In his book, ‘Contraction and Convergence’, Meyer tells the story of GCI’s battle to construct an international global solution to the global problem. First GCI set about demonstrating the correlation between C02 emissions from fossil fuel burning and per capita income over time. In the process they decisively demolished the argument of the business-asusual economists who have always claimed that the more “developed” nations are more “efficient” than the lower income countries because they create more income per tonne of fossil fuel burned. On the contrary, Meyer, Cooper and Bradney analysed the historical records and demonstrated that “high-income/high-emissions economies produce and consume less efficiently in terms of dollars-worth of goods and services delivered per tonne of carbon burned than do low income countries with a low emissions impact”. Indeed they showed that this pattern is systemic rather than merely accidental. So the polarised consumption patterns we have sustained (and concealed) globally since at least the end of the last war are the results of the way that a structurally dysfunctional global economic system has operated. Certainly the under-consumption of [poorer nations] has been consistently concealed by the over-consumption of [richer nations], who, although they were out-numbered two to one by the [poor ones1, had fifteen times the hard currency purchasing power. Meyer and his colleagues even managed to demonstrate, to the embarrassment of opponents of the anthropogenic thesis, that the calculations that had been used to claim that ameliorating action was too expensive were based on undervaluation of the lives of people in the poor countries “because their ability to buy the right to live was only a fifteenth of those in countries where productivity had been boosted by the use of fossil fuels”. Once the cloak of phony science and distorted economics was ripped away, the underlying obstacle to controlling global pollution was revealed. Without its cloak of invisibility the business-as-usual paradigm was shown in all its age-old nakedness as the fundamental struggle between exploiters and exploited. On the one hand the underdogs (and the socialist, communist, and environmental internationalists, and the NGOs who supported them) made clear their moral case: why should they be curbed in their fuel consumption and prevented from the benefits of industrial development and economic growth that had fattened the imperial powers? On the other hand the expropriators themselves, especially the Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic, dug their heels in, and refused to consider cutting even their projected rate of increase in C02 emissions if the “developing world” (specifically China, India and Brazil) was going to be allowed to develop all the dirty old technology that they had themselves pioneered and deployed without restraint. The GCI considered that this impasse called for pragmatism and compromise. Meyer came up with his trademark paradigm of ‘Contraction and Convergence’ (C&C). The idea was to fix a date for convergence, say 2030, from which time forwards every person on the planet would have an equal lifetime ration of “carbon”; thus the allocation for a nation would be this per capita allowance multiplied by the nation’s population. Until that fixed date those countries (called “Annex I” countries) whose consumption of fossil fuels, and consequent C02 emissions, exceeded the notional per capita allowance would be required to contract their consumption/emissions down to the target rate. The corollary was that those nations (“non-Annex I”) whose current consumption is below the target allowance would be allowed to increase their consumption as they developed their industry, but only up to the target date, and never above the fixed per capita rate that had been decided. Never Point at a Rainbow Julienne Ford
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