Interview with Mark Lynas
Mark Lynas serves as advisor on climate change to the President of the Maldives and is a visiting researcher at Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment. He has written several books on climate change and is a frequent contributor the Guardian and Independent. I spoke with him about the recent attacks on climate science and the state of climate negotiations in the U.S. and internationally.
Climate science, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K., is under concerted attack from climate change skeptics, who have seized upon the hacked University of East Anglia emails and mistakes in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report. How significant is this assault on climate science and what do you think climate scientists, specifically, need to do in response?
Well it’s had absolutely no impact on the science itself or the data upon which our understanding of climate change is based. If you were to ask the question ‘What do we think differently about either the temperature records or the proxy records or the ice cores or any of the fundamental sources?’, the answer would be nothing.
Nevertheless opponents to substantive measures to address climate change are running with the notion that the science is inconclusive.
Well this is a tremendous gift to the fossil fuel lobby courtesy by and large of freely delivered activism as far as I can tell mobilized in the blogosphere. There’s thousands of people out there doing PR for ExxonMobil for free.
What role, if any, do you think climatologist should play in responding?
Well defending their work is obviously something climate scientists have to do and only they can do it. But, given that this isn’t really about climate science, I suspect that wouldn’t be enough because ultimately what this comes down to is climate science being a proxy battleground for competing ideologies – the anti-regulation, anti-government, pro-fossil fuels ideology on one hand and, on the other hand, an ideology, which is held by greens, and certainly the mainstream in Europe and most Democrats I suppose, which accepts that there are limitations on human activities in the biosphere. That’s to put it at its most fundamental level. If you are anti-big government, anti-regulation, and pro-corporate then you cannot accept the reality of climate change even though not doing so requires the belief in rather absurd conspiracy theories, which involve, depending on who you’re speaking with, tens-of-thousands of scientists in the UN and governments sitting down to conspire to raise our taxes or get the U.N. black helicopters to take over world government. Most of it is palpably absurd but that doesn’t seem to stop people believing in it because they want to and it serves them for purely ideological purposes.
What is your interpretation of U.S. Senate negotiations on climate change and their impact on international efforts at achieving a comprehensive climate change deal?
Well, really, I think that lack of action in the U.S. is really the coup de grace for international climate negotiations. I mean things were at a pretty disastrous level after Copenhagen. I personally put that down largely to the maligned influence of the Chinese. But I think, looking forward, if the U.S. doesn’t move then there really is no incentive for the Chinese, or the Indians, or any of the other big parties to make any concessions at all because they can quite rightly point to the United States as the richest country and, historically, the largest polluter as having done almost nothing.
It’s a very depressing scenario which is unfolding and you can see that there’s backtracking in various other countries as well. In Australia, climate legislation is stalled and is being put off. The same thing is happening in Japan. Even here in Europe, you’re feeling like you’re moving against the current if you’re working on climate change. We’re sort of entering an environmental recession if you like.
What impact will the absence of a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme have on the already existing carbon market – the European Emissions Trading Scheme, the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism, the patchwork of cap-and-trade and carbon offset markets?
Well, the idea of cap-and-trade was an American idea and it was originally introduced at Kyoto by the American delegation in 1997 because it involved a more market-based approach to carbon regulation as opposed to taxes. Carbon taxation is really the alternative and I can’t really see any great enthusiasm in the U.S. for that either, certainly not from the Republicans, because ‘tax’, of course, is a dirty word.
So, let’s not get hung up about the specific mechanism of the carbon regulation regime. What they’re really against is any regulation of carbon at all i.e. to preserve the situation where the atmosphere remains a free dumping ground for anyone who wants to emit carbon into it. Cap-and-trade is about as market-based as you can get and you would think that that would be quite business friendly – and in Europe it’s been far too business friendly with huge amounts of pollution allocations being handed away for free to the biggest polluters. It’s been a billion Euro windfall for those who emit the most. I would have thought the Republicans would love that type of thing.
But I’m not saying I support a tax on carbon. What’s important is that there is a price on carbon on some level – a price signal that internalizes the externality of market failure on carbon emissions, that forces companies to price that into their bottom line on their economic decision-making.
At Copenhagen, and you’ve written about this and it’s become quite a contentious issue, the Chinese opposed developed countries efforts to include in the Copenhagen Accord mid-century targets for reducing emissions. Why do you think the Chinese opposed this and what are the lasting effects on climate negotiations?
I don’t know why they did it and I’ve heard different theories with varying degrees of plausibility. One theory is the mathematical one. That if you take an 80% by 2050 Annex I cut as part of a 50% global cut then if you crunch the figures that still restricts Chinese growth after about 2030. In that case, if that is true, than that suggests that the Chinese want no restrictions on their carbon emissions right up to mid-century, or at least they are not prepared to entertain that at this point.
Another theory is that if you are not prepared to take on targets yourself you really don’t want other people doing so because it makes you look bad. So, therefore, having Annex I countries generally taking an 80% cut, it would make the Chinese look even more retrograde than they actually are.
One other explanation is that they didn’t want to do it at this point and anything that was going to look like a good deal and would be attracting a lot of support would be against their interests.
I don’t know which is the correct explanation to be honest and certainly it just comes down to hearsay. And I think it was a huge, huge mistake on their part because if the Chinese could insist or could go along with a strict carbon cut for rich countries then they would be in a position of being the workshop of the world to actually manufacture all of or a large proportion of the low-carbon technologies that rich countries would be buying.
What other after shocks from Copenhagen do you think are significant?
The death of the Kyoto Protocol? How about that? I don’t see how there can be a second commitment period because there isn’t any enthusiasm for it except on the part of countries that wouldn’t have to take on emission reduction targets and that’s why there enthusiastic – the Chinese, the Indians, and the developing countries that are constantly insisting that Kyoto has primacy. It has this very deep divide between rich and poor. So long as you’re poor you don’t have to take on any carbon target indefinitely. But I can’t see any of the industrialized countries that would be taking on targets having any remaining enthusiasm for it.
Environmentally, Kyoto has been plainly inadequate but it does at least have the beginnings of this carbon market, which has funneled tens-of-millions, perhaps hundreds-of-millions of dollars, of clean-tech investment into China, India, and other countries and that’s now under threat if there’s no Kyoto post-2012, then there’s no carbon market, then the carbon price falls apart and we’re really back to pre-1990 – square one.
So what do you think is the path forward? Is it to mobilize support around the flawed Copenhagen Accord?
Well its difficult to mobilize enthusiasm around something that is so lame. Given that this was largely written – dictated – by these big G77 countries and the U.S., none of whom want a strong climate regime, to then be in a position where you have to defend that as a best possible outcome is just rather demoralizing for everyone.
Maybe its time to just go back to square one and just say this isn’t working. We want an entirely different approach but I don’t think there’s any real emerging sense of what that is likely to be.
Mark Lynas’ website can be found here.
