So what has changed for the world since first Earth Summit in Rio twenty years ago -- and what new challenges and opportunities will be on the table at the end of June when the UN again convenes its members?
Well, some things are pretty clear. Climate disruption is happening faster and with greater severity than the world thought when it first gathered in Rio -- and the faith in the ability of nations to take collective action to avoid long-term disaster has been badly shaken. The willingness of carbon producers to fight back against efforts to develop a low-carbon economy which would end our addiction to oil and coal was greatly underestimated, as was the danger that conservative forces would decide to make climate an ideological litmus test. The US, even under a President with strong multi-lateral instincts, is no longer willing to lead. And the rapid transformation of the global economy with the rise of the BRICS nations -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- resetting the power dynamics of climate diplomacy.
All pretty grim news -- and there aren't many optimists about big global climate deals being made in Rio at the end of June.
But after six days and three intense global conferences -- the Carbon War Room's Creating Climate Wealth, a MRFCJ Climate Justice Forum in New York, and the Skoll World Forum here -- there are some deeper trends that offer hope.
First, the clean energy economy is ready for primetime. Twenty years ago, the nations that pledged to curb their carbon emissions had a very meager tool chest to do so -- neither solar nor wind were yet economic winners, hybrid and electric cars were not even a glimmer on the horizon, incandescent light bulbs were pretty much the only option, buildings unavoidable leaked vast quantities of energy. Today, all that is changed. With coal and oil prices soaring, low carbon growth is, even if most of us don't realize it, already CHEAPER than trying to generate higher GDP using high carbon fuels. Zero net energy buildings are cheaper to build and operate than leaky ones. The marginal cost of coal fired power plants is higher than wind, and about equal to solar. As more and more clean energy is deployed, its price keeps coming down, increasing the economic argument for kicking the carbon habit.
So we can -- and should -- replace the "shared sacrifice" frame on climate security with a "competitive race to seize the future" frame.
Second, while the world almost gave up on climate diplomacy after Copenhagen, Durban actually created a new pathway. The agreement that instead of a climate treaty in which only some countries participated, we would seek one that fairly included everyone has taken away the strongest argument that big carbon and the right used to block collective action. (The key ads used by American carbon interests to prevent the US from signing on to Kyoto featured a jig-saw puzzle which pulled China, India and Brazil out and asking how fair a treaty it could be that didn't include most of the world.) The US, China and India may wish that the Durban principals had not been agreed to, but eventually went along - and now responsible climate voices in those countries have a platform that can be defended.
Third, there is some obvious and compelling confidence building measures on the table. The most exciting is UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon's call for "Sustainable Energy for All" campaign." Here there are four imperatives:
1) The world in Rio should commit that everyone will have electricity and modern cooking fuels, the first by 2020, the second by 2030.
2) Most of us can obtain electricity by paying for the electrons as we use them -- I didn't get a bill for $50,000 for the power plants that serve my apartment in San Francisco. Neither should the poor. We should recognize that since solar power costs less than kerosene long term, we should finance the poor obtaining access to it. Money -- enough -- should be set aside and ring-fenced for distributed energy access for the poor.
3) Governments need to get rid of perverse policies that block energy access. In some countries, including most of the US, a business or family that generates a surplus of solar electricity can't sell it to its neighbors. Import duties double the cost of solar panels in many poor countries. Fossil fuel subsidies make renewable look more expensive than they are.
4) And social safety net programs -- efforts directly focused on alleviating extreme poverty -- should lead with making sure that the poor have access to clean energy, because without modern energy services, education, livelihoods and health are all locked into vulnerability. The myth of Abe Lincoln studying by candlelight might have worked in 1860, but as Secretary General Ban Ki Moon says, in the 21st it is the moment a family gets electricity that gives them the chance to climb out of poverty.
Energy access for all is a huge opportunity for joint collaboration that could put two billion people on the pathway to a renewable energy future, greatly shaking the monopoly that currently empowered coal and oil. But it's not the only one. Ecosystem restoration and regenerative agriculture is a pathway out of poverty, an essential step in feeding the world, and a major way of enhancing the carbon restoration capacity of soils, grasslands and forests -- it increases climate resilience by stabilizing water cycles and supplies -- and it makes tons of economic sense.
And finally, entrepreneurial energy is gathering around the low carbon economy. On distributed renewable energy access alone, dozens of new companies -- Simpa, SELCO, Eco-net Solar, Minda, Eight19, Stima, Frontier are only a few - and major players like Tata, the big Telcom companies, Shell are trying to figure out how to crack the Base of the Pyramid market. Auto companies are betting heavily on electrification. All of these private sector players are, effectively, betting that the world will take this challenge seriously and that finance, in particular, will be available.
Investing smart, and innovating rapidly, not sacrifice, is the key to climate progress. Rio probably won't be cheery, because diplomacy is locked in its old ways. But on the sidelines, there's a lot to cheer.
A veteran leader in the environmental movement, Carl Pope is the former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club. Mr. Pope is co-author -- along with Paul Rauber -- of Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, which the New York Review of Books called "a splendidly fierce book."
Follow Carl Pope on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CarlPope
So really, the paragraph "First, the clean energy economy is ready for primetime. Twenty years ago, the nations that pledged to curb their carbon emissions had a very meager tool chest to do so -- neither solar nor wind were yet economic winners, hybrid and electric cars were not even a glimmer on the horizon, incandescent light bulbs were pretty much the only option, buildings unavoidable leaked vast quantities of energy." continues a really big lie: that individuals making incremental changes in their consumerism will be effective in combating overconsumption and institutional waste, when it is really the incentivization of proper attitudes toward conservation and efficiency in corporations and bureaus and lifestyle densification, rather than a greenwashed pseudo-conservational consumption habit, we should be pursuing.
Taxing meat and removing agricultural subsidies would be two mammoth and highly effective immediate steps that would require only an act of Congress (use your Occupies and state party chapters to get progressive wonks into office! Occupy Congress!) to eliminate up to 40% of our pollution and GHGs by the end of the decade.
http://zoltansustainableecon.blogspot.com/2012/03/rio-20-part-2-europes-economic-cost-of.html
Government is not going to fix the problem when corporations make the decisions through blatant corruption and legal campaign contributions. Governments are puppets for the 1% if they are not the 1% themselves. All the rest is just hot air. Literally and figuratively. Democracy is subverted. Capitalism is dying. The world oligarchy is rising again. Hapsburgs, Borgias, Romanovs, and De Medicis or Bushes, Waltons, Gates, and even Clintons. The meritocracy of the 19th and 20th century is over and with it our self-determination. OK...I'm feeling slightly depressed now.
The way I see it, given an increasing world population --- or even the existing world population --- we HAVE to somehow develop an effective world government. If we don't, we put civilization at very high risk. Witness the 1900-1950 period with two devastating world wars and a decade of worldwide economic depresssion.
Like too many people trying to live in too small a house, there are simply too many of us trying to live together peacefully in too little space. It may or may not be trying to become one now, but the UN as our grandparents designed it was never meant to be a world government. They had the vision and the wisdom to see that we had better come up with something...SOON! The UN was a hope, a step toward getting people together to begin to figure out how to create something that would work.
I don't want to have to create a world government any more than you do. I just can't see any realistic alternative. I wish I could.
It seems that different people see the goal in different ways. When someone talks about getting out of poverty in a one-size-fits-all formula, I get concerned. For aborigines in the Amazon, the goal might just be to be left alone in their ancestral home, able to fend for themselves as they have done for millennia. For somebody in an urban barrio, it might be cheap electricity. For the Amish, it precludes electricity altogether. So what does it mean to "climb out of poverty?"
To reach a socioeconomic status relative to the culture and economy of the tribe, region or state one lives in which enables one to live a life of relative self-determination and/or to not be at the complete mercy of monopolized or oligopolized basic needs commodities market masters, neo-colonialism, etc.
Ki-Moon would've been better saying something like Renewable Energy for All who Want That Kind Of Stuff, but it's not as catchy, and in the PR department, governments and international governmental forums will always have a hard time. Admittedly, there's always been a clash in governments that have to rule over both corporate and native interests. When both sides want the other to disappear so they can live in what is prosperity to them, what is a government to do? At least the UN is trying.