there was no intention to ‘rub it in’ - i just wanted to ensure i was interpreting the comments correctly.

There are no subjective values in the piece, only objective ones. Particularly, impacts are valued from the perspective of the affected. Most of the values are positive, but there is also a sketch of what would happen if normative values are used instead.

It’s useful to have your opinions set out on the Irish Environment website. As there’s no facility there for comments or queries, I hope you won’t mind my commenting here.

At the start of the piece you use the term “we” in a manner which makes the reader think you are referring to our species. Suddenly one realises that the “we” you have in mind is the rich, or the Irish, or something like that. Whoever it is there are 2 types of people, us and them, them being the poor. (You say: “Climate change primarily affects poor people in faraway places. Poor people often live in hot places. They are more exposed to the weather. They cannot afford to protect themselves against the vagaries of the weather. This means that climate policy is not for our benefit, nor for the benefit of our children and grandchildren.” )

At the start you suggest that “The benefits of climate policy are the impacts that would be avoided.”

But your valuation of these benefits is not their objective value to the people who would otherwise suffer the climate impact, but their subjective value to people who aren’t faced with the impacts! I know this because you say:”There are four important assumptions in the estimate of the social cost of carbon. How serious is climate change? How much do we care about remote probabilities? How much do we care about people in distant lands? How much do we care about the far future?”

This is in direct conflict with your earlier statement that: “We have a moral obligation, however, to avoid harming others or to compensate them if we do.”

Such a moral obligation is of course not met by simply asking ourselves how much would we like to pay to avoid or compensate!

Thanks for that - a well written and reasoned piece.

I disagree as you know. 4 degrees warming, considered likely before the end of the century and possible within our lifetimes, could result in catastrophic regional warming and the impacts are pretty much impossible to calculate, at least without making numerous value judgments and assumptions.

As you say though, we have been through this before.

http://blogs.ssrc.org/darfur/2007/08/02/cause-and-effect/

Thomas Homer-Dixon:

“Interactivity has a number of critical implications, the most important of which is that arguments about the relative importance of one cause over another are usually a waste of time.”

“Research on causation in complex systems over the last two decades suggests that such mental manipulations almost always produce erroneous and even meaningless results. The causal variables and links within complex systems are so numerous, so many of these variables and links are unknown, and so many causal relations are reciprocal and/or nonlinear that we can’t possibly know a priori the consequences of subtracting or altering only one factor.”

“In this case, we have absolutely no way of knowing the consequences of holding the climate constant in Darfur (whatever “constant” means).

“In the case of Darfur, it’s pointless to ask about, or to argue over, the relative importance of climate change as a cause of the violence. But based on the evidence available, we can say with considerable confidence that any adequate description or explanation of the crisis must include climate change as a causal factor”

I would be grateful if you could, when convenient, quote the academic sources which state that there is no evidence that Darfur has anything to do with climate change. I do not have easy access to a university library at this time.

I expect we will have to agree to disagree. I see the pooling of any amount of sovereignty under a treaty as distinct from “supranational governance” and I can’t see how the international energy, industrial, transport and agricultural policy aspects of climate change policy may be tackled effectively without some pooling of sovereignty.

The alternative, as I see it, is a combination of the “Great Games” and ill-conceived alliances among the major international powers and power blocs similar to those that charcterised the period prior to the first world war. And that I fear.

Decarbonising the economy requires a revolution in energy, industry, transport, and agriculture.

International climate policy therefore implies international energy, industrial, transport, and agricultural policy.

In the EU, for instance, environmental policy is set by qualified majority, while industrial policy is unanimous. However, the EU cannot meet its emissions targets without affecting its industry. The EU emission targets are therefore a de facto expansion of majority voting.

I would think that climate change is a difficult problem enough without being drawn into a debate about supranational governance.

To say that it is never decisive is pedantic. One could argue that no one factor is ever decisive in conflict. It is clear that it is a major factor.

It is also not valid to separate out climate change from population and energy issues and to say that climate change alone is unimportant because it is not the sole cause of resource shortage. It is akin to the defence of the armed robber that it was he only loaded and supplied the gun but his aggressive accomplice shot the bank teller and therefore he is innocent of all wrongdoing.

I would have thought that the London Review of books attracted high calibre contributors worth taking seriously but obviously not. I am aware that you think that somem in the UN are a crowd of bluffers too but I am posting these links nevertheless so others can make up their own mind. I preface these links witht he comment that the quotes are selective and climate change is a contributory factor rather than the sole factor. That climate change is not the sole factor is a truism that is beside the point that is a major factor imho.

United Nations Environment Programme: Environmental Degradation Triggering Tensions and Conflict in Sudan
“The scale of climate change as recorded in Northern Darfur is almost unprecedented, and its impacts are closely linked to conflict in the region, as desertification has added significantly to the stress on traditional agricultural and pastoral livelihoods.”
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=512&ArticleID=5621&l=en

Ban Ki Moon: “Nor is the crisis confined to Darfur. It has spilled over borders, destabilizing the region. Darfur is also an environmental crisis — a conflict that grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation and a scarcity of resources, foremost among them water.”
http://www.un.org/sg/articleFull.asp?TID=68&Type=Op-Ed

Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General:
“The roots of the present conflict in Darfur are complex. In addition to the tribal feuds resulting from desertification, the availability of modern weapons, and the other factors noted above, deep layers relating to identity, governance, and the emergence of armed rebel movements which enjoy popular support amongst certain tribes, are playing a major role in shaping the current crisis.”

“The Committee attributed the current conflict to seven factors. The first factor is the competition between various tribes, particularly between the sedentary tribes and nomadic tribes over natural resources as a result of desertification.”

http://www.un.org/News/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf

Except the climate is not co-operating because weather control is insufficiently advanced to deliver what special forces can: bodies and “events” that drive the sheeple into the hands of those who see our salvation in this New World Order.

At least everybody gets to feel important and involved in solving a non-problem. The real problem, theft of resources, primarily, dooms many to an early death. But that can all be answered with by relying on a greater evil to be addressed. One that is a fiction. There is no terror, drugs or climate problem! There are only manipulative pukes who gain a fat living of the labour of others.

Please use your brain before helping these guys make a fortune out of fear that we help them to propagate!

Many thanks for initiating this thread and encouraging a lifting of the eyes from the frequently frenzied, Ireland-focused, navel-gazing to consider, as you put it, “things that matter now to the majority of the world population, such as clean water, enough to eat, and freedom from infectious disease.”

I understand your point about the climate change issue being used to lever major changes to international law and governance. Yes, multiple objectives, many hidden, are being pursued by a wide range of players, but “world government”? I think this is a Star Trekkie fantasy. But it is one which advocates of “small government” in the US, and elsewhere, are only too ready to raise as a bogeyman.

For me, the issue remains the pooling of sovereignty by nations to tackle problems that, on their own, they are unable to resolve. And this pooling has to governed by the democratic consent of the people in the countries involved. And yes, the EU has some way to go in this respect. It is unlikely a genuine European polis will emerge to provide legitimacy to the European Parliament. It may be that national parliaments will need to exercise more control over their governments in the European Council and the other ministerial councils as the Danish Folketing does. Or that national parliaments will have to be more involved, collectively, in the scrutiny of EU legislation. But the democratic mechanisms exist to effect these changes.

One would be surprised how, for many small countries internationally, Ireland’s story resonates. The slow, and hard-won, emergence from the overbearing shadow of a former globally-dominant neighbour, the pooling of sovereignty within the EU, the maintenance of a distinct national identity, the openness to international capital and labour and the implementation of beneficial, EU-driven policies that local politicians feared to table all strike a chord.

Yes, Ireland has serious problems with the institutions and process of democratic governance that need to be addressed urgently, but they pale into insignificance when compared to the problems confronting most of the earth’s population. By resolving these problems, involving itself more in the institutional reform of the EU and, crucially, spreading the message further afield, Ireland can do more than it thinks to encourage the spread of democratic governance and the pooling of sovereignty that provide the only effective basis to tackle these global problems.

Climate change is not an urgent challenge to be addressed? I am genuinely interested in what exactly you mean by this. Do you think that:

A) mainstream science has it wrong; business as usual emissions would not likely result in, say, 4+ degrees warming by 2100 (to take one projection by UK Met)

or

B) that relatively rapid warming could be adapted to at relatively low economic cost?

If it is A, what would convince you on this? Would a global mean temperature record in 2010 be statistically significant after the warmest decade on record?

If it is the latter, then we are into the territory of value judgement, eg: agriculture (human life) in Australia becomes impossible, but higher altitudes and latitudes open up to new types of agriculture.

Just interested. Thanks.

The academic literature will tell you that resource degradation is at most a contributing factor to violent conflict, but never a decisive one. Resource degradation itself has multiple causes, climate change being only one and often a minor one.

I was saying that bigger and bigger government is inevitable, not global governance. We could well end up like the advanced ant super organisms. One of the features of such super-organism colonies is how viciously they attack competing super-organism competitor colonies!

As far as I am aware (I don’t have online access), four articles in the London Review of Books have posited that Darfur is linked to desertification/climate change as displaced persons have moved south in search of more fertile land. I understand that this is not the sole cause of the war as there are political and tribal tensions between the Sudan and Chad. However, I am not aware that anyone has questioned that climate change is an important contributory factor. Do you posit that climate change is not an important contributory factor to the civil violence in those countries?

That sounds very like Bjørn Lomborg of The Skeptical Environmentalist. I’m a little confused though by your use of the term ‘visionary’ in relation to EU policy.

Seamus

Minor point: global ‘governance’ does not necessarily mean global ‘government’ ……… but global risks could be addressed by the main ‘power constellations’ [and not all democratic] if another level of communication emerges - ASEAN/China The Americas, Europe, ….a few more ….. and at this supranational level certain people may be nominated to address such risks …..and reach agreements….. but we are way way far away from this and international law will not reallly become a reality until this is reached (if ever ……… ). The recent appointments of EU President and Foreign Minister [acknowledging them personally] does not represent a positive move in this direction - they are unknowns in terms of global politics and power - and the power of the main EU states’ leadership [Germany;France] ensured this outcome - state sovereignty over EU interests. Militarily the EU also remains too weak in terms of ‘enforcing’ any agreements and one only has to look at the disaster in Bosnia in particular, and the non-debates on both neutrality and nuclear power in IReland, to recognise that there is a long way to go ………….. US Military power is essentially focused on protection of energy sources and resources (take a scan at their overseas bases) which leads to

@Zhou

…. and my agreement that ‘ The question is not “if” but “when” and “how”.’ some form of global Governance becomes a systemic necessity ………

I’m no expert on climate change - but Copenhagen demonstrates that 5/6 or 7 power groups would stand a better chance of some agreement and relevant action emerging.

@Greg
If your figures had been followed on that email to Pat Kenny ……… and we had that dosh in the interim - I calculate that we could be well on the way to building the third nuclear power plant on the island [solving a lot of energy worries and climate change concerns and penalties] and exporting power to the rest of Europe generating useful revenue and employement and general welfare.

@Richard (again)
You have expertise in this area - how much nuclear power would we need in the medium term and how much would it cost etc ? ………. I really would like to know ……………

Climate change may not be urgent for us but it is already too late for some people such as those of Darfur and Eastern Chad.

The americans are right to be afraid of big government because it impinges on personal freedom, devalues the voter’s influence and impinges upon man’s spirit. That doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary and inevitable in a world with scarce energy resources and an ever expanding population. The question is not “if” but “when” and “how”.

For some differing views on the issue, please check out:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/
http://joannenova.com.au/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/

I fully accept the limitations of the nation state, and the intellectual argument that supranational problems require supranational governance.

That said, supranational governance does not come about easily. While I’m not in the least convinced that climate change is a terribly urgent problem, we do not to get going before we can hope to get international law right.

Furthermore, John Bruton’s argument is counterproductive. It is easily argued that this is a solution (world government) looking for a problem (climate change). If you listen to the right-wing opposition in the USA, you would find that a crucial point (to them) is that big government, let alone world government is a greater concern than climate change. Bruton reinforced that view.

Finally, a world government that is remotely democratic would not look like Europe’s at all. We’re only 0.5 out of 6.8 billion people.

I rather agreed with John Bruton’s piece on the limits of the nation state. Only thing I found somewhat ‘peculiar’ was that it was John Bruton - as EU Ambassador to the U.S. he did well - and he is simply ’stating the obvious’ in terms of where US global policy places its interests.
We are in a global risk society as Ulrich Beck puts it - and global risk demands some form of global co-operation - and at the mo, as Jurgen Habermas reminds us, global governance is not up to the challenge; he also reminds us that only the state can act - or in the Irish case - not act (as in financial regulation) or act in error (Naa-Maa; protect elites; take your choice ……….)
This is not about ‘giving up sovereignty’ but finding some means of agreement on addressing global problems ……… next phase of political economy … EU ain’t perfect but better than most ……….

The Irish target is a domestic target. It is aspirational rather than binding. The sanction is egg on a politician’s face.

The EU will probably meet its targets under the Kyoto Protocol, but this is not by virtue of its climate policy. The main reason is lacklustre economic growth.