Some interesting statistics on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the recent critique against the science.
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The last (fourth) assessment report:
People from 130 countries participated, 2 500 reviewers submitted 90 000 comments, 450 lead authors worked together with 800 contributing authors from all over the world. The report consists of 3 000 pages and 18 000 references.
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The critique:
After three years of intense scrutiny two errors have been found and out of the 18 000 references a handful have been questioned for accuracy.
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The critique and the media reports on it has the last few months contributed to a dramatic shift in public opinion on climate change. It a weird world we’re living in.
A new study by the Carnegie Institution for Science shows that over one third of carbon dioxide emissions from consumption in developed countries are actually emitted outside of their borders. The mechanism that create this is of course international trade.
As developed countries import more and more “dirty” consumer products, produced in for example the Chinese manufacturing industry, the emissions take place in China whereas the consumption takes place somewhere else.
An intuitive response is to blame consumers in the rich world for “outsourcing their emissions”. While this is certainly true, there is also another side of that coin. The income from exporting the goods is reaped in by, in this example, Chinese companies more than willing to exchange carbon dioxide emissions for foreign currency.
A potential and related problem, constantly brought up when climate change legislation is being discussed, is “carbon leakage”. This refers to the possibility that higher prices on emissions in the developed world would just force companies to relocate to developing countries and rich consumers would import the products instead of buying them domestically. The emissions are still the same, just geographically moved. While it’s far from certain that this “carbon leakage” problem is actually a serious reality, there is an easy solution to both this and the “export of emissions” problem: Cap and trade coupled with carbon tariffs.
If we sign on to the so-called ‘polluter pays principle’ which means that the person responsible for polluting the environment should also be the person paying for the damage, we ideally want consumers in for example Sweden to pay for the emissions that their consumption generate no matter where these emissions take place. By using a tax and/or cap and trade system domestically you can target the domestic emissions - but the one-third of emissions taking place abroad will not be affected. This can be done, however, by using carbon tariffs where the “carbon content” of products are taxed in line with the prices paid for emissions domestically (this should also be in compliance with the WTO ‘most favored nation’ rules).
This system can then be expanded on if several domestic and regional cap and trade systems are linked up to a big system with a common carbon tariff against imports from countries without any emissions pricing. In effect this could lead to a global ‘polluter pays principle’ where consumers pay for their environmental impacts and no one else, wherever the emissions take place. Economically and environmentally efficient.
Actually this kind of system is today discussed in Europe and well as in the U.S. and elsewhere. Let’s hold our thumbs.
The Earth Awards 2010 is now calling for submissions and the grand prize total is $50,000. I was one of the finalists last year and spent an amazing weekend in New York for the awarding ceremony event at the Four Seasons. If you have a good idea, don’t hesitate to submit it!
From the organizers:
We seek sustainable innovations that offer solutions to the ecological and social challenges of the 21st century.
We would like to invite you to submit your innovations in one of the following six categories: Product, Future, Built Environment, Social Justice, Fashion, Systems.
Apart from a monetary prize, all finalists of The Earth Awards 2010 will have the unique opportunity to pitch their ideas and innovations to world business leaders, helping them to transform their designs into market-ready solutions.
Please see our website www.theearthawards.org and the attached call for entries for more information. Feel free to contact me with any questions, or if you require additional information. We look forward to your submission.
I just recently bought my first iPhone and it’s possible the best buy of my life. I’ve found some nice apps and thought I would share them.
Facebook - Goes without saying, with push service Skype - Obviously Google - All google apps in one iPhone app, including voice search. Cool! SR - Swedish radio app BBC World News - BBC text and live video news NYTimes - News with a broad selection of categories: World, U.S., Politics, Business, Technology, etc. White House - News and videos (a lot of videos for Obama fans to enjoy) China Daily - Chinese news in English, has a nice feature with travel and tourism information Nike+ - Track and benchmark your training, requires a Nike transmitter in your trainers SOUTcast - Great radio app with thousands of stations and a really good browsing system WunderRadio - Also a great radio app, not as good browsing but nice features like GPS-tracked local radio stations as well as a play in background feature that uses Safari to enable background playing.
Today the environment program at FORES releases its first study since I took over the activities about six weeks ago. The study is called “Vinnare och Förlorare” (Winners and losers) and is an analysis of which industries and companies lose and win from an increased price of greenhouse gas emissions.
The printed 130pages study will be released later today at the big energy and environment conference “Energitinget” but already this morning national television did a piece on it.
Tomorrow I’m speaking at an event at the school of business at the University of Gothemburg. The organization for Nordic cooperation is hosting the event and the topic is what the Nordic countries can do together and what role we can play in the global climate negotiations. I haven’t thought much about it before but I’m now quite excited about the idea of having the five Nordic countries pushing a common agenda. We are quite similar as people with quite similar ideals and aspirations as to what role we want to play on the global playing field. I’m optimistic about the possibilities to shape and push common ideas and proposals, not least within mechanisms for financing mitigation efforts as well as technology transfer and technological development. Perhaps there are also possibilities to take on the trade and climate change issue together, and why not foreign investments and environmental impacts.
These technologies [disruptive zero-carbon tech] still have to prove that they are reliable, durable and scalable — and if you Google both, you will find studies saying they are and studies that are skeptical. All I know is this: If we put a simple price on carbon, these new technologies would have a chance to blossom and thousands more would come out of innovators’ garages. America still has the best innovation culture in the world. But we need better policies to nurture it, better infrastructure to enable it and more open doors to bring others here to try it.
The story of how a couple of minor mistakes turned into a global discrediting campaign of the main international body for information on climate change science can be found here.
“To those familiar with the science and the IPCC’s work, the current media discussion is in large part simply absurd and surreal. Journalists who have never even peeked into the IPCC report are now outraged that one wrong number appears on page 493 of Volume 2. We’ve met TV teams coming to film a report on the IPCC reports’ errors, who were astonished when they held one of the heavy volumes in hand, having never even seen it. They told us frankly that they had no way to make their own judgment; they could only report what they were being told about it. And there are well-organized lobby forces with proper PR skills that make sure these journalists are being told the “right” story. That explains why some media stories about what is supposedly said in the IPCC reports can easily be falsified simply by opening the report and reading. Unfortunately, as a broad-based volunteer effort with only minimal organizational structure the IPCC is not in a good position to rapidly counter misinformation.
One near-universal meme of the media stories on the Himalaya mistake was that this was “one of the most central predictions of the IPCC” – apparently in order to make the error look more serious than it was. However, this prediction does not appear in any of the IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers, nor in the Synthesis Report (which at least partly explains why it went unnoticed for years). None of the media reports that we saw properly explained that Volume 1 (which is where projections of physical climate changes belong) has an extensive and entirely valid discussion of glacier loss.”
Also: NASA scientists unveil their latest findings on our warming world: 2009 is tied as the second warmest year since modern recordkeeping began, and 2000-2009 is the hottest decade ever, read more.
A cold few months in parts of the world, combined with a campaign by the carbon lobby to discredit climate change science, perhaps doesn’t mean the world isn’t warming…
Who, Where, Why?
I'm a 28 years old swede political economist and entrepreneur trying to make things more sustainable. Here I write about things I do and think.
A new study by the Carnegie Institution for Science shows that over one third of carbon dioxide emissions from consumption in developed countries are actually emitted outside of their borders. The mechanism that create this is of course international trade.
