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I can see why the world is warming to Newt. He talks a lot of sense on climate change.

My message is that the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading in the atmosphere… and do it urgently.

Let me explain why this is a very challenging thing to do if you’re a Conservative. For most of the past thirty years, the environment has been a powerful emotional tool for bigger government and higher taxes. Therefore if you’re a Conservative, the minute you start hearing these arguments, you know what’s coming next. Just bigger government and higher taxes. So even though it might be the right thing to do, you end up fighting it because you don’t want the bigger government and the higher taxes. And so you end up in these cycles…

I think there has to be a green Conservatism. There has to be a willingness to stand up and say, “here’s the right way to solve these [problems] as seen through our value system. And now have a dialogue about what’s the most effective way to solve it, rather than get into a fight about whether to solve it. When I was speaker, on a whole range of biodiversity issues, I intervened again and again on the side of the environment. I really do believe [in the environment].

I would be delighted to see open ended hearings – not in time, but in terms of the topic – that started and said: “If we’re serious about a dramatic global reduction in carbon loading over the next twenty years – starting immediately – what are the different models that might work? Are there incentive based, market-oriented models that might work as well or faster? And is there a chance that they would produce the technology that would make it easier  for India and China to decide you can have green prosperity?”

Because if you can develop green prosperity, you change the entire trajectory for the planet, not just for the US… I would love to see hearings that didn’t start with a fight over cap and trade… which I don’t think is the way to start. The way to start is to ask what the optimum choices we can make strategically to minimize carbon loading in the next twenty years.

I believe we can bring a science, technology, and entrepreneurship/incentive-based model that would at least be worth being considered seriously by the House and Senate.

Two minor caveats. First, I don’t think  Gingrich ever developed his idea for an incentive-based model that wasn’t cap and trade. And, of course, this is from back in 2007. I hear the ex-Speaker’s position has evolved been more intelligently designed since then. Here’s the 2011 version:

Remember, in the mid-1970’s there was a cover of Newsweek and Time that says we’re in the age of a brand new glacial period and they had a cover of the Earth covered in ice. This is the 1970’s. Now many of those scientists are still alive and they were absolutely convinced. I mean, if Al Gore were able to in the 1970’s we would build huge furnaces to warm the planet against this inevitable coming Ice Age.

I’m not disputing or discrediting the National Academy of Sciences, I’m saying a topic large enough to change the behavior of the entire human race is a topic that is more than science and deserves public hearings with very tough minded public questions and we’ve had almost none of that on either side.

The ‘more than science’ hearings should be fun! Perhaps Newt will explain what happened to evidence that was sufficient to demand urgent action just four years ago…

It is a substantial report, and looks like important reading for those working on migration, climate change and many other related issues.  It is also full of crunchy data and pretty charts, which always helps.   Some of the top-line conclusions are unsurprising.  It states that environmental change has a clear impact on migration through its influence on the web of political, economic and social drivers that lead people to move, and that this impact will only increase in the future as the world becomes more populated and as natural hazards proliferate.  It also argues that the complex interaction of drivers will lead to different migration outcomes, and that well-planned and coordinated policy responses will reduce the risks of humanitarian emergencies and displacement.  So far, so predictable.

However, some of its findings and recommendations are more counterintuitive, and should be studied carefully by policymakers.  Three in particular jumped out at me.

1. People will increasingly migrate towards environmentally vulnerable areas.

Ask about environmental change and migration, and most people will think of events that that displace large numbers of people in a short period of time: disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Asian tsunami and Cyclone Nargis, or droughts and famines in sub-Saharan Africa.  The image is of people running away from environmental hazards – a vast stream of ‘climate refugees’.  Yet as individuals and households try and carve out space in a rapidly changing global economy, migration will increasingly take place in the other direction, towards urban areas where there are more opportunities to diversify livelihoods but also where the risks of environmental hazards are greater.

This will be particularly true in large cities in low-income countries.  For example, the research for this report indicates that the number of people living in floodplains of urban areas in East Asia may rise from 18 million in 2000 to anywhere between 45 and 67 million by 2060.  This has huge implications for policymakers and urban planners, who will need to design cities that are capable of absorbing many more people in a sustainable way and that are much more resilient to environmental change than is currently the case.

2. Environmental change is equally like to make migration less possible as more probable.

Migration is an expensive business, requiring considerable financial capital.  Contrary to popular opinion, it is not usually the poorest of the poor who migrate, but instead those who have acquired some economic assets.  However, as the Foresight report points out, environmental changes (such as drought and flooding) may destroy or remove the very capital that enables people to migrate, leaving large numbers ‘trapped’ in areas that are particularly vulnerable.  This comes with substantial risks, since it may encourage people to migrate in more irregular and unsafe ways to seek new sources of income.

3. Preventing or constraining migration is not a no-risk option.

While the debate on migration in many countries often generates recommendations about how to limit people’s ability to move, the evidence gathered for this report supports the case of those who argue that putting severe limits on migration can have a harmful impact on both the development of the individual in question as well as that of both sending and receiving countries (full disclosure: IPPR has broadly subscribed to this view in its work on both UK migration policies as well as international migration and development).

The Foresight report suggests that migration should be regarded as a broadly positive process that can give people access to new employment opportunities that increase their resilience to shocks.  It points out that in 2009, remittances sent by international migrants to low income countries totalled around US$307 billion (nearly triple the amount of development aid that was disbursed in the same year).  Remittances are not a silver bullet, and will not prevent migration driven by development needs or environmental changes.  But by facilitating the freer movement of people both internally and internationally and improving their capacity to send remittances home, policymakers may enable more households to remain in situ than would otherwise be the case.

The work of the Foresight team has provided plenty of food for thought, and some good ideas that should be mainstreamed into planning on migration and environmental change.  Let’s hope that policymakers are listening.

once we’re through the crunch, we may be back to a game of cat and mouse between oil supply and economic growth. Demand falls, oil price falls; demand picks up, oil price goes back up too – but never for long enough to give investors a clear signal to pump cash into new oil supply infrastructure

Over at the Energy Bulletin, Dave Cohen’s just published a post thinking about the same question – and wondering when the next oil spike is due. His take is that the next crunch will likely be in 2013, give or take a year, as his graph below illustrates:

As Dave notes, this graph is not a forecast on oil prices, but rather a schematic illustrating that a) demand surges cause oil price shocks [i.e. the peaks on his graph]; b) oil price shocks cause recesssions and force reductions in demand [the troughs]; and c) the average price of oil goes up over time [the straight line]. Informally, he notes, “we can say there’s been an oil price shock when the real (inflation-adjusted) price goes over $100 per barrel and stays there for at least 2 months”.

His whole post is worth reading (n.b. especially his emphasis on the key variable in all this, namely prospects for Chinese growth) – and leaves the reader wondering: how do we break out of the cycle?

As I argued back in 08, one answer could be massive new investment in oil production – remember the IEA’s consistent warnings throughout the downturn about how under-investment in new oil production is setting the stage for a new supply crunch. But there are two problems with that option. One: we’re into diminishing returns territory. With the age of easy oil over, production increases from now depend on unpalatable options like tar sands, oil shales and, ahem, a lot more deepwater drilling (which is projected to account for 40% of global oil demand by 2020). Two: this approach does nothing to solve climate change.

So, I concluded 2 years ago, “it looks like the only way through is for policymakers to agree a global climate policy framework that’s both global in scope and sufficiently long term to provide investors with an unequivocal signal of where to put their cash: this is the only way of squaring energy security with climate change”.

I still think that’s right – but obviously, prospects for that have dimmed considerably since Copenhagen. So where does that leave us? That leaves us, alas, stuck in the yo-yo world depicted in Dave’s graph (which looks a lot like the Multilateral Zombie climate policy scenario that David and I described in our 2009 report for the UK government on global climate architecture – see page 7 onwards).

Oh – and it also leaves us on track for 3 degrees plus of global warming.

My own take on this is that when we think about public opinion in the climate context, we’re a bit too fast to look at it through the lens of NGOs and the media – both of which had, I think, a terrible summit at Copenhagen.

Take NGOs first. For the most part, they concentrated on highly technical issues, as they have throughout the past decade – acting, in other words, like negotiators despite not having any bargaining chips. When they tried to look up a bit, and set an overall agenda, it was so vague as to be meaningless (“ambitious, fair, binding” – more on that here). Finally, as the summit fell apart, they retreated to their habitual comfort zone of arguing that it was all the fault of the US and EU, who had been unforgivably horrid to poor old China. (See Mark Lynas for a blistering critique of that view.)

Then, of course, there’s the feral nature of the 24/7 news media, which cheerfully overlooks its own agenda-setting role even as it peddles its sensationalised stories of stitch-ups, scandals and show-downs.

The Guardian’s John Vidal deserves singling out for an especially dishonourable mention here. Just two days in to Copenhagen, he ran a breathless piece saying that Copenhagen was “in disarray” following the leak of a draft agreement that “would hand more power to rich nations”. Never mind that the content of his piece was highly questionable (as we pointed out on GD at the time). The effect was to poison the atmosphere just as the summit began – leading the Indian environment minister to say in April this year that the summit had been “destroyed from the start” by the Guardian leak. Nice one, John!

So given that it would appear to be unwise to expect either NGOs or the media to help shape public opinion more constructively, what’s left? One suggestion at the conference was a bigger role for faith leaders – who are indeed getting steadily more active on climate.  

But my hunch is that it’s social networking technologies that are the key opinion formers to watch.

We’ve seen how breathtakingly fast they are at aggregating information – as during the Mumbai attacks, for instance, where Twitter was consistently 60-90 minutes ahead of the news media.  We’ve seen how they aggregate opinion as well as information – which can of course be as much of a curse as a blessing.  And we’ve seen how they can organise action – not just protest, but also more proactive policy solutions.

But what we haven’t seen, yet, is how all these elements could combine in the face of stronger climate impacts  - not just an extreme weather event, but an impact that could really trigger awareness of the potential for irreversible shifts. Strikes me that social networking technologies would be a highly unpredictable and interesting wild card in such circumstances – and potentially rather more useful than either NGOs or the media.

In a pastiche of Kennedy’s man on the moon speech, I imagined President Obama laying down the following gauntlet to the world:

I believe that the world should commit itself to achieving the goal of stopping the inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions that is doing so much to put our planet in peril. I don’t believe we should aim to achieve this goal in 2020 or 2030 or 2050 – but right now in 2009, making this year the high water mark for mankind’s global experiment with the global climate.

Obviously this didn’t happen, but – gradually – we’re learning more about has happened to emissions. The figures for US carbon dioxide  for 2009 are now in and the good news is that they fell by an astonishing 9%.

Question is: has the US stimulus been wisely spent on measures that will push the economy onto a lower carbon path as it grows again? The answer is probably not, though there is some reason for hope:

As the economy recovers, the structure of that recovery will be important to the future emissions profile of the United States.  If energy-intensive industries lead the economic recovery, emissions would increase faster than if service industries or light manufacturing play the leading role.   If coal, which was more heavily impacted by the recent economic downturn than other energy sources, rebounds disproportionately, the carbon intensity of the energy supply could rise above the 2009 level.

However, longer-term trends continue to suggest decline in both the amount of energy used per unit of economic output and the carbon intensity of our energy supply, which both work to restrain emissions.

The world is at a major inflection point on its carbon trajectory, but I fear we’re going to blunder through it without realising the opportunity for transformation. As Copenhagen showed, unfortunately, we’re still a long, long way from reframing climate change as a now problem. But it’s still not too late to start working for peak emissions.

Ever wondered what a nuclear strike would do to the environment?

The detonation of 100 15-kiloton nuclear weapons in Indian and Pakistani megacities would create urban firestorms that would loft 5 million tons of thick, black smoke above cloud level. (This smoke would engulf the entire planet within 10 days.)

Because the smoke couldn’t be rained out, it would remain in the stratosphere for at least a decade and have profoundly disruptive effects. Specifically, the smoke layer would block sunlight, heat the upper atmosphere, and cause massive destruction of protective stratospheric ozone.

A 2008 study PDF calculated ozone losses (after the described conflict) of 25-45 percent above mid-latitudes and 50-70 percent above northern high latitudes persisting for five years, with substantial losses continuing for another five years. Such severe ozone depletion would allow intense levels of harmful ultraviolet light to reach Earth’s surface–even with the stratospheric smoke layer in place.

Beneath the smoke, the loss of warming sunlight would produce average surface temperatures colder than any experienced in the last 1,000 years. There would be a corresponding shortening of growing seasons by up to 30 days and significant reductions in average rainfall in many areas, with a 40-percent decrease of precipitation in the Asian monsoon region.

Basically, the Earth’s surface would become cold, dark, and dry.

Via @jduncanMACD – the UK’s tweeting Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament.