Human Rights

Quote of the Day: “If a country chooses not to undertake the mitigation necessary to avoid dangerous climate change and if a country chooses not to invest in the adaptation to facilitate coping with the climate change that is going to happen that is a choice in favour of the systematic abuse of human rights.” — Kevin Watkins, UN Human Development Report Lead Author, commenting on considering climate change within the context of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

I started off the morning with a Press Conference at the Laguna Hotel where Minister Baird is staying. He arrived in jovial spirits and spoke French with the Global Environment Fund chief for a few minutes before making his announcement. He said the climate change science was even stronger (presumably stronger than it was a few years ago, when his Prime Minister dismissed it as a socialist hoax designed to suck money out of wealth producing nations). The Minister said he would not be daunted or deterred by those who preach the art of the impossible with respect to developing countries taking on taking on binding emission limits. He also said that the world needs to “take action under the United St..” before catching one of his rare slips mid-way to say “United Nations.”

Next, I popped down to the press tent to the Indonesian Pavilion, otherwise known as the place to get free cappuccino. A PR lady volunteered me to interview Muhammad Lutfi, the Chairman of Indonesia’s powerful Investment Coordinating Board, who was sitting in a room beside the cappuccino machine. I asked him what he thought about developed countries competitiveness concerns if they moved to put a big price on carbon for their industry while developing countries did not and the temptation for rich countries to impose carbon import taxes (or countervailing duties) like President Sarkozy has called for, while many others are thinking of it. His reply: “If I was the French President, I would probably do the same thing. Trade has to be on a level playing field.”

I also learnt that Indonesia has a big geothermal power strategy. “We’re going to push geothermal like no tomorrow,” Lutfi said. Indonesia has about 16,000 MW of geothermal potential, and plans to have at least 4000 MW of it online for the Java-Bali grid by 2015.

Today was business day, so I headed over to the Conrad Hotel to check it out. A lot of nice suits and finger food. Bjorn Stigson, World Business Council of Sustainable Development chief, seemed to be in his usual professor-type demeanor. He told me “we should not discount the risk of serious distortion to the international trading system, if we fail to reach a comprehensive climate agreement.”

In the afternoon, I met with a colleague of Madame Gro Harlan Brundtland to discuss the Global Leaders for Climate Action initiative and ideas for striking a post-2012 climate agreement grand bargain between developed and developing countries.

The highlight of the day was interviewing Kevin Watkins, the lead author the UN Human Development Report which was published a couple of weeks ago, presenting climate change as the human rights issue of our time, as an analog to the Stern Report that defined climate change as the economic issue of our time. Below is part of the Q and A that was conducted with Balinese drummers in the background doing a jig.

Kevin Watkins, UN Human Development Report Q and A:

What are the human rights of climate change?

The potential costs of avoiding dangerous climate change are in the order of 1.6 per cent of GDP. The potential costs of not undertaking that investment are 400 million additional people exposed to the risk of malnutrition, another 300 million people potentially displaced as a result.

Children born in a drought year face increased risk of malnutrition at age five, by about a third. For people in a vulnerable position, their ability to manage a single climate event like drought is extremely limited.

There is tendency in the west to think of climate shocks as short, sharp events that cause a lot of suffering. But it is indeed a long-lived impact. Poor people in particular have to sell off productive assets, which limits their capacity for recovery. It can take ten years to restore your assets after a single drought event.

If we don’t tackle climate change (mitigation and adaptation), what we will see after 2015 is the potential for some rapid unprecedented reversals in human development.

What about those skeptics like Lomborg who say spending money on climate change is a poor use of funds if human development is the goal?

Climate change is doing is making people more vulnerable to malnutrition, more likely to take their kids out of school, running down their health, and making them less resistant to diarrhea and diseases like malaria. This is not an either or option. What do you prefer? Your head or your heart?

India greeted your report’s suggestion of cutting developed countries emission by 80 per cent by 2050 and developing countries emissions by 20 per cent as unfair, as it would mean taking India’s emissions from 1 tonne of carbon per capita to 0.8 tonnes per capita while the US would go down from 20 tonnes to 4 tonnes, which would still leave them with 5 times as much per capita as India. How do you respond to that?

This is a total straw man. We are not suggesting the 80-20 cuts for any country in particular—these are aggregate reductions meant for the developed and developing countries as a group to lead both groups to converge on two tonnes of carbon emissions per capita by 2060 [they are currently at 7 tonnes per capita]. Countries like India (1 tonne per capita) Ethiopia (0.1 tonne per capita) would be able to increase their per capita emissions--by double in India’s case. By the same token countries like the US [or Canada] with higher than average per capita emissions in the industrialized world, will have to make more stringent cuts than 80 per cent than countries like Japan which are much more efficient. The other point we make is that you can’t expect developing countries to make these cuts without financing from the industrialized world.

How important is putting a price on carbon in the battle against climate change?

Carbon pricing in all countries is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for mitigating climate change.

What do you think of the current pricing approach for carbon?

Cap and trade as its currently being regulated isn’t producing the results needed. What carbon markets do is price scarcity. And if you regulate a market to generate surplus the price tends to disappear. That is precisely what happened with the EU emissions trading system. The problem in Europe is that the political leverage of big utilities is such that politicians haven’t been able to bit the bullet and align the caps in the current trading system with their own climate change mitigation goals. And that’s a problem. The key question is how fast we move to full auctioning of carbon permits.

What do you think about developed countries' competitiveness concerns around pricing carbon?

If governments do take more stringent emission mitigation, it clearly has implications for the competitiveness of industry and it varies by industry according to the costs they can pass through to the consumer. I think it would be quite dangerous if you had major developing countries that developed a comparative advantage in carbon pollution, with the underpricing of carbon.

I finished the day off at some room in the Grand Hyatt complex talking to a Canadian and a guy named Jonas who helped the Pope go carbon-neutral.