Monday’s piece was not fair. It portrayed political leaders as gamblers and we can’t conclude that yet. They are risking heating up the atmosphere beyond sensible limits for a reason: competitiveness. A unilateral and ambitious climate mitigation commitment by, let’s say, the EU, would represent a voluntarily handicap of its own economy by stringing energy provision to more expensive and now scarce sources. This means that the deal under negotiation will only be achieved by consensus from all parties, where all voluntarily agree to play under the same constrains by changing to low carbon economies at the same time and pace. These days in Bonn parties are measuring their words when it comes to emission reduction commitments for the simple reason of not going further than the neighbor. They are all here to listen, so nobody speaks. Delegates start to feel deceived and upset. Unfortunately, the cost of remaining competitive might means more global warming consequences in few years.

Let’s ask ourselves again if political leaders are gambling or not. First we’ll assume that they are not. They are incurring in the more than 30% risk to go through the 2 degrees ceiling because they have trust in science and society to deliver solutions. This brings us to a very basic question that was very well put in Blow, a 2001 film by Ted Demme. Blow is the true story of George Jung, played by Johnny Depp, a North American young fellow that in the early seventies gets involved in cocaine dealing. Business does well and soon he finds himself hanging out with big fishes and driving fancy cars. After some years luck withdraws, gets caught by the police and spends some years in jail. Later he’s released and it doesn’t take much until he manages to get the business going again, and once again get caught. Increased drug consumption boosted by economic growth in the early nineties makes a number of jobs available to him when he’s released. Higher anti-drug budgets also swollen by the same economic growth take him to jail again. Now, in his fifties, Jung spends his time in jail in reflecting upon his life rather than networking. One afternoon, sitting in his cell bouncing a ball against the wall, Mr. Jung gets struck by a ray of light: that he was bounded to end up in jail because, he now concludes, his ambition exceeded his talent.

This question, whether one’s ambition exceeds one’s talent or not, is something that we should ask ourselves periodically and before engaging in any ambitious task. This simple and yet uncommon practice would make the world a better place; but let’s go back to climate change. A low commitment in mitigation pushes us closer to the limit of our talent, wherever that is. The more we allow the atmosphere to heat up the more negative consequences we will face, and the more solutions we will have to develop. Have this been put in contrast with our talent? We fixed the CFC crises, we did not fix poverty, we fixed the post world war crisis, we did not fix Middle East, and so on. The answer of whether global warming we’ve brought ourselves into exceeds our talent to reach an agreement and implement its solutions remains unanswered.

Domingo Torres Santos
Diakonia- Climate Change Policy and Advocacy Officer

The conference hall in Bonn fills up slowly with something of a beehive, the quick, tense and invisible movements of delegates up and down the aisles, and the buzzing sound of hundreds of short conversations. When most of the chairs are full, in very slow international English, we are all welcomed and the table, all white men, is introduced. Introductory speeches begin: Sudan, representing the G77 plus China, Lesotho, representing the Least Developed Countries, Czech Republic, on behalf of the EU, and the list gets longer. All got the punch line from the same shop: we are here with the intention of doing our best for a good deal. It’s suspicious that there’s hardly any excitement in the room, but that’s about to change. Todd Stern, the US head of delegation takes his turn. They purchased in the same punch line outlet, but they did not get it complete, just the beginning, “we are here” and the delegate is interrupted by an applause. A long, firm, steady applause. The prodigal son is back; the family is now complete. We can start to work.

For delegates and observers, aggregate mitigation target from developed countries are one of the key and most expected outcomes of this meeting. The EU proposes to reduce 20% from 1990 levels by 2020, and is willing to increase it to 30% if signals for a higher commitment are sent; Sweden published some weeks ago the most ambitious target: 40% reduction, one third of it in other countries; the United States commits 15% reduction from today’s level, that is around no reduction from 1990 levels.

Is this enough? Or put differently, are we governed by sensible leaders or are they gambling? Diakonia is one of the many organizations proposing the adoption of The Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR). The GDR is a framework for climate stabilization that shares effort according to capacity and responsibility, while at the same time exempts poor people from it. They depart from the increase of 2 degrees, that the IPCC has indicated as where to halt global warming to calculate Greenhouse gas emission reduction target, before its consequences get almost unmanageable. According to the GDR and others, our best is a global reduction target for industrialized countries of around 40% in domestic reductions by 2020. Science says that this represents 30% of chances of shooting out the 2 degrees ceiling. This is gambling, and quite-likely-that-you-lose kind of gambling, as likely as getting shot by playing Russian roulette with two bullets. Newer research argues about the 2 degrees ceiling being brought down to 1.5. This raises the likelihood to lose.

The US opening speech reads that “our way forward should be steered by science and pragmatism”. We’ll leave aside the speaker; Stern was just saying what everybody else was thinking. The reduction target and the temperature rise ceiling cannot be separated, since the emission reduction aims at limiting the temperature rise. They are one and the same thing. The reduction target answers the question “wanting not to increase temperature more than 1.5, how much should we reduce our Greenhouse gas emissions?”. The current proposals are something like extending a 5 000 Swedish kronor check to buy a brand new four wheel drive. It wouldn’t be pragmatic to extend it for the full amount.

If one objective is to decrease temperature rise and another to reduce reductions, Todd Stern speech (and everyone else’s thoughts) should have read is that “our way forwards should be steered by science and/or pragmatism”, because what seems to be pragmatic is to add a couple of bullets to the chamber and hope for the best.

Domingo Torres Santos, Policy Officer on Climate Change, reporting from the Bonn Climate Change Talks