ITALIAN VERSION
On the 20th February 2020, the EU Staff for Climate and the DG Research co-organised the Conference ‘From Rhetoric to Reality: The Role of the EU in delivering on the Paris commitments’, an internal discussion intended to raise awareness on the current climate ecological crisis.
The Conference followed a petition which reached over 11000 signatures and was then presented to the three main Institutions (the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council) to encourage them to undertake meaningful action in line with the Paris commitments.
Session I - Prof. Kevin Anderson
Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate Change, holding a joint chair in the School of Engineering at the University of Manchester (UK) and in Centre for Sustainability and the Environment (CEMUS) at Uppsala University (Sweden) opened the Conference. He focussed on the notion of carbon budget and called for a re-design of our economy in the effort to meet the Paris Agreement’s (PA) commitments. In particular, he argued that the biggest illusion hitherto featuring the EU’s action are the so-called Negative Emission Technologies (NETs).
With the provocative question of whether the EU should show leadership or keep lagging behind, Prof. Anderson made his opinion clear that the EU is not doing enough to reach the PA’s objective of limiting the global temperature increase within 2° Celsius – at east as far as the energy sector is concerned. More specifically, he believes that the EU and its Member States (MSs), although committing to act in accordance with the best science and on the basis of equity, should seriously design an effective carbon budget policy.
He elaborated the idea focusing on the impacts of climate change on future generations, and criticised the unfairness towards them of the 1.5°/2° Celsius threshold set out in the PA This is not only a current cause for enhanced poverty, misery and ecosystems destruction, but also a trigger for unrecoverable eco-damages that will be passed on the future generations. He then quoted the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s findings that efforts should focus on carbon-budget policies, rather than long-term targets as only the former are actually linked with temperature rise. This means that ‘the more we increase our emissions now, the less future generations will have to decrease theirs’– fully in line with principle of intergenerational equity.
Secondly, he condemned the 30-year long international failure of acting on the basis of the IPCC reports, despite the fact that the Panel has been warning the global community of the threats posed by climate change since 1990. Such a choice of not acting - dubbed optimistic rhetoric – has entailed that ‘among the climate progressive nations, the EU28 did not reach any meaningful CO2 cut relative to 2° since 1990 in aviation, shipping, imports and exports. Just half-a-percent per year of reduction’. This can be explained, according to the speaker, by the concept of litany of technocratic fraud, a term which comprises the various strategy created in the past years by the wealthier nations. Prof. Andersons blamed in particular the so-called “offsettings”, which he defined as actually ‘a payment we made to the poor to diet for us’, as well as afforestation, i.e. planting trees to justify the expansion of cement infrastructures.
In the third part of the presentation, he brought attention to two additional aspects, that mitigation is politics-based but that politicians are not the sole responsible for the failure to act. The former essentially means that the mitigation agreements reached at the COP25 in Paris are a commendable political commitment, as equity and science are chosen as the foundations of the climate change fight, including the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsiblity[1].
This notwithstanding, things are at the same time complicated by the latter principle. In fact, policymakers rather than on IPCC reports, based themselves on the so-called “Integrated Assessment Models” (IAMs). These, in advising politicians on how to act, have simplified the scientific evidence available to the extent that they ended up being highly misleading. For instance, carbon budgets which are larger than the real ones – and therefore strive for much less mitigation efforts. Or, they refer to Negative Emissions Technologies to capture 100 billion tonnes of CO2 directly from the atmosphere although these technologies do not exist but are just a few pilot schemes, and mostly remain academic speculations. And, even if they were implemented, they should be carried on by next generations. In essence, for a post-2020 Paris-compliant carbon-budget, science and economists suggest different amounts.
Once having identified the main problems of the hitherto EU strategy, Prof. Anderson investigated on the potential ‘EU’s fair role in delivering Paris’. He restated the importance of designing adequate carbon budgets i.e. the possible total emissions from now to forever – based on science. ‘The challenge is to equitably split it among every country in the World’ which essentially depends on each country’s negotiators’ ability to persuade others. The split should be based on factors like the population, the size of one’s economy, historical emissions, current emissions or capacity to handle them, besides finally including shipping and aviation – currently excluded.
Further on, he mentioned some factors that will help us as a global community to address the climate crisis: banks can mobilise money to help the climate crisis, just as they previously did with the financial one; social media’s perk of making more and more people engage in the climate change fight, as they are progressively eliminating the traditional ‘oligarchy’ of newspapers; Brexit and Trump have proved the demand for a ‘new’ constituency; lastly, the ongoing plummeting of the price of renewables.
In his conclusions, the presenter brought about a possible scenario to help cut by one third the global CO2 emissions based on scientific evidence: in particular by to setting out a legal obligation for the top 10% emitters to cut their CO2 footprint, while the rest 90% of emitters could be free to maintain their emissions level. The purpose of such hypothetical experiment is that an effective fight of climate change would be possible only if policymakers and the global community as such took it seriously.
This suggests that there is an unavoidable 3-step strategy to deliver Paris, which is not about policy but rather depends on the context in which they occur. The first is to immediately cut emissions (and this cannot be done via technologies because they are not ready yet, but rather via changes in the energy behaviours and practices of high-energy users). The second is to set out very stringent energy efficiency standards in the near term on all major end-use equipment. Lastly, in the medium to long term, a plan along the lines of the Marshall plan after WWII for a coordinated reconstruction of zero-CO2 energy supply and major electrification in the whole energy system, including aviation and shipping is needed. The strategy requires a shift in the productive capacity of society akin to that in World War II. Concretely, it means shifting for example ‘from large (holiday) houses and highly mobile lives and high levels of consumer goods to rapid transition from 81% fossil fuel to zero-CO2 infrastructure’.
He concluded by quoting Einstein: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expect different outcomes’. In essence, the EU needs new narratives on what growth and development are, matched with a renovated time-perspective and a genuine commitment to the intra- and intergenerational equity principles.
The presentation was followed by an interesting Q&A session.
Session II – Two representatives from the European School
This presentation was followed by a contribution of two students from the European School likewise advocating the upheaval of EU’s action as far as climate change is concerned and along the same lines a more science-based approach.Their contribution opened with the acknowledgment that ‘2019 has been a game-changer, as we have finally full awareness of the threat posed by climate change’, but quickly moved to the provoking question of ‘how to move forward and to achieve measures that are enough’.
In particular, they believe that wealthy nations must reduce their emissions by 11% per year starting today and that 7% is the emissions cut that the EU must achieve each year to deliver the Paris Agreement objective.
They also raised the issue of citizens’ unawareness: ignorance about what one’s own country is doing to reduce emissions, about what still needs to be done. And this is because this information is massively and fundamentally influenced by political choices.
In their opinion, several factors are to blame for the unsuccessful approach so far adopted to know how much a MS/the EU must cut to deliver the goal by 2030 or 2050. Firstly, lack of transparency regarding what is actually going to happen. Secondly, instead of calling on immediate action, most of the statistics provide emission-cuts projections which are planned to happen in the future, hence putting an extra burden on next generations. Third, they are based on NETs that at the moment are mere academic assumptions. Lastly, these figures are based on territorial, not on consumption emissions, hence fail to depict what is actually going on, i.a. they ignore the so-called tipping points.
In light of these considerations, they called for courageous actions at the legislative, policy, and investment level – based on state-of-the-art scientific findings.
As a conclusion, they recalled that ‘Europe has been a proud defender of Human Rights, Democracy, Truth and a Champion of scientific knowledge, technological advancement and that this is not the time to stop. We know we are not doing enough’. They demand clear, science-based per capita reductions from today, as well ask them to do what EU can to support the people and put the real numbers in the public domain.
Europe Direct Emilia Romagna trainee
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[1] wealthy nations need to transition to zero-CO2 ahead of poorer nations