jeffrey D. Sachs, Climate change Negotiations, global-warming, technological problem AND CO2 emissions, China and US not ready to sacrifice millions of jobs

أوجه القصور التي تعيب مفاوضات المناخ

Jun 23, 2014 Jeffrey D. Sachs

نيويورك ــ إذا كان للعالم أن يتمكن من حل أزمة تغير المناخ، فسوف نكون في احتياج شديد إلى نهج جديد. ففي الوقت الحالي، تنظر القوى الكبرى إلى تغير المناخ باعتباره جولات تفاوض حول من يتعين عليه أن يخفض الانبعاثات التي يطلقها من ثاني أكسيد الكربون (والناتجة في الأساس عن استخدام الفحم والنفط والغاز). ويوافق الجميع على "المساهمة" بنسب ضئيلة في خفض الانبعاثات، في محاولة لدفع بلدان أخرى بالقيام بالمزيد. فالولايات المتحدة على سبيل المثال، سوف "تتنازل" وتتقبل مقداراً ضئيلاً من خفض ثاني أكسيد الكربون إذا فعلت الصين نفس الشيء.

الواقع أننا ظللنا طيلة عقدين من الزمان واقعين في فخ عقلية الحد الأدنى التدريجية هذه، وهي عقلية مختلة من جانبين رئيسيين. فهي أولاً غير ناجحة: فالانبعاثات من ثاني أكسيد الكربون آخذة في الارتفاع، وليس الانخفاض. وتزاول صناعة النفط أنشطتها بكل ارتياح ــ التكسير والحفر والاستكشاف في القطب الشمالي، وتحويل الفحم إلى غاز، وبناء مرافق جديدة للغاز الطبيعي المسال. إن العالم يدمر أنظمة المناخ والإمدادات من الغذاء بوتيرة فائقة السرعة.

وثانيا، لا تزال عمليات "إزالة الكربون" من أنظمة الطاقة معقدة تكنولوجيا. والمشكلة الحقيقية التي تواجهها أميركا ليست المنافسة من الصين؛ بل التعقيد الشديد الذي تنطوي عليه عملية تحويل اقتصاد قيمته 17.5 تريليون دولار من الوقود الأحفوري إلى بدائل منخفضة الكربون. ومشكلة الصين ليست الولايات المتحدة، بل كيفية فطام أكبر اقتصاد أو ثاني أكبر اقتصاد على مستوى العالم (اعتماداً على البيانات المستخدمة للقياس) عن اعتمادها الشديد على الفحم. وهذه في الأساس مشاكل هندسية وليست مشاكل تفاوضية.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs

Writing for PS since 1995
352 Commentaries

Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as adviser to three UN Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, Building the New American Economy, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, and, most recently, The Ages of Globalization.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 8 Comments on this article

bahar camozu Mar 21, 2015

The world is wrecking the climate and food-supply systems at a breakneck pace.
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Rhett Racere Mar 5, 2015

the phrase "in the mean time" catches the essence of entire matter. Emergency "progress" is not progress at all. Natural progress is all that has endured, and all that CAN endure. It may seem to some that emergency progress entails the destruction of the present for the good of someone else's vision of a future. Utopian ideals always shed present blood.
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Lili Fuhr Jul 1, 2014

I don't agree that there is a "place at the table for ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Peabody, Koch Industries, and other oil and coal giants". They are the ones manipulating politics and funding climate sceptics to secure their business model while wracking the planet. The 90 biggest of these "carbon majors" are together responsible for roughly two thirds of global emissions since the industrial revolution. And even in the most optimistic IEA scenario CCS can only increase the global carbon budget by a few percent - and thus it cannot count as a solution!
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John Smithson Jun 26, 2014

Jeffrey Sachs says: "The information-technology revolution that has brought us computers, smart phones, GPS, and much more, was built on a series of industry and government roadmaps."

That's not true. "Directed technological change" does not work. No one can predict the future. Technology evolves quite like biology. Market selection acts like natural selection. Technology advances as the fittest survive and the weakest die. Failure advances technology as much as success.

In other words, government tends to be more of a problem than a solution, as it distorts market influence and lets the weak survive at the expense of the fittest. As in General Motors and Chrysler, which the government found to be too big to fail.
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Vincent Champain Jun 25, 2014

Yes innovation is the main solution to climate change. But to ensure innovation on low carbon technologies pays, we need a global carbon price, so that whoever finds a way to reduce carbon emissions can make a profit out of it. And for this the most realistic solution is regional carbon prices + imported carbon taxes. This is what countries should be negociating !
- Stepan February Jun 27, 2014
  
  Carbon tax only makes sense as a gentle encouragement of a switch to an alternative that has lower negative externalities but costs about the same as the legacy alternative. Otherwise, it is just punishment for action that cannot be avoided.
  
  Low carbon costs MUST come down much more before the tax is instituted. And to achieve that, we need the princes to coordinate their enormous resources to advance science and technology.
  
  You can tax people all you want, no one is going to build you a low-carbon moonshot, because markets do not solve negative externality problems. But government-sponsored basic research can change the landscape so that markets flow to the lower cost alternative. Tax can only channel the flow, it cant push water up the hill, because it would drown the economy.
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Zsolt Hermann Jun 24, 2014

There is an even deeper problem.

Let us say suddenly everybody agrees that we have to change and 'save the planet", be in harmony with nature and so on.
We simply have no idea what it means.
We do not even know nature.

We are operating in the dark, without real coordinates, we base everything on our own artificial perception that we created independent of nature.

Perception is based on equivalence of form.
In order to start understanding nature we would need to take on its form.

Nature (including our own biological bodies) is based on general balance, a very dynamic, sensitively regulated homeostasis.
It is a system with global and integral interconnection and "mutual guarantee" in between its parts.
As science is showing us nature operates as a single organism.

With our present, individualistic, fragmented, subjective approach and perception we are completely incompatible.
The only way humanity could integrate with this system, understand how to adapt to it is to adjust global human society to the laws and principles of nature.
This means mutually complementing cooperation and the use of "wisdom of the crowd", "collective intelligence".

The system is vast and infinitely more powerful than a single species, even if this species is humanity. Thus the system is not going to change, only we can and have to change.

But since human beings are the only creatures that can make such changes consciously, by free choice, we could become benevolent partners with the system in total control with an effortless and qualitatively much higher life.
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Stepan February Jun 24, 2014

Wholeheartedly agree. Guilt-based negotiations are intractable if the guilty control no remedies that can right the wrong. It just descends into defensiveness and buck-passing.

If the world agrees on a high-intensity program to research and develop carbon-reduction technologies, political solutions will flow out of the results. As Steve Jobs said, "Its not impossible, I know you can do it."

The negotiation that needs to happen now is how much money each polluter will put in and how many and which paths to research.
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