Fast Forward to 2013: Call the emergency services!

Ian Christie casts a weather eye over the promises of the technical fix brigade. Can it really ride to the rescue for the Earth’s climate?

Is this the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end? A year after the expiry of Kyoto I in 2012, there’s still deadlock on a successor agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Worse still, climate fatalism is setting in.

The future that seems to be in store is so alarming that many people think it’s now too late for changes in lifestyle, renewables and energy saving schemes to make any difference. The time seems ripe for a big new idea – something to persuade us that we can actually achieve the kind of cuts in emissions that we so badly need. And, apparently seizing the time, along come the ‘climate engineers’, the technical fix brigade, the new breed of entrepreneurs and technologists who see great opportunities in the fact that we’ve let climate change grow from a threat to an emergency.

Which, to be blunt, is what the world did under Kyoto I. Cast your mind back over that initial agreement’s 2008–2012 ‘commitment period’. That was the crunch time for the faltering first steps by signatories from the industrialised world to cut emissions, and for all of us to get wise to low-carbon technology, real energy efficiency, lifestyle changes and mechanisms like emission trading.

“Entrepreneurs and technologists see great opportunities in the fact that we’ve let climate change grow from a threat to an emergency.”

There was some good news. Led by the UK and Germany, a core of EU countries took some determined, if patchy, action to show international leadership. And the latest figures show that half a dozen countries did actually meet their Kyoto obligations by the end of 2012. So take a bow, the British, the Germans, the Danes and other pioneers. But even in this select group no-one has yet dared to introduce annual carbon allowances for households – the very idea was shot down in flames in the EU – and the business lobbyists and populist media have strongly resisted both carbon taxes and tougher emissions trading schemes. Nor did all those industrialised countries who missed even their modest 2008–2012 Kyoto commitments set much of an example to inspire the rest of the world.

Not so splendid isolation

Who could forget ex-prime minister Tony Blair, in that 2007 TV special on his 10 years in office, repeatedly coming back to his greatest regret – his key failure to persuade the then US President George W. Bush to make more than token gestures in tackling global warming? Six years on, there is still no sign of the US even joining the tortuous negotiations on a ‘Son of Kyoto’ treaty. True, many US cities and states have taken a lead and developed impressive climate policies of their own, regardless of the denial and indifference in Washington DC.

But many more have yet to act seriously. The rise and rise of the fundamentalist ‘religious Right’ has focused political energies much more on cultural struggles than on the environment and energy, while yet more land in Alaska is opened up for drilling with each successive surge in world prices for oil and gas. Finally, the big developing countries – crucial to the talks currently stagnating in Geneva – have become ever more energy-hungry and fossil fuel-intensive in the past decade.

China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and the newly unified Republic of Korea are all still growing their economies as fast as they dare. Although renewable fuels, especially biomass, are increasingly important, these new industrial giants are just as badly carbon addicted as the West. So it looks bad for Son of Kyoto. But surely, eventually, the mounting evidence of severe climate disruption must add a proper sense of urgency?

We’ve had three sudden surges in the last decade in the increase of carbon dioxide parts per million in the atmosphere. We’re now up to 397 ppm, and well on course for 450 by 2030: it’s uncharted territory for civilisation and our environment. Hurricanes have devastated the Caribbean every year since 2004, the extreme thinning of Arctic ice is changing the polar ecosystem irreversibly, much of Bangladesh has been submerged – and so it goes on. It can’t go on.

But leading NGOs and climate scientists have been issuing the same warnings and drawing the same conclusions from weather disasters and computer models for a long time now. Familiarity has bred indifference, except when people are jolted by a new disaster or spell of ‘weird weather’. Even the weirdness becomes more ‘normal’ each year!

In the savagely competitive media market, getting attention for ‘the environment’ is harder than ever – except when exciting disasters hit, like last year’s Great Storm which flattened forests all across northern Germany, or the annual battering of Florida by hurricanes (and ensuing patch-up operations, with generous funding from ex-governor President Jeb Bush). Enter the new climate engineers. Last month they made headlines with their first global conference – also held in Geneva, as a pointed contrast with Kyoto II. The Climate Technology Coalition (CTC) had arrived in town, and media interest was huge.

Big Bucks for quick fixes

So what’s the sales pitch for the CTC? Simple: it is now too late for renewables, energy conservation and long-term shifts in values and lifestyles to allow us to stabilise the climate. And since we have a climate emergency on our hands, only urgent technical fixes can help us now. Luckily, these will generate enormous wealth and innovation all around the world and allow us all to live the affluent industrial lifestyle while stabilising the climate, buying time for longer-term solutions, and helping us cope with the effects of the warming that is inevitable.

“The climate engineers have a strong strapline: International Rescue – new technology for a safe climate.” And just what is being proposed? The CTC has a strong brand and strapline: ‘International Rescue – new technology for a safe climate’. It’s a broad church, full of corporations, business alliances and technologists who once thought they’d fallen foul of public opinion forever, or were too far-out to be taken seriously.

The nuclear industry, for instance, began to rebrand itself and rehabilitate its image politically as long ago as 2004, presenting nuclear as a key part of any low-carbon energy strategy. Since then, the GM crops business has seen a similar opportunity for rebranding. And the so-called ‘exotic technologies’, such as orbital sunlight deflectors and ‘virtual ice’ reflectors, have grown in appeal for powerful lobbies who don’t like global warming but don’t want to see global business-as-usual have to make too many concessions to environmentalists. Will the ‘rescue technologies’ prevail? Predictably, perhaps, the reaction from environmental NGOS and the sustainability world has been largely scathing.

Madness or marketing?

The CTC has a rival, the Climate Action Now! (CAN) coalition, set up by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and pro-renewables businesses to lobby for strong action post-2012. CAN argues that CTC is run by many of the very interests that have resisted early action on climate change, and who are now shamelessly pushing for technical fixes on the grounds that action has not been radical enough to avoid a climate emergency. “CTC is a bunch of corporate lobbies and wild-eyed R&D people from the US military-industrial complex,” says Al Moore, the spokesman of the US’s own CAN network.

“We should know by now that every technical fix creates a whole load of unintended consequences. In this case the technical fixes could finally wreck the climate, not stabilise it.” But there is far from a united front against CTC, despite the scorn it has attracted for posing as a modern-day version of International Rescue, as in the old Thunderbirds TV show. While the idea of global climate engineering seems mad to many, there are plenty of committed environmentalists and sustainability advocates who share the diagnosis that climate change is now too serious and rapid for us to be able to rely on first-choice solutions like renewables, which are going to take decades to replace fossil fuels.

They are beginning to wonder aloud if CTC might have some ideas worth taking seriously – as temporary answers that can buy us time while we build a truly sustainable infrastructure and economy. This looks like the beginning of a cultural divide and political split among those who have been campaigning for decades for action on climate change. And while their ranks are at risk of being divided, the CTC is looking confident and united.

“They only look green,” warns Moore. “They just want business as usual, and the threat to the planet is, for them, just a new marketing opportunity.” Maybe so; but the new climate engineers are on the march. Watch out for them – they sense that their time has come, and they think they hold the keys to the future.

Climate Engineering fixes on offer from the Climate Technology Coalition:

26 January 2005

Ian Christie