Today, the radio program Democracy Now! featured Bill McKibben, talking about the 350.org divestment campaign. There is information about it on their website.

BBC: Coal resurgence calls undermine clean energy commitments

Related: The World Falls Back In Love With Coal

This is a talk given by Mark Jacobson from Stanford, entitled: “A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables”

His slides are also available.

“On many measures, policies, actions, and technologies to shape consumption appear to be “improving” environmental management. But too often the measures are close-up snapshots that cut out a much bigger, more complex, global picture of crisis. One common set of measures zooms in on consumer use of a product. Here, it is easy to and progress: simply compare the energy needs of a refrigerator or microwave or TV from the 1970s with a 2010 model. Another common set of measures zeros in on national consumption patterns. Here it is harder to and positive trends. Still, many exist—from higher recycling rates to more green buildings—for those who are looking for signs that capitalist economies are capable of shifting toward some form of sustainability.

Yet all of these measures need to be put into the context of a rising global population and rising per capita consumption in a globalized capitalist economy, a system that creates incentives — indeed, makes it imperative — for states and companies to “externalize externalities” beyond the borders of those who are actually doing most of the consuming. The challenge for environmentalists and policymakers is therefore about much more than influencing “consumers” — much of what is happening globally is beyond their control. Rather, it is about transforming a global system that is driving unsustainable production, much of which is increasingly masking itself as sustainable consumption. Fundamentally, this means that any move toward sustainable consumption will require much better full cost accounting and more equitable distribution of income: locally, nationally, and globally.”

Dauvergne, Peter. “The Problem of Consumption.” Global Environmental Politics, Volume 10, Number 2, May 2010, pp. 1-10 (Article)

Possibly of interest: 2012 climate change fast

“The dominant reason for acting on climate change is not that it would make us better off. It is that not acting involves taking advantage of the poor, the future, and nature. We can hope that refraining from such exploitation is good (or at least not too bad) for us, especially in terms of current lifestyles and those to which we aspire. But such hope is and should not be our primary ground for acting. After all, morally speaking, we must act in any case. If it turns out that we can do so and still do well ourselves, then this is to be welcomes as a fortunate empirical fact, and no more. Given this, incessant hand-wringing about whether, how, and to what extent we might benefit from action is at best a side issue, and at worse just another vehicle for procrastination and moral corruption.”

Gardiner, Stephen. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. p.68 (hardcover)

One perpetual question in climate politics is whether radical political change is necessary to achieve climatic stability, or whether the necessary energy transition can be achieved in a ‘stealthy’ technocratic way.

This question is linked to the general question about radical versus incremental change, which is in turn touched upon in Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape:

“This bias relates to what has come to be known as ‘the endowment effect’: people demand more money in exchange for an object that has been given to them than they would spend to acquire the object in the first place. In psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s words, ‘a good is worth more when it is considered as something that could be lost or given up than when it is evaluated as a potential gain.’ This aversion to loss causes human beings to generally err on the side of maintaining the status quo. It is also an important impediment to conflict resolution through negotiation: for if each party values his opponent’s concessions as gains and his own as losses, each is bound to perceive his sacrifice as being greater.” (p. 75 – hardcover)

When it comes to political change, there are at least two rational reasons to favour the status quo. Firstly, through radical change we risk losing things that we currently possess and which have value. For instance, if we radically altered our political system to take into account the interests of future generations, it may stop serving some of the functions it serves effectively now. Secondly, there is the danger of unwanted side-effects accompanying change. In addition to losing old capabilities, we may take on new problems.

All told, I think our collective status quo bias is far too strong. We want to keep economic growth happening, maintain our lifestyles, and generally avoid large-scale political change. Unfortunately, by trying to keep our own lives as similar as possible to the past, we are condemning the Earth to a future unlike anything humanity has ever seen. If we are to tackle the problem of climate change, we need to find ways to effectively drive the transition away from fossil fuels. The psychological potency of loss – which Harris and Kahneman highlight – may be one mechanism for that. By highlighting everything that is put in jeopardy by climate change, it may be possible to drive people to reform their lifestyles and institutions in ways that limit its severity.

The ordinary understanding of the legitimacy of democratic governments is that their authority derives from a popular mandate; the government can legitimately impose laws on citizens because those citizens have the ability to replace the government if they choose.

The argument that popular consent makes the decisions of democratic governments legitimate is based on the assumption that the people impacted by those decisions are the citizens who are alive and voting.

Because greenhouse gas pollution endures for so long in the atmosphere, people for tens of thousands of years will be affected by the choices we make now. In particular, how much fossil fuel we collectively choose to burn during the next few decades will have a huge impact on the kind of world many future generations inhabit. We have a choice between passing on a world that largely resembles the one we inherited or passing on one that is radically transformed, largely in ways that are deeply harmful to the life prospects of future generations of human beings.

In this way, citizens and governments have entered into a conspiracy against future generations. Governments do not meaningfully restrict the use of fossil fuels. Indeed, they positively encourage it. This policy is popular because it facilitates many things that people value: from inexpensive domestic and foreign travel to cheap and uninterrupted electricity, air conditioning, winter heating, consumer goods, and all the conveniences and pleasures that exist in our energy-intensive lives. In order to maintain those lifestyles, we choose to burn vast quantities of fossil fuels.

The consequence is that many people with no political voice are made to suffer. This in turn undermines the moral legitimacy of the arrangement. The consent of the governed is a point in favour of democratic governments, but they must also be held accountable for the consequences of their actions on defenceless members of future generations who will suffer from the pollution we produce but who have no political voice.

What we are doing now is effectively treating members of future generations as our slaves, or at least as people whose interests do not matter at all. When democratic governments choose to treat people in that way, they lose the ability to convincingly argue that their behaviour is ethical. The question for individuals then becomes: “What should I do personally, living in this unjust society?”

According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center the Arctic summer sea ice has reached a new record low, below the shockingly low value from 2007.

There are a few scientific facts about the world that are vital and increasingly well understood. Foremost among them is the reality that human beings have already put a dangerous amount of greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere. Nonetheless, the world as a whole continues to demonstrate a ferocious appetite for fossil fuels. Burning those fuels will inevitably contribute still more to climate change, turning a dangerous situation into a potentially catastrophic one.

In order to avert the worst-case outcomes, humanity as a whole needs to work toward keeping most of the planet’s remaining fossil fuels underground, while achieving a global transition to a low- and ultimately zero-carbon economy.

In a world where states, companies, and individuals behaved rationally, we would already be working aggressively to phase-out fossil fuels. As it is, nothing like the necessary level of effort is being made. In an ideal world, Canada would be finding itself with fewer and fewer willing buyers of coal, oil, and gas; as it is, we should choose to restrain production and exports unilaterally.

Right now, Canada is helping to feed the fossil fuel addiction of the United States. Under the current Conservative government, we also aspire to help feed the addictions of China and others. If the world is to avoid catastrophe, those addictions must be curbed. By voluntarily reducing our exports of fossil fuels, Canada can play a disproportionate role in driving that necessary transition.

Canada may not have much population or total wealth when compared to giant states like China and the United States, but we do have vast reserves of coal, oil, and gas. When we export those fuels, we help keep the world on an economic development pathway that is tightly linked to fossil fuel use, and in which well over 2˚C of climate change will eventually occur.

Catastrophic global climate change would serve the interests of nobody, but states are not thinking ahead and responding appropriately to the dangers we face. Within that context, Canada has the choice between continuing to be an enabler of unethical and destructive fossil fuel use or voluntarily restricting fossil fuel production and export. Hopefully, Canada will eventually find itself in a situation where nobody wants to buy these dangerous fuels, and where the world as a whole recognizes the value of keeping them underground. In order to help drive the emergence of such a world, the best thing Canada can do is to stop fueling the fossil fuel addictions of other countries, while also working to decarbonize our domestic economy.