted to economic slowdown by building cheap, high-polluting coal-fired power plants that might then have to be scrapped as climate impacts hit. “What concerns me most is that the financial crisis will lead to a second set of bad investment decisions” he said, adding “I hope that the second financial crisis is not going to have its origins in bad energy loans”. As I note later, the economic downturn seems to be treated here so far as an unrelated set of events. Recent economic upheaval is surely a signal of many disruptions to come, but there is little appetite for learning about failed global risk management. Will climate disruption only drive massive and urgent responses when we are on the brink of a climate crunch? I fear no amount of investment will pull us back then.

Reflecting on the past 12 months, I wonder whether I was over-optimistic in my assessment as I flew out of Bali. I struggle to think of one positive shift in relation to climate change. To the contrary, all indicators are moving in the opposite direction to those acknowledged by all scientists, policymakers and enlightened business leaders as necessary to avoid ‘dangerous climate change’. In the opening speeches, Pachauri, the head of the IPCC even challenged whether a 2°C target was robust given that the inevitable rise in sea level this would produce from thermal warming alone would be a minimum of a third of a metre. And the new Chair of Working Group 3 started his assessment of the current position as absolutely not on track. Emissions – far from declining – have actually been increasing at a faster rate each year. Yet the political talk here is still of achieving peak emissions by 2015 – just six years away! Perhaps a global depression is our only hope.