OECD Yearbook 2015 by OECD

OECD Yearbook 2015

PLANET

United States see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10% annually, but that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.

Idea: A Global Climate Trust?

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our sciencebased emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows-Larkin describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations.”

Visit www.thischangeseverything.org *Extract from Naomi Klein’s fourth book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, published in September 2014 by Penguin Press in the UK, Simon & Schuster in the US, and Knopf Canada

Now, I realise that this can all sound apocalyptic–as if reducing emissions requires economic crises that result in mass suffering. But that seems so only because we have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, while failing to place value on those things that most of us cherish above all–a decent standard of living, a measure of future security, and our relationships with one another. So what Anderson and Bows-Larkin are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.

The reason we now have a global crisis is that the current system of inter-governmental negotiations under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) cannot be relied on to achieve these reductions in the overall total of global emissions. The science on climate change is worrying enough. The knowledge that there is currently no effective system for addressing it is worse. The reason is that the current system lacks a vital component: a regulator of total aggregate global emissions. To prevent climate change becoming irreversible, it is essential that an effective regulator of the aggregate global total of emissions from the use of fossil fuels is put in place, not to replace the system of inter-national negotiations, but as a back-up in case it fails. In case, to be specific, the outcome of the negotiations is not enough to satisfy climate science. We are faced with an emergency. We need to design and implement a system that enables us to address it. There is no time to be lost. The regulator must be science-based and market-friendly. The easiest way to control emissions is to control production. The easiest way to control production is by a global licence scheme administered by a global institution established for the purpose. The necessary global institution to run the scheme, call it the Global Climate Trust, would need to be independent of both governments and the fossil fuel industry. Extract from post is by John Jopling of FEASTA, on behalf of CapGlobalCarbon.org, 17 March 2015. For the whole post, see oecdinsights.org/