Some companies, rather than redesign their way of business, want to make what they’re already doing seem cool.
Nokia, the cellphone manufacturer, has a secret weapon in its marketing portfolio. His name is Jan Chipchase, and he’s a living action figure. He might be the new face of global corporatism: handsome, slightly unshaven, with a vaguely European accent. Most of all, he likes to be brutally honest about what he does.
“When we travel, we are often hiring people for the very short term, so we have to carry enormous amounts of cash with us.” FLASH SLIDE showing bundles of hundred dollar bills wrapped in CitiBank stationary. “On the last day, typically, I spread the money in piles all over a bed in a back room. If people were to come in there at that moment, they’d think there was something very shady going on, and in a way, there is.”
It’s a clever corporate tactic. Be honest about your excesses, and the public will forgive, then forget, then applaud. But what exactly does Jan Chipchase do? Why is he keynoting a “Better World” design conference?
“What is this work all about?” he asks, as if reading my thoughts. The question hangs in the dark room as a hundred or so 20-something engineers await the secret formula.
The word “ETHICS” flashes onto the screen. I interrupt his flow, to ask what the word ethics has to do with spying on remote villagers, and reporting what he finds back to Nokia.
Chipchase squints at me through the spotlights, asks me to repeat the question. He mutters something unintelligible, then an apology about not giving a very satisfactory answer. His presentation, like a dorm room YouTube video, ends abruptly.
Outside, I corner two students, one male, one female. “Was I too hard on him?” I ask. “Did his work seem unethical to you?”
“It bothered me a little,” says the woman, “It seemed like he was just doing what ever he wanted in those countries, and I’m not sure what the point was.”
“Still,” interrupts the young man. “I’d kill to have that job.”—M. Power
International agreements take too long, we need a swift mobilisation not seen since the second world war
For those concerned about global warming, all eyes are on December's
UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. The stakes could not be higher. Almost every new report shows that the climate is changing even faster than the most dire projections of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their 2007 report.
Yet from my vantage point, internationally negotiated climate agreements are fast becoming obsolete for two reasons. First, since no government wants to concede too much compared with other governments, the negotiated goals for cutting carbon emissions will almost certainly be minimalist, not remotely approaching the bold cuts that are needed.
And second, since it takes years to negotiate and ratify these agreements, we may simply run out of time. This is not to say that we should not participate in the negotiations and work hard to get the best possible result. But we should not rely on these agreements to save civilization.
Saving civilisation is going to require an enormous effort to cut carbon emissions. The good news is that we can do this with current technologies, which I detail in my book,
Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.
Plan B aims to stabilise climate, stabilise population, eradicate poverty, and restore the economy's natural support systems. It prescribes a worldwide cut in net carbon emissions of 80% by 2020, thus keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations from exceeding 400 parts per million (ppm) in an attempt to hold temperature rise to a minimum. The eventual plan would be to return concentrations to 350 ppm, as agreed by the top US climate scientist at Nasa, James Hansen, and Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC.
In setting this goal we did not ask what would be politically popular, but rather what it would take to have a decent shot at saving the Greenland ice sheet and at least the larger glaciers in the mountains of Asia. By default, this is a question of food security for us all.
Fortunately for us, renewable
energy is expanding at a rate and on a scale that we could not have imagined even a year ago. In the United States, a
powerful grassroots movement opposing new coal-fired power plants has led to a de facto moratorium on their construction. This movement was not directly concerned with international negotiations. At no point did the leaders of this movement say that they wanted to ban new coal-fired power plants only if Europe does, if China does, or if the rest of the world does. They moved ahead unilaterally knowing that if the United States does not quickly cut carbon emissions, the world will be in trouble.
For clean and abundant wind power, the US state of Texas (long the country's leading oil producer) now has 8,000MW of wind generating capacity in operation, 1,000MW under construction, and a huge amount in development that together will give it more than 50,000MWof wind generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants). This will more than satisfy the residential needs of the state's 24 million people.
And though many are quick to point a finger at China for building a new coal-fired power plant every week or so, it is working on
six wind farm mega-complexes with a total generating capacity of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the many average-sized wind farms already in operation and under construction.
Solar is now the fastest growing source of energy. A consortium of European corporations and investment banks has announced a proposal to develop a massive amount of
solar thermal generating capacity in north Africa, much of it for export to Europe. In total, it could economically supply half of Europe's electricity.
We could cite many more examples. The main point is that the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables is moving much faster than most people realise, and it can be accelerated.
The challenge is how to do it quickly. The answer is a wartime mobilisation, not unlike the US effort on the country's entry into the second world war, when it restructured its industrial economy not in a matter of decades or years, but in a matter of months. We don't know exactly how much time remains for such an effort, but we do know that time is running out. Nature is the timekeeper but we cannot see the clock.
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
We're Pumping Out CO2 to the Point of No Return. It's Time to Alter Course. Scientists now say peak temperatures will not fall back. Join me in taking the 10:10 pledge – it's the best shot we've got left
Until a few months ago, government targets for cutting greenhouse gases at least had the virtue of being wrong. They were the wrong targets, by the wrong dates, and they bore no relationship to the stated aim of preventing more than 2C of global warming. But they used a methodology that even their sternest critics (myself included) believed could be improved until it delivered the right results: the cuts just needed to be raised and accelerated.
Three papers released earlier this year changed all that. The first, published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February, showed that the climate change we cause today will be "largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop". About 40% of the carbon dioxide produced by humans this century will remain in the atmosphere until at least the year 3000. Moreover, thanks to the peculiar ways in which the oceans absorb heat from the atmosphere, global average temperatures are likely to "remain approximately constant ... until the end of the millennium despite zero further emissions".
In other words, governments' hopes about the trajectory of temperature change are ill-founded. Most, including the UK's, are working on the assumption that we can overshoot the desired targets for temperature and atmospheric concentrations of CO2, then watch them settle back later. What this paper shows is that, wherever temperatures peak, that is more or less where they will stay. There is no going back.
The other two papers were published by Nature in April. While governments and the United Nations set targets for cuts by a certain date, these papers measured something quite different: the total volume of carbon dioxide we can produce and still stand a good chance of avoiding more than 2C of warming. One paper, from a team led by
Myles Allen, shows that preventing more than 2C means producing a maximum of half a trillion tonnes of carbon (1,830bn tonnes of carbon dioxide) between now and 2500 - and probably much less. The other paper, written by a team led by
Malte Meinshausen, proposes that producing 1,000bn tonnes of CO2 between 2000 and 2050 would give a 25% chance of exceeding 2C of warming.
If you want an idea of what this means, take a look at the global carbon clock at www.know-the-number.com. The level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising at the rate of 2bn tonnes a month (CO2 equivalent). The Allen paper suggests that the world can produce only the equivalent of between 63 and 75 years of current emissions between now and 2500 if we want to avoid more than 2C of warming.
Writing elsewhere, the two teams gave us an idea of what this means. At current rates of use, we will burn the ration that Allen set aside for the next 500 years in four decades. Meinshausen's carbon budget between now and 2050 will have been exhausted before 2030.
The World Energy Council (WEC) publishes figures for global reserves of fossil fuels - the minerals that have been identified and quantified, and which it is cost-effective to exploit. The WEC says 848bn tonnes of coal, 177,000bn cubic metres of natural gas and 162bn tonnes of crude oil are good to go. We know roughly how much carbon a tonne of coal, a cubic metre of gas and a barrel of oil contain. The calculations and references are on my website: the result suggests that official reserves of coal, gas and oil amount to 818bn tonnes of carbon.
The molecular weight of carbon dioxide is 3.667 times that of carbon. This means that current reserves of fossil fuel, even when we ignore unconventional sources such as tar sands and oil shale, would produce 3,000bn tonnes of carbon dioxide if they were burnt. So, in order not to exceed 2C of global warming, we can burn, according to Allen's paper, a maximum of 60% of current fossil fuel reserves by 2500. Meinshausen says we've already used one-third of his 2050 budget since 2000, which suggests that we can afford to burn only 22% of current reserves between now and 2050. If you counted unconventional sources (the carbon content is much harder to calculate), the proportion would be even smaller.
There are some obvious conclusions from these three papers. The trajectory of cuts is more important than the final destination. An 80% cut by 2050, for instance, could produce very different outcomes. If most of the cut were made towards the beginning of the period, the total emissions entering the atmosphere would be much smaller than if it were made at the end of the period. The peak atmospheric concentration must be as low as possible and come as soon as possible, which means making most of the reductions right now. Ensuring that we don't exceed the cumulative emissions discussed in the Nature papers means setting an absolute limit on the amount of fossil fuel we can burn, which, as my rough sums show, is likely to be much smaller than the reserves already identified. It means a global moratorium on prospecting and developing new fields.
None of this is on the table. The targets and methodology being used by governments and the United Nations - which will form the basis of their negotiations at Copenhagen - are irrelevant. Unless there is a radical change of plan between now and December, world leaders will not only be discussing the alignment of deckchairs on the Titanic, but disputing whose deckchairs they really are and who is responsible for moving them. Fascinating as this argument may be, it does nothing to alter the course of the liner.
But someone, at least, has a radical new plan. This afternoon the team that made the film The Age of Stupid is launching the 10:10 campaign, which aims for a 10% cut in the UK's greenhouse gas emissions during 2010. This seems to be roughly the trajectory needed to deliver a good chance of averting 2C of warming. By encouraging people and businesses and institutions to sign up, the campaign hopes to shame the UK government into adopting this as its national target. This would give the government the moral leverage to demand immediate sharp cuts from other nations, based on current science rather than political convenience.
I don't agree with everything the campaign proposes. It allows businesses to claim reductions in carbon intensity as if they were real cuts: in other words, they can measure their reductions relative to turnover rather than in absolute terms. There's an uncomfortable precedent for this: cutting carbon intensity was George Bush's proposal for tackling climate change. As economic growth is the major cause of rising emissions, this looks like a cop-out. The cuts will not be independently audited, which might undermine their credibility with the government.
But these are quibbles. 10:10 is the best shot we have left. It may not be enough, it may not work, but at least it's relevant. I take the pledge. Will you?
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited