Why Greenpeace is part of the problem on global climate policy Alex Evans
July 26, 2012 | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks | 10 comments
On Twitter a couple of days ago, Greenpeace International’s executive director Kumi Naidoo penned an appeal for people to become Greenpeace members. I threw off a series of tweets in reply saying that Greenpeace was part of the problem rather than part of the solution on global climate policy and that there was no way I would ever join Greenpeace given its current position – prompting a few people (including Kumi himself) to ask what I meant, and why I was on such a downer on Greenpeace. Here’s my answer.
Global climate policy, when you strip it down, is about one thing: stabilising levels of greenhouse gases in the air at a safe level. To do that, you have to define that safe level; quantify a global carbon budget that decreases in size over time, to keep us within the safe operating space; and figure out national shares of that emissions budget, through binding targets for everyone (not just developed countries).
Of course, the question of who gets what in a global carbon budget is about as charged and political as it gets. So much so, that the international climate policy process has spent the last two decades studiously ignoring it. As a result, it’s impossible even to talk about concrete scenarios for stabilising the climate. The deadlock is more or less complete, making the UNFCCC process the world’s number one multilateral zombie.
As regular readers will know, I’ve been arguing for a long time that the only way we’ll ever get countries to agree on how to share out a global carbon budget is by using a simple principle that everyone can understand: namely, that each of the earth’s human inhabitants has the same right to emit carbon.
To bridge the political divide, countries could negotiate a gradual process of convergence towards equal per capita shares, over anything from 1 to 100 years. But everyone would still be clear and confident about the ultimate destination of the process: fair shares of the atmosphere for everyone.
Now, I recognise that there are other views on how to share out a global emissions budget, like Greenhouse Development Rights. That’s fine. We may differ on the allocation mechanism, but we agree on the fundamental issue – that we need a stabilisation target, that then leads to a global carbon budget.
But what’s not OK – especially for NGOs, given that their job is supposed to be about setting the forward agenda - is to duck the whole issue of carbon budgets and how to share them out, instead sticking to an incrementalist approach that’s long on rhetoric and painfully short on specifics. Yet that’s exactly what we see from the big environmental NGOs.
It’s what we saw, for example, with the TckTckTck coalition (whom I critiqued here both before and during Copenhagen). And it’s emphatically what we see with Greenpeace. All Greenpeace call for is global emissions to peak by 2015, developed country emissions to fall 40% below 1990 levels by 2020, and developing countries to slow emissions growth by 15-30% by the same year.
There’s no mention of a carbon budget, or of a stabilisation target. And while Greenpeace’s 2009 position paper on ‘Equity and Climate Action’ expresses a degree of sympathy with Greenhouse Development Rights, it says in the next breath that “Greenpeace is not calling for its immediate implementation”. In other words, Greenpeace files both carbon budgets and how to share them out under the “too difficult” heading – just like the politicians they criticise so vociferously.
I think the job of NGOs is to speak truth to power, and tell policymakers what’s necessary. It’s not their job not to try to be negotiators themselves, or to make judgements about what’s “realistic”. What’s politically realistic can change overnight after a shock, creating a (usually brief) window of opportunity for thinking the unthinkable. At times like that, the people who’ve patiently been telling it like it really is get listened to. Think of Winston Churchill after the failure of appeasement.
A few NGOs, like 350.org, do that – which is probably why, following a spate of extreme weather in the US and around the world this year, it’s 350 founder Bill McKibben’s analysis that’s been going massively viral around the web (an analysis, incidentally, that puts the idea of carbon budgets front and centre).
But most of the big, mainstream NGOs just keep trimming their sails and ducking the hard issues. Just like they’ve been doing since long before Kyoto in 1997.
Of course, all this still leaves the question: why single out Greenpeace, if all the big environment NGOs are equally guilty of this failing? Because Greenpeace is a special case – or at least, it has the potential to be.
Kumi Naidoo is one of the most respected development campaigners out there. Before he went to Greenpeace, he was head of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, the world’s largest civil society movement. GCAP are the people who gave the world white wrist bands at the time of Make Poverty History - an achievement that was in large part Naidoo’s doing. When I was Hilary Benn’s special adviser at DFID at the time, friends working as development campaigners would speak his name in hushed tones of reverence.
So ever since his arrival at Greenpeace, I’ve been quietly wondering whether he’d be the man to take Greenpeace to a more credible place on climate change. Because I felt sure that someone with such impeccable development credentials would just get it about equity and carbon budgets.
I figured he’d get it that until policymakers grasp the nettle and start talking about fair shares for real – which means in numbers, not words – then climate stabilisation will continue to be kept off the agenda by developing countries’ acute concerns about being left with no space to develop (and the consequent ability of countries like the US to hide behind them and refuse to take action unless the emerging economies do too).
I figured he’d get it that a genuinely equitable way of sharing out emissions allocations would not only save the planet by unlocking a carbon budget, but would also (once coupled with emissions trading) create a massive new source of finance for development – something that Bono spotted a while back.
And above all, I figured he’d get it that opposition to talking about how to share out a carbon budget amounts to complicity in a 21st century version of enclosure.
Land grabs aren’t just happening on the ground in poor countries around the world; they’re happening in the sky as well. Consider this: the global carbon market was in 2010 worth $142 billion. That’s $13 billion more than total global aid flows in the same year. A hugely valuable new asset class has been created – literally out of thin air. And low income countries haven’t been given any. Despite the fact that their per capita emissions are a tiny fraction of everyone else’s.
Meanwhile, as richer countries keep pumping out the emissions, the size of the carbon budget that we’ll have to share out once we do finally decide to talk about it, keeps getting a little smaller every day. And, breathtakingly, this approach is described by Greenpeace and others as fair.
I used to love Greenpeace when I was a kid. The first book on environment that I ever read electrified me with their story as an organisation. But that was before I got to see them up close.
I’m still hoping that Kumi Naidoo can put them back on their pedestal. Then I’ll be the first to sign up as a member, get everyone I know to do the same, and run a marathon to raise cash for them. But until then – no way.
Update: Kumi Naidoo has now replied to this post. You can read what he had to say, and my response, here.
I'd like to point out that while environmental groups may be silent on this issue, development groups like Oxfam haven't shied away from the hard issue of carbon budgets. We published this paper pre-Copenhagen outlining our thoughts on a fair and equitable solution, http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/fair-climate-deal-… and we're in the process of updating our thinking in the context of the current negotiating framework. At Oxfam, we know very well how politically fraught this issue of effort sharing is in the context of the global carbon budget, but we can't just ignore it and hope it goes away. Development organizations have an equal stake in this fight and responsibility to show thought leadership and push countries in the right direction. Let's stop just pointing fingers at environmental organizations in the context of climate action – we're all part of the climate community and we all have a responsibility to push our global leaders to act.
Yup, that's *totally* true.
It is indeed increasingly the development NGOs, rather than their environment brethren, who've been bringing the real leadership on climate – not just on equity issues, but also on the core science, as was very clear at Copenhagen (see http://www.globaldashboard.org/2009/12/06/environ….
And Oxfam deserve a particularly honourable mention among the big development NGOs for setting out to integrate development and environment issues in their Grow campaign, as I blogged at the time of its launch (see http://www.globaldashboard.org/2011/05/31/why-oxf… full disclosure – I worked with Oxfam as a consultant during the design phase of this campaign, and wrote one of the launch reports).
Part of the problem? Really? Carbon rights isn't the only thing Greenpeace can help with. Rhetoric alone won't win this one. We need a critical path to success. Maybe you should start a campaign org, Alex?
What this post is missing is mention of Oliver Tickell's book Kyoto 2 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kyoto2-How-Manage-Global-…. It goes much further than GDRs etc in terms of articulating what actually needs to be done.
Apart from that, I generally agree with the thrust of this post.
To be fair to Greenpeace, ahead of Copenhagen all the NGOs were asking for a developed country commitment of 40% emissions cut by 2020 and a slowing of emissions cuts by developing countries. This approach was essentially demanding that at Copenhagen the rich nations come forwards and take on their fair share of the responsibility for acting on climate change. Something they have continually failed to do. We were also demanding $200 billion in annual climate finance for poor countries, half of which was for low-carbon development. Again this was to ensure fair shares of responsibility. The overall aim at Copenhagen was to get developed countries to act first and in line with what science says is needed. This was the only way to get developing countries onboard to take their own actions.
The Greenhouse Development Rights (GRDs) approach, which Christian Aid strongly supports, is not contradictory to achieving an equitable share of carbon emissions per capita, but instead a means of calculating fair shares of who should act and by how much on the way to getting there. By 2050 there is very little carbon budget left to share if we are to stay below 1.5oC or even 2oC, so the question is really how do we share the cost of getting there. For the new Global Deal to be negotiated by 2015 it will be essential to get this equity formula right. GDRs is based on a good set of principles – historic responsibility, capacity to act and the right to development – so is an excellent starting point for these negotiations.
"I think the job of NGOs is to speak truth to power, and tell policymakers what’s necessary. It’s not their job not to try to be negotiators themselves, or to make judgements about what’s “realistic”. But most of the big, mainstream NGOs just keep trimming their sails and ducking the hard issues. "
Is this the same Alex Evans who called us "utterly bonkers lefties" for doing just that over Argentina (and Greece's) debt?
Fair question – the answer is that I think there's a difference between tackling the hard issues (which is what I think Greenpeace fails to do on global climate policy) and being tactically smart about how you go about it.
My argument in my post back in April about Jubilee* was not that Jubilee was wrong to take on the hard issue of odious debt lent to dictatorships. It was that if you want to convince anyone else in the UK of that hard argument, then there were probably smarter ways to do so than to :
- use Argentina as the example
- during the 30th anniversary of the Falklands invasion
- at a time when Argentina was indugling in more sabre-rattling on the Malvinas than at any time since the war.
My criticism of Jubilee wasn't about your policy. It was about your comms strategy. [Which was, you must admit, pretty funny
]
* http://www.globaldashboard.org/2012/04/10/great-n…
In 1993, together with Greenpeace colleagues and our ship, we were arrested and detained by the Norwegian authorities for 6 weeks for blockading a Shell exploration rig in the Barents Sea. The justification for that action was that we already knew there was more carbon in the known fossil fuels reserves than we could afford to use, so the industry should stop looking for more as a first step. It was based on the carbon budget. In 1997, Greenpeace produced the report Fossil Fuels and Climate Protection – the Carbon Logic (http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/science/reports/carbon/clfull-1.html). The 225 GtC for the budget was a quarter of known reserves and something like 5% of estimated resources. The carbon budget and the logic of what therefore needs to happen has always been there. It is great that the arithmetic and figures are now going viral (we didn't have that luxury 15 years ago) through Bill McKibben's rolling stone article, and a few months ago a similar piece by George Monbiot and hopefully the logic of what needs to happen will also be spread. Greenpeace has also consistently called for action from the developed countries to be taken first for all the reasons we know well. Today, please let us not divide between environment and development communities to win this battle. If there is one thing that almost 30 years of campaigning on this issue has taught me it is that as civil society, we have our differences both in approach and focus but environment, development, social and labour need to work together. If we argue with each other then the only winners are those who profit from ignoring the science of the Carbon budget and the logic of what this means. This is the greatest injustice.
Carbon budget? Jeez guys…take a breath would you? It's NOT poison.