Socialist Outlook : SO/10 - Summer 2006

Review

Contraction and Convergence: the Global Solution to Climate Change

by Aubrey Meyer - published by Green Books for the Schumacher Society, first published 2000, £5.00
Sheila Malone

Aubrey Meyer is a musician. But over a decade ago he swapped his violin for a computer and threw himself into finding a solution to the looming threat of global heating. This book is about his quest.

Meyer describes how he felt, ‘crushed and frightened by the realisation that humanity’s pollution was destroying the future by changing the global climate’. He details just how bad this crisis was even in 2000, when the book was first published. The upward-curving ‘hockey stick’ diagram is used to illustrate the relationship between the human activity of fossil fuel burning, the release of greenhouse gases (ghg) and its warming effect on the atmosphere. These have all accelerated during the last 200 years since industrialisation, but dramatically so in the last few decades. In 1960, for instance, carbon dioxide levels had risen by twenty percent on pre-industrial levels. But as early as 2030 they are predicted to rise by 100 percent.

The big fear amongst climatologists is that if this causes global temperatures to rise beyond a ‘tipping point’ of two degrees, it will set off positive feedbacks such as the release of methane from melting permafrosts. Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide and could rapidly accelerate the heating process, causing a catastrophic destabilisation of the climate. Rising sea levels will result in floods, storms and hurricanes of increasing frequency and intensity in coastal and low lying areas and rising temperatures inland will cause widespread drought and desertification .

As Meyer points out, political and business leaders have been aware of this threat for more than a decade, and have been discussing solutions since the1992 Rio Earth Summit. Nevertheless, fossil fuel burn, ghg emissions and global temperatures have all been rising relentlessly.

One atmosphere – one agreement

Meyer’s proposed answer is Contraction and Convergence (C&C). Its starting point is that any solution must be international: since there is only one atmosphere, what each nation emits effects the others. All countries must agree on a global target in order to avoid catastrophic warming, for instance sixty percent reduction by 2050. Each is then given a quota, based on population, allowing it to emit within this overall target. This should lead to the contraction of high polluting and growth of low polluting industry. The aim is to achieve gradual convergence in emissions between the two. And if they keep to the overall target emissions will gradually fall.

Meyer describes how he and his colleagues from the Global Commons Institute (a group he set up in 1991) took this plan to the various climate talks and conferences of the UN during the1990s.

His first challenge came from the then favoured solution of environmentalists to problems of pollution – ecological taxes. Since under capitalism these are passed on to the consumer, hitting the poor hardest, Meyer rejects them as unfair. In contrast, C&C’s allocation of quotas he sees as equitable, in a way similar to rationing. At the same time he ties this to an individualist notion that ‘the right to emit carbon dioxide is a human right’.

Debtors and creditors

On quota allocation Meyer adopts the idea of ‘debtors’ and ‘creditors’, popularised by Andrew Simms. The rich, industrialised nations are debtors, since they have polluted the planet for hundreds of years and need to pay back by drastically cutting their emissions. Developing countries are creditors and are allowed to increase emissions to ‘catch up’. As some NGOs point out, however, as long as they remain locked into the global economy on an unequal and dependent basis, this could result in developing countries pursuing the same ecologically harmful mode of development that has caused the problem in the first place.

Interestingly, the United States backs international quotas, I assume because it includes their rivals such as China and India. However, the Americans insist that quotas must be tradeable. Meyer also agrees with this, arguing that in this way C&C brings together both the Right who, ‘will have to swallow a globally egalitarian, predistribution of emissions rights and the Left who will have to go along with commercial dealing in those rights through international emissions trading’.

Trading in emissions

Although the USA did not sign the Kyoto Protocol because not all countries were involved, this first treaty on emissions cuts adopted tradeable quotas as a main mechanism. Under the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), carbon dioxide is now a commodity bought and sold on the open market. However, that such marketisation is more about making money than reducing carbon emissions seems clear from the recent scandals surrounding the ETS. Political and business leaders have simply set domestic targets either artificially low, thus failing to make sufficient cuts, or artificially high, enabling them to make big profits selling their surplus quotas to others – who of course continue to pollute. As a result, even the meagre Kyoto targets are unlikely to be met. Signatories are also at present unable to agree on any future stricter quotas.

It is possible that had he been writing earlier, Meyer’s original ideas of fairness and equality might have fitted in with Social Democratic, welfare state solutions. For instance, a clean environment and a stable climate could be presented as a common social good – like health and education. Governments would then have had a responsibility to provide this through general taxation, subsidising renewables and penalising waste and inefficiency.

But over the last decades, neo-liberalism has been busy dismantling the welfare state under the mantra of public provision bad, private provision good. The theory is that as long as capitalism can see tackling climate change as a business opportunity it will provide a solution. It is true that individual capitalists will invest in waste-reduction and energy efficiency to cut their own costs. But at the same time they are in business to sell as much of their product as possible to compete with their rivals, increasing production and demand.

However, the neo-liberal agenda has not gone unchallenged from below. The superexploited workers and the poor in both North and South are the victims of both its social and economic and also its ecologically disastrous policies. Campaigns around water, energy, infrastructure and transport have challenged big polluting companies and raised the alternatives of social ownership and rational public planning.

In contrast, Contraction and Convergence, although backed in Britain by most environmental groups, including the Green Party, Liberal Democrats and a number of Labour MPs, remains a top-down, market-based solution. As such it is unlikely to be able to offer a radical enough answer to the enormous and increasing threat of climate change.

Sheila Malone is an activist in the stop climate change movement.

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