[p2p-research] Fwd: article by Bill Becker

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Uta Jehnich <uta at worldforum.org>
Date: Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 5:53 AM
Subject: article by Bill Becker
To: jehnich uta <uta at worldforum.org>


 *Hello everyone, Jim wanted to be sure you got a chance to read this
article. Best wishes, Uta*

William S. Becker <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-s-becker>

Executive Director, Presidential Climate Action Project
HuffingtonPost: December 14, 2009

*COP 15: Accepting
Responsibility***<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-s-becker/cop-15-accepting-responsi_b_391053.html>

Imagine you're a well-to-do person attending a dinner of your peers. The
food is top-rate and there's plenty of it. Course after course is laid upon
the table.

A group of less-advantaged people has been watching from the sidelines. When
the dinner is done, you invite them to join you at the table. After the
restaurant staff has served coffee, the bill comes. You and your rich peers
insist that everyone now at the table must share in paying the entire bill.

If that seems unfair, then you have just understood the position of the
delegates from emerging economies, now negotiating with their wealthier
colleagues from the North over a climate deal at Copenhagen.

Some poorer nations have taken the position that because the industrialized
world is responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions already in the
atmosphere -- in effect exhausting the environment's capacity to cope with
carbon -- rich nations must pay "damages" or "reparations." These payments
presumably would be used by emerging economies to cope with the climate
changes that already are devastating some of them, and to increase their
standards of living while minimizing their emissions.

But the United States' chief negotiator, Todd Stern -- an attorney and by
all accounts a very good and moral man -- rejects that argument. Speaking at
COP-15, he repeated President Barack Obama's recent promise that the United
States will pay a "fair share" of financial assistance to emerging
economies. But, he said: "*We absolutely recognize our historic role in
putting emissions in the atmosphere, up there, but the sense of guilt or
culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject
that*<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-will-pay-into-climate>
."

Through most of the past 200 years of industrial revolution, Stern argued,
people were "blissfully ignorant" that carbon emissions caused climate
change. *Therefore, he contended, the people of the United States need not
feel a sense of guilt.* <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0FIneVEhPg>

Like a good lawyer arguing on behalf of his defendant, Mr. Stern has taken a
tough bargaining position. But it is neither accurate nor moral. At the
highest levels of academia and government, we have not been blissfully
ignorant that industrialization would result in climate change, and even if
we were, that does not absolve the developed world of its responsibility to
help poor nations as they attempt to achieve a standard of living they so
far have only observed from the sidelines.

Scientists have known about climate change since the late 1800s. The first
estimates that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions could dramatically
increase atmospheric temperatures were made in the late 1800s when* Swedish
scientist Svante Arrhenius
*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science>estimated
that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase the Earth's
surface temperatures by 5-6 degrees Celsius.

A long period of debate ensued during the early 20th Century, but evidence
mounted that Arrehenius had it right. By mid-century, physical measurements
were showing a striking correlation between greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere and the Earth's temperature.

In the United States, presidents at least as early as Lyndon Johnson were
warned that climate change was coming. In 1965, Johnson's panel of science
advisors told him:
By the year 2000 there will be about 25% more CO2 in the atmosphere than at
present. This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an
extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable through local or
even national efforts, could occur.

Every U.S. president since has known of the risks of climate change. Every
president and Congress since has failed to adequately mitigate or manage
that risk. Although then Vice President Al Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol on
behalf of the United States in 1998, the U.S. Senate made clear it would not
vote in favor of ratification. As a result, President Clinton didn't bother
to try.

It wasn't until this year that either house of the U.S. Congress passed a
bill to begin controlling greenhouse gases. That bill, the Waxman-Markey
bill, proposes to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at about 3 percent below
their 1990 level by 2020 -- a ridiculously low goal given that America is
the country most responsible for the warming gases in the atmosphere today
and remains one of the world's leading carbon polluters.

Our national climate policy has been dominated for a century by denial, by
the political influence of fossil energy industries, and by willful
disregard for climate science verging on, if not crossing the line into,
gross negligence.

Even if Mr. Stern were correct -- that the political leaders of the
industrial revolution were "blissfully ignorant" of the relationship between
pollution and climate change -- that may not absolve them of liability for
the damages our greenhouse gas emissions have caused. I asked University of
Oregon Law Prof. Mary Wood about this. Her answer:
There are different competing policy objectives that a government has to
consider, one of which is fairness to the polluter (by not punishing action
that was legal at the time) and the other is protection of the public (by
cleaning up the hazardous waste site). The courts have chosen the latter
over the former every single time.
Prof. Wood contends there is substantial basis in case law, U.S. statutes
and international treaties to hold public officials accountable as "trustees
of the commons," responsible for protecting the air, water, soils and other
natural resources on which our wealth and health depend.
If we Americans should not feel guilty about our role in climate change,
then we should at least acknowledge a great moral obligation to help poorer
nations get to the table of genuine prosperity (the definition of which
deserves its own essay) without further destroying the commons.
In arguing for the plaintiff, I will concede two points. First, money is far
from the only issue on which developed nations must take responsibility. We
also have a moral duty to dramatically cut our emissions and to do so
quickly. On its blog, the Center for American Progress *reported one
conversation it had at COP-15 with a representative of island
nations*<http://climateprogress.org/2009/12/11/china-in-copenhagen-day-5-no-country-is-an-island>
that
are seeing their land and cultures lost to sea level rise:
All of the billions and trillions in the world won't do a darn thing if your
country is drowning or, worse yet, no longer exists. For the small islands,
the focus should be on drastic emission reductions and not a price tag for
their existence.

Second, we must be creative in finding the money that developing nations
will need for mitigation and adaptation. Financial assistance of the type
and amount that adds appreciably to staggering national debts or that
further undermines the economies of the developed world is not in anyone's
best interest.

For example, among the ideas circulating through COP-15 is a proposal by
George Soros to create a $100 billion assistance fund for poor nations using
foreign exchange reserves issued by the International Monetary Fund -- *an
idea Soros said would not add to anyone's national
debt*<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6951748.ece>
.

Poorer countries would win a moral victory by forcing industrial economies
to characterize financial assistance as "reparations," or to demand punitive
as well as compensatory damages for past emissions. But the moral victory is
not as important as the funding itself.
What cannot be reasonably argued, however, is that the United States and the
other rich countries who have been eating so well for so long have no moral
responsibility to help others find a way to achieve their own decent, safe,
sanitary and sustainable standards of living. That help should be given
willingly and generously.



-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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