Copenhagen Arrests

The demonstration yesterday here in Copenhagen was large and peaceful, with some minor disturbances. The police were out en force and had identified a large bloc of protesters for pre-emptive arrest – news sources later put the number at about 160 for the event I witnessed.

Leaving the city center, the route crossed a major bridge before channeling into a narrower section of street lined by small shops. Police cordoned off the small side streets here. When the group passed through, police charged, pinning the 20-somethings against the storefronts, smashing the windows and wreaking a fair amount of havoc. There was no riot or violence here on the part of the protesters; it was simply a pre-emptive arrest of a group that had clearly been identified earlier.

The arrests seemed strikingly precise. The crowd was very dense here and police seemed to excise their targets amidst groups marching adjacent.

Reports from people at other locations in the march suggested that a group had earlier made a point of charging forward, yelling and threatening to smash things. But it seemed that it was a different group than those I saw arrested.

Perhaps the most iconic moment was when bands of rabble rousers danced around and jeered at the phalanx of police guarding the shiny storefronts of McDonalds and KFC along the route. But the breadth of involvement from so many different groups, with their wealth of concerns bearing directly on the negotiations, was both inspiring and indicative of the broad political stakes often sidelined by the obsessive focus on CO2 concentrations.

I can’t help but feel that some protesters’ fascination with provoking state repression is an unimaginative response. There is no necessary choice between peaceful acquiescence and destroying things; or rather the sense that one must choose is a failure of imagination. Eve Sedgwick would call it a strong affect theory – a belief in an either-or choice that is self-reinforcing because it leads to negative experiences, which in turn pre-empt more subtle, exploratory or substantive choices.

Finally, estimates for the size of the demonstration were at about 100,000 people. This number seems conservative but plausible to me based on back-of-the-envelope calculations of how fast the march was moving and the width of the road where I was standing.

The Soros SDR Proposal

Writing from the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, against a backlog of blogging and research write-up:

A couple people (thanks to Adam Henne) have asked my thoughts on George Soros’s proposal to fund climate change adaptation based on re-working the rules for Special Drawing Rights reserves. The idea seems to be simple enough and, to be honest, not that ground-breaking. Significant funds are kept in reserve, backed by gold to be used for liquidity purposes. Soros wants that money to be invested in adaptation, on the basis of a fund that would generate $10 billion a year. How that surplus would be generated seems to be the main outstanding question. But more generally, we can see in broad scope some of the reasons why anthropologists might pay attention to these things.

There’s been some confusion about the currency at stake here, which bears some explaining in order to understand the significance of climate finance. Especially American observers were a bit freaked out when the New York Times described SDRs as “a “virtual currency” with a value set by a basket of real currencies.” SDRs are an multilateral finance currency which forms the basis of development aid and other multilateral commitments; they refer (if I understand correctly) to potential claims on held cash reserves. For instance, the very low interest loans made available to least developing countries by the multilateral banks are drawn in SDRs – when I paid attention to such things circa 2005 these loans were often reported in ‘dollar equivalents’ with a dollar being worth about 2/3 an SDR, if I remember correctly.

But the point to be made is that in fact lots of currencies like this exist. The comment on the NY Times article by SteveG is correct, but frankly belated: “CDOs and flash trading aside, the era of “nexus economics” is upon us, i.e., a time of rapid changes in economic structures, transactions, and individual behaviors wrought by a highly connected world.” One wonders if all currencies aren’t virtual, with paper cash being simply secondary to electronic, calculated values. Carbon credits themselves are another kind of currency, and some people wonder whether a global carbon market will in fact establish a global currency based on atmospheric exchange.

Think about it: put carbon into the atmosphere in one place on Earth and accrue an obligation (e.g. buy a carbon credit on the market) – or take carbon out of the atmosphere somewhere else on Earth and establish a credit (i.e. an actual financial instrument that can be exchanged for other currencies). These are the sorts of practices I have tried to capture with the admittedly academic phrase ‘the relational ontology of atmosphere’. It’s because ‘carbon’ and ‘the atmosphere’ are simultaneously abstract, equivalent and global that it’s possible to imagine human relations on this order, always translated in practice in terms of what one can ‘do’ with a particular currency. Carbon emissions, like labor in Marxist theory, are a fact of economic activity, so an integrated carbon market could hypothetically trace alongside markets based on national currencies (again, this is nothing new; it’s the scale and scope of carbon markets that make the idea provocative).

It would be great for Caroline McLoughlin to weigh in on this, if she’s reading. By the way, as I type near the Forum in Copenhagen I can here the police cannons, helicopters and general mobilization around protests apparently along the river and toward the city center.

On the one hand, carbon currency is already in operation, and traders routinely talk about carbon credits as currencies. On the other hand, the global scope of such a system is basically hypothetical, with global carbon markets a long way off. A report yesterday here in Copenhagen, where I’ve been talking to people about these things, argued that establishing and unifying regional carbon markets might result in a global market perhaps by 2024. (PointCarbon estimates the volume of carbon trading in 2020 will be about 3$ trillion; the head of Derivatives and Structured Finance at the World Bank confirmed yesterday to me that they use this estimate in their work. Global trading is >20 $ trillion, so perhaps 10-15% in 2020?) The more fundamental issue is that if climate change is to be dealt with seriously then the volume of new credits will have to approach zero in the last half of the century, at the same time that traders are increasingly invested in a large market. Michael Wara at Stanford has already noted that offsets have created a significant political lobby for products that do little to help reduce emissions. The idea of a unified global carbon currency would be in conflict with the basic need to decarbonize the economy.

Concerning Soros’s proposal, four things seem apparent. First, Soros is asking the SDR currency hosts to reduce their liquidity reserve. This is money administered by the IMF (and development banks) in times of need when countries don’t have enough cash to meet their short-term obligations. When Soros says we need innovative financial mechanisms, he’s actually asking for a higher-risk financial position that would reduce the IMF’s ability to respond to these needs (unless he suggests some provision to take money out of the fund in a crisis, but I haven’t heard anything about this). I suppose it would take liquidity out of national reserves for the currencies that make up SDRs, namely the Dollar, Euro, Yen and Pound.

Second, while it’s not exactly clear, to generate the proposed $10 billion a year the money would be invested for a decent rate of return. How the $10 billion annual return is used for adaptation doesn’t matter very much; how the $100 billion is invested to achieve a 10% the return is what counts at this stage. I suppose that’s where Soros comes in – put baldly (if speculatively), George wants access to that money, and climate change seems like moral reason enough to ask for it. One suspects he would be using the money for something and it would be good to know what (especially if it’s being leveraged). But does this mean George Soros is facing investment flow problems? It seems there’s lots of unanswered questions here.

Third, the publicly-announced ‘idea’ for this fund is not a new idea the stodgy banker-types don’t want to hear because they can’ t think outside the box. He announced it this way to stimulate some level of public interest in releasing the money.

Finally, in terms of the proposal, all the real work remains in figuring out how to do adaptation. The idea simply puts up returns on the investment to be used for climate adaptation, which so far is both relatively vague on how it would be spent and subject to the normal caveats about development-type interventions. The rule of thumb among consultants who evaluate development projects is that a project with 10% lasting effect is about the most one can hope for (this was for livelihood rural development work in Southeast Asia). Of course, it spells disaster if adaptation interventions are only 10% successful. Much more work needs to be done on the operational problems for spending adaptation money smartly, and the whole wealth of criticism – technical and otherwise – of development needs to be invoked here.

Climate Justice

Here’s Michael Dorsey on Climate Justice – a 19 minute podcast.

An Overview of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Control Policies in Various Countries

The Congressional Research Service has published the following report:

An Overview of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Control Policies in Various Countries (Nov 30, 2009)

It doesn’t appear to be getting much circulation  so I wanted to put it up here. It came to me by way of  The Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, which has the report posted on their website.

It compares enforceable GHG regulations in the EU and following countries:

France
Germany
United Kingdom
Australia
Brazil
Canada
China
India
Japan
Korea
Mexico
Russian Federation
United States

Should be interesting, or at least helpful at some point.

The Story of Carbon Trading – Annie Leonard

Everyone should check out Annie Leonard’s awesome short animated flick on Cap and Trade. You’ll remember Annie from her brilliant Story of Stuff, for which Glenn Beck called her a communist.

I’d like to take a moment to point out how easy it is to be a communist these days. No,I don’t mean Annie didn’t have to work on her own film – I hear she runs a tight ship, and I was privy to some of the logistical details (here’s a shout out to collaborative nonprofit digital media production). I mean, it used to be that if you wanted to be a communist you had to endure McCarthy-ite repression, hovel around in rural ag communes in California, or or take to the underground and start robbing banks. But now anybody can be a communist, thanks to the folks at Fox who have managed to popularize it for the masses.

Back to Annie’s new film, I especially like her straight-talking tone and her clear explanations. But there’s a poetic quality to it as well. When I first clicked through to the link it took a minute for the video to load, and meanwhile I flipped to another browser widow. When the video started and Annie’s voice came through I swear I heard for a minute Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be… You and Me. Ah, the memories of carefree childhood running through fields and other natural settings. Who can forget Atalanta performed by Alan Alda and Marlo? It left me humming… Glad to have a friend like you – fair and fun – and skipping free!

Cap And Trade Should Go The Way Of The DoDo Before We Do

Read Daphne Wysham’s blog on the above title at the Huffington Post. My comments below are in response to that debate.

Levi, I don’t understand why you neglect a basic regulatory proposal that’s already on the table. The proposed EPA rules are quite robust and would make for a very significant first step in reducing US emissions.

Duke University’s Nicholas Institute has analyzed the rules and determined that the EPA’s threshold is high enough that only 1.3% of manufacturing facilities would be affected, but that alone would account for 82% of industrial­/manufactu­ring emissions. The regulations would not affect many farm operations or commercial buildings. Clearly this would face legal challenges, but there’s simply no reason to write off a strong regulatory approach based on congressional weaknesses.

I also don’t understand why you apologize for those who want inaction. It’s one thing for a politician to accept compromise in order to get the job done as best as possible. But you’re not a politician. Citizens have to be very clear about what they think is actually the correct answer to the problem. I just don’t understand the liberal tendency toward acquiescence in the middle of a pitched battle. It’s like you’ve been punched so many times you just flinch every time a bully walks by. Politics is about making deals. Democracy is about arguing what’s right and what’s wrong. So wipe that smug grin off your face and stop being such an apologist for invested interests.
More on Climate Change
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The Basic Contradiction of Climate Science

We’re all grateful to Andrew Revkin for keeping us up to date on the controversy surrounding hacked email messagesfrom the UK. Calls for a more inclusive science, or at any rate an approach to science that doesn’t assume the authority of its expertise, do in fact seem a long time in coming. The circles I sometimes run in – I’m thinking of people who work in development in Southeast Asia, mostly expats with a technical bent and a generally progressive but practical outlook – are deeply skeptical of the demand from the heights of the ivory tower to jump (how high?) on the climate bandwagon, especially when their imperious demands are coupled with the naive, bureaucratic idealism of United Nations proceduralism. When all of a sudden climate change adaptation and mitigation monies become the major driver of aid investment, red flags will fly.

But the disappointing aspect of the hacked email messages goes to a problem advocates for climate justice have been pointing out for a long time. All of a sudden climate science is obliged to pay much more attention to a rear-guard move to protect the legitimacy of their work, but what we’re left with is a silly, irresponsible debate between elite Northern science and the elite Northern conservative populists who don’t want the UN eroding their right to play frontiersmen on the grand stage of American exceptionalism. Meanwhile, ecosystems around the world are changing dramatically – but has anyone bothered to make localized, intimate environmental knowledges the object of public debate? The question here is trust and the mythos of provability. For some odd reason scientists and the people who fund them still think proof is only a relation between complexity of the data and the theories that may or may not account for them. Robust knowledge, on the other hand, would have a long time ago began to correlate science with localized ecological changes and the vast social and social justice implications of those changes.

Kim Fortun has brilliantly called attention to skepticism of computer modeling in the field of toxicology by pointing out that models imply one must either be a savant or be willing to trust the savants. Climate change originated as a problem based on Fourier’s thermodynamics calculations in the 19th century. Decades of advances in elite Northern science (linked to environmentalism as a cultural movement) fed into a drive for advanced computer simulation of climate calculations, with climate science and advances in computational power driving each other to ever-ethereal heights. In fact the either-or dead-end of trusting the science or denying the problem is an artifact of theparticularistic (dare I say it?) American commitment to science/anti-science dualism.

This conundrum means ‘we’ will trust ‘our’ scientists if we must, but there’s no way we’re going to trust marginalized brown people who might stand to gain from what they say. One may trust the numbers, or one might trust one’s neighbors – hopefully these things would confirm each other. I have no patience at all for claims for more and better rationalism as a solution at this point: it assumes that things were going more or less fine as it was when in fact things were deeply fucked. George Monbiot’s response to the email thing left me breathless. He’s never felt so alone? Yes, that’s what rationalism will do to you. Try talking to other people for once – and ignore the skeptics. But another way of saying this is that precisely what’s excluded in the science/anti-science conundrum is the fact that the status quo is deeply political. The obvious way out is to simply disenfranchise the skeptics who after all simply critique the science as a wedge to protect their way of life.

Good Will and Institutionalist Environmentalism

A lot of people of a certain stripe working in environmental organizations – let’s call them, say, goodwill institutionalists – organize their approach to environmental activism around a believe that it matters how decision makers care about the environment. They believe in socialization or ‘training’ in the sense of training government officials or perhaps decision makers in business to think environmentally.

It implies a subject of will – “political will” for instance as is often battered about in public discourse as the “cause” for insufficient action – whose goodwill inclines the person to make ethical choices in the form of difficult/costly decisions. Such will is expected to hold the line on short-term gain.

This approach dovetails with what Larry Lohmann sardonically calls ‘the most naive environmentalism’ duped so easily by – and allied so often with – the most cynical market gamers. It’s not exactly liberal environmentalism, although the two no doubt overlap considerably. For instance, this absolutely does not apply to strategies of WRI or NRDC.

The emphasis on will derives from a structured understanding of how decision-making works – short-term gain is naturally powerful but people are social creatures and norms wrought in socialization can be powerful. It also hinges on a particular understanding of how organizations work – training ensues in order to demonstrate work procedures, which are basically bureaucratic (and hence mundane) but in the office milieu operate to ensure values are included in specific ways. Bureaucratic black holes like hallway interactions, country clubs, smoke-filled rooms and the like constitute a dark terror to the bureaucratic imagination.

Whether or not these people’s descriptions of the world hold water is one question. But before we ever get there, we can note that these subjects of will imagine the world in such a way that they are able to perform their own existence – in their goodness holding the line against short terms gain. So they willfully toil against all odds at the center of a mundane bureaucratic apparatus, stricken with terror that somewhere, in some bright casual interaction, the important decisions are being made without them.

RE: Democrats Push Climate Bill Through Panel Without G.O.P. Debate

Yesterday the Dems were obliged to use a procedural rule to push the climate bill through the Environment and Public Works panel. Republicans were happy enough to ridicule the process by abstaining from any involvement, and there’s enough Democratic ambivalence about the Kerry-Boxer climate bill to make this standoff a big deal.

On the international front, especially with the UNFCCC meetings in Barcelona underway, the sense is that Obama can’t deliver Congress and therefore, whatever his views about the importance of climate change, the US is not in any position to put offers on the table in Copenhagen. It was a telling sign and also (in my opinion) a step in the right direction that the African delegates walked out this week. Sparks need to fly at this point.

But frankly I think there is room to push Obama a lot harder on this. I was on a conference call this week with a policy think tank dedicated to issues of concern for African-Americans with a long-standing commitment to environmental justice as well as a new climate policy commission. They released a poll last month demonstrating that 58% of African-Americans feel that global warming  is a major problem – at a time when concern among the general population is waning dramatically. The general sense was that an effort should be put forward for prominent black officials to indicate publicly the disconnect between Obama’s efforts and African-American constituencies.

Maybe it’s worth pointing out that no one can expect the general population to care about climate change in the same way that it might advocate for, say, health care. Global warming was identified as a threat by elite scientists, many holding political and cultural views that divorced them from the concerns of that broad swath of Americans trapped in the middling modern suburban landscapes of the 1980s and 90s. The battleground positions were laid around skepticism of the science, suspicion of environmentalism as a cultural project,  and a struggle over growth and jobs – at a time of falling real wages, highly aggressive corporate strategies, the wholesale erosion of many Americans’ financial  security, and collapse of civic involvement, education and public investment. Americans got screwed, and no one’s really managed to put that on the table very well. No wonder people aren’t too eager about now having to cope with the fact that US elite, with the collusion of a very thin segment of foreign elite, have been systematically impoverishing the rest of the world too.

For that matter, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of American industries and businesses have also been screwed, especially by big finance. A recent letter from the Commodity Markets Oversight Coalition, a trade lobbying group, expresses a profound sense of unease at the prospect of a volatile, unregulated carbon market. Combine that with recent speculation in energy markets and you get the picture. Indeed, many people are increasingly frustrated at the very tight connections between the administration and some of the most pernicious financial brokers operating today. Frank Rich is not the only one to express relief that states are now able to prosecute financial institutions for predatory loan practices. The ‘regulators’ in Obama’s administration are the people who engineered the financial crisis.

The finance issues aside, my sense is that climate change is a perfect opportunity for Obama the politician, the orator. Someone is going to have to make a convincing case to Americans that climate change is and will be the defining issue of international politics for the next 50 years. The task of the rhetorician is not now to ‘convince’ Americans to go along with a political move that merely floats on top of a deeply fractured public basically unaware of the contradictions it faces. Americans aren’t that dumb, and Republicans won’t let the politicians get away with it. Eventually Democrats are going to have to confront that populist anger. But, as with his speech on race during the campaign, President Obama has a phenomenal capacity to say what needs to be said at the right time – especially when the issues revolve around profound historical injustices. It’s time for an emancipation proclamation that diagnoses the ugliness of the American century in such a way that Americans can see with the rest of the world a realistic program for a near-term global future.

Accounting Tout Court!

In case anyone thought the whole accounting thing was a bit off – check out Deutsche Bank’s Carbon Counter. Their little slogan? “Know the Number.”

Bigger news might be the article in Science this week (thanks to Caroline for telling me about it) in which Searchinger et al detail “Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error” in the Kyoto Protocol, namely the failure to account for biomass emissions, for instance from deforestation, biofuels or land use change. Of course other accounting protocols, especially those related to REDD offsets for new carbon markets, do pay attention to these things – albeit across a heterogeneous procedural landscape. This is part and parcel of why carbon investors like Deutsche Bank will have a field day exploiting the intricate topographies of these investment-cum-emissions terrain. (Think derivatives.)

Personally I’m more interested in the rights scenarios implied in this landscape. But there’s no argument that a strong global agreement with any carbon trading provision will prove incredibly important to financial markets at least for the near-term.