A high ambition coalition of the willing on climate change

As the Center for Global Development’s Owen Barder and Alice Lepissier noted in their post from the COP19 climate summit in Warsaw last month, there was “lots of cloud and not much silver lining” in evidence there, what with Japan’s announcement of reduced emissions targets and the further diluting of the already dubious ‘pledge and review’ approach.

For me, though, the most depressing thing of all was the deafening silence among governments attending the COP about the issue of global carbon budgets. It’s a deep irony that, just as the IPCC publishes by far its most unequivocal analysis to date about the need to define (and then stay within) a safe global carbon budget, governments are less willing than ever to talk about the issue.

Part of the problem is that governments and other UNFCCC process hacks assume that a carbon budget is just too difficult to talk about. Not just because countries would have to agree on a way to share it out, but also, even more fundamentally, because of a sense that agreeing a carbon budget would depend on a ‘big bang’ moment at which all countries agreed on an allocation mechanism – and good luck with that.

This set Owen, Alice, and I thinking about whether there’s a way for some countries to go ahead with a carbon budget-based approach, but without all governments having to be on board at the outset: a high ambition coalition of the willing, in other words. (more…)

Why Greenpeace is part of the problem on global climate policy

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. (more…)