From Lima to Paris

                                                Comments due by Nov 20, 2015

 Needless to say, there’s been a big and promising shift in tone and some substance in global warming diplomacy of late — led by the paired pledges of China and the United States to intensify efforts to curtail heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions. Other countries, including gas-rich Malaysia, have promised to act on climate.

No one should presume things will be easy in Lima, Peru, where negotiators are gathering through next week to shape a global climate agreement that could be finalized in Paris a year from now. There’s strong — and to a large extent justified — resistance to new carbon commitments in India, for example, where hundreds of millions of people lack access to any modern energy sources, let alone clean ones. And there will be intensifying demands for billions to flow from industrialized countries that spent decades building wealth burning fossil fuels to poor, vulnerable ones. Given continuing economic troubles in many developed countries, those demands will be hard to meet.

Still, there are plenty of signs that there’s room for a global accord to emerge, with every faction — from the poorest to the richest — finding a comfort zone thanks to the 24-year-old clause in the original climate treaty laying out nations’ “common but differentiated responsibilities” (here’s a great explainer from McGill’s Center for International Sustainable Development Law).

As long ago as 1991, there were calls to pursue “soft,” not internationally binding, steps toward a global climate treaty. Read these notes from a fascinating 1991 Harvard meeting on Negotiating a Global Climate Agreement to get the idea. (There are some excerpts below. I first wrote about that meeting in 2010.)

Talks are progressing now because this shift is in fact occurring.

John Upton has an informative piece on Climate Central that lays out the logic of non-binding success and also why some parties, particularly Europe, still resist:

As negotiators gather in Peru for a critical round of climate talks, U.S. delegates are straining to explain what they call a “counterintuitive” reality: For next year’s global climate agreement to be effective, commitments made under it must not be legally binding.

Such an outcome would disappoint many, including the European Union’s negotiating team, which says it will be pushing for binding commitments during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in Lima this week and next. America’s negotiators are pushing for voluntary commitments.

The success of the next climate agreement, which is due to be finalized during talks in Paris one year from now, may hinge on American negotiators winning in this latest spat in a long-simmering quarrel with their European counterparts.

It’s a pretty good bet that Europe will — excuse the term — soften, given the momentum built by the year-long process that produced the American announcement with China and particularly because failure in the heart of Europe is unimaginable.

The new emphasis on a soft approach is quite a contrast to the tone in the run-up to the tumultuous Copenhagen talks in 2009, when inflated “seal the deal” expectations — partially driven by the election of President Obama — led to the idea there could be new international, legally-binding gas limits like those tried in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — which has proved a dead-end document.

Yvo de Boer, who held the chair in the climate talks through Copenhagen and now runs the Global Green Growth Institute, made the point this way in an interview with Bloomberg’s The Grid back in June:

Q: Is it still realistic for climate negotiators to want an “international, legally binding” treaty? Was it ever realistic if the U.S. always opposed one?

A: If a country enters into a legally-binding commitment and they back away from it, what do you do? Arrest the prime minister? “Nationally legally-binding” is much stronger. I think we’ve moved beyond Kyoto-style agreements. Hopefully in Paris we will see countries make ambitious pledges to limit or reduce emissions. [Read the rest.]

Debates will (and should) continue over how much of what’s being pledged is simply enshrining energy and pollution trends (both in the United States and countries like China) that are already being driven by other factors (cheap shale gas and growing energy efficiency here, smog concerns in China, etc.).

And much of what is being pledged, despite Yvo de Boer’s hope for legally-binding actions at the national level, is still much more like putty than steel, as Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School noted (in the context of United States law) on his Lawfare blog earlier this year. 

But momentum matters, as does the rising trust among parties as they split from a faction-against-faction approach (remember theGroup of 77 plus China bloc?) to finding common threads, one on one.

The summary of that 1991 meeting on climate agreements, written by Henry Lee, who’s still at Harvard, have some relevant sections, including this one:

Perhaps the real problem is not agreeing on a treaty, but building nations’ confidence in other nations’ capacity and willingness to cut emissions. We are skeptical about whether Brazil will do it, and they are skeptical about us. And as in the recent U.S.-Japan decisions over Structural Impediments to trade, if we both can do it, we will both be better off.

Overcoming this blockage will either take an adjustment of our notion of sovereignty where implementation is concerned, or a focus on unilateral action. U.S. unilateral action could set an example for the world, and help to structure the international process so as to increase confidence. If the U.S., for example, significantly increased transportation fuel prices, then this action would both increase our influence in pushing for good international deals, and exempt us from charges of obstruction when we refuse to sign a bad one.

There is a lot of latent cooperativeness, looking for a structure in which to express itself. This is what international legal measures, soft or hard, should do — give an enabling structure to this latent willingness to help.

Obama has moved far more on power plants and auto efficiency than fuel prices (which are headed down of course), which simply shows that expectations and options evolve over time. But his administration’s domestic power plant rules and simultaneous interaction with China reflect how this dynamic can work.

There’s much more at the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, including this new paper: “A Pre-Lima Scorecard for Evaluating which Countries are Doing Their Fair Share in Pledged Carbon Cuts.”

Update, Dec. 6, 8:45 a.m. | Professor Lee at Harvard sent this illuminating note after I’d posted:

The real architects of the soft strategy were Abe Chayes [bio] and Tom Schelling [Nobelist in Economics] and it is fascinating that it has taken 23 years for the world to finally catch up. Although Chayes’s thumbprint is all over the Rio treaty of 1992.  Howard Raiffa convened a bi-weekly seminar at the Business School in which both Tom and Abe participated, and it was out of these discussions that the soft strategy emerged.

While I firmly believe it to be the only workable strategy that can result in meaningful progress, skeptics ask –will this strategy be enough to make a measurable difference in slowing the build up of greenhouse gas concentrations? Given the domestic hurdles facing Obama, the inability to raise significant funds for the Green Climate Fund and China’s long farewell to its growth in carbon emissions,  we may still be another decade away from seeing this issue turn around.  This is not to say that the Xi-Obama agreement or a successful Paris protocol will not be significant, but the question is –will it be enough.

I replied this way (email shorthand cleaned up):

The “Will it be enough?” question leads to “What is enough?” I’ve always liked John Holdren’s notion that there’s a sliding mix of “mitigation, adaptation and suffering.” No hard lines going forward. And the learn-and-adjust aspect of humanity’s complex response will keep tweaking the two knobs as necessary.

It will be far from perfect, or rational. But we’ll keep moving on. The human way.

Update, Dec. 6, 11:45 a.m. | Robert Stavins, another Harvard economist focused on climate policy, sent the following observation:

You mention something that is very important to keep in mind, but frequently ignored in press and other commentary on the ongoing international climate negotiations, namely: “No hard lines going forward.”

There is not some distinct bend in the marginal damage function or marginal cost function at 450 ppm [a carbon dioxide concentration of 450 parts per million]. In other words, it’s fair to say that stabilizing at 350 ppm means less damages, and stabilizing at 550 ppm means more damages (things get more complicated when bringing in marginal costs, and searching for the most dynamically efficient path forward), but there is really not something magical about 450 ppm.

The 450 ppm target is a political goal (which is important), but is not linked in some rigorous way with the science and economics. It has also become fundamentally infeasible, as the this year’s IPCC AR5 WG3 and SYR reports have illustrated quite clearly.

Unfortunately, pointing this out has become politically incorrect and controversial.

I was also remiss in not including a link to his excellent blog post explaining the significance of the Lima meeting and why recent steps are important. Here is a snippet:

There will be — indeed, already have been — pronouncements of failure of the Lima/Paris talks from some green groups, primarily because the talks will not lead to an immediate decrease in emissions and will not prevent atmospheric temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which has become an accepted, but essentially unachievable political goal. These well-intentioned advocates mistakenly focus on the short-term change in emissions among participating countries (for example, the much-heralded 5.2% cut by the Annex I countries in the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period), when it is the long-term change in global emissions that matters.

Are Corporations to be trusted on Environmental issues?

                                               Comments due by Nov. 13, 2015

The state of New York is investigating whether Exxon Mobil misled the public and investors about the risks of climate change, a move sought by environmentalists that could signal a broader reckoning with the conduct of big energy companies.

A spokesman for Exxon Mobil confirmed Thursday that the company had received a subpoena from the office of the attorney general of New York, Eric Schneiderman, related to the subject of climate change and was “assessing” its response.

The investigation focuses on whether Exxon Mobil intentionally clouded public debate about science and hid from investors the risks that climate change could pose to its business according to a person familiar with the matter.

Schneiderman has broad leeway to take on such a sweeping target under both consumer protection laws and New York’s Martin Act, a securities law that protects investors.

The inquiry seeks a variety of documents and records from the company, according to the person familiar with the probe, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the contents of the subpoena have not been made public.

“We unequivocally reject allegations that Exxon Mobil suppressed climate change research contained in media reports that are inaccurate distortions of Exxon Mobil’s nearly 40-year history of climate research that was conducted publicly in conjunction with the Department of Energy, academics and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” Exxon Mobil spokesman Scott Silvestri said.

Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, is also conducting a similar investigation regarding Peabody Energy, a leading coal company. The person familiar with the matter suggested that other energy companies could also face scrutiny.

Environmental advocates hailed the probes as a major victory. For well over a decade, such organizations have been probing alleged links between Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded energy company, and the raising of public doubt about climate change. They cited not only direct statements and advertisements by Exxon Mobil, but also its alleged past support for think tanks and advocacy organizations that express climate change skepticism.

“We have watched Exxon sow doubt on climate science and delay action on climate change for nearly a generation,” said Kert Davies, formerly with Greenpeace and now the Climate Investigations Center.

Similarly, in a 2006 letter to the company, the British Royal Society chargedthat a variety of statements in Exxon Mobil’s public documents at the time “are not consistent with the scientific literature that has been published on this issue.”

“The context here is that climate activists have long accused Exxon – along with various other large energy companies – of seeking to influence the climate policy debate to their benefit. The claim that Exxon ‘suppressed’ research is part and parcel of this broader issue. Naturally, the company takes a different view of this issue,” said Pavel Molchanov, an oil industry analyst with Raymond James, in a statement.

Recent news reports have increased calls for action, as the Los Angeles Times and the online publication Inside Climate News both published articles charging that Exxon researchers were concerned about climate change from fossil fuel emissions decades ago, and yet for long periods, the company publicly raised doubts about the science.

The charges have been so prominent that senator and Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders recently called for a Justice Department investigation into Exxon Mobil regarding “what it knew and what it told the public and shareholders about the cause of climate change.”

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University who has been a critic of the company, likened the investigation to past investigations of the tobacco industry in a statement Thursday.

“We are not physiologically addicted to oil, but we live inside a highly developed infrastructure that fosters fossil fuel dependency and discourages alternatives.  We could have begun to shift the incentives, and encourage alternatives, if we had implemented a carbon tax…at any point over the past 20 years,” Oreskes said. “There are many reasons we did not do that, but a significant one, in my view, is the role of Exxon Mobil and others in fomenting disinformation, undermining public support for such initiatives, and lobbying against  policies that would have begun to decrease our fossil fuel dependency.”

In the 1990s, Exxon Mobil took stances that expressed skepticism about climate change. For instance, in 1997 Exxon CEO Lee Raymond stated in Beijing, “Many people, politicians and the public alike, believe global warming is a rock-solid certainty. But it’s not,” according to a contemporary media report.

But matters have changed since then and the company’s current CEO, Rex Tillerson, has called for a carbon tax.

“Exxon Mobil recognizes that climate risks are real and responsible actions are warranted,” said its vice president of public and government affairs, Ken Cohen, on a press call regarding the subpoena. “We have a commitment to helping address this important societal challenge.”

Cohen said on the call that the company began in the late 2000s to inform “shareholders and investors” about climate change and how it could affect the company’s business “through regulatory filings.” In response to the series by Inside Climate News, Cohen said the company has been in “active dialogue” with the publication since the stories came out.

“Our company, beginning in the latter part of the 1970s and continuing to the present day, has been involved in serious scientific research, and we have been supporting since that time scientific understanding of the risk of climate change,” Cohen said.

“Over the last decade, whispering concerns have increased within oil and other fossil fuel companies about a wide range of possible legal vulnerabilities.  I think such concerns in fact have driven companies to take public positions acknowledging basic climate science in more recent years, and compelled them to even begin advocating seemingly progressive but politically unlikely policy approaches like carbon pricing,” says Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House aide on climate change who is now an energy and climate consultant in Washington.

Schneiderman, a Democrat, has been attorney general since 2011 and like other prominent New York-based prosecutors has not shied away from tackling big targets. Over his tenure, he has taken on Apple’s foray into E-books, big mortgage banks, and fantasy sports sites. He even filed a $40 million civil lawsuit against Donald Trump, alleging that the mogul’s “Trump University” — which purported to teach real estate investment techniques — in fact offered very little education at a high cost to students. (NYT Nov 6, 2015)

China Ends Its One Child Policy

                                                  Comments due by Nov. 6, 2015

( What are the implications of ending the one child policy in China? Is the global population to see a big rise? Is it possible to talk about sustainability and population growth? Time will tell.) GK

 Over the years, so many exceptions and amendments were made to China’s one-child policy that it was hard to pinpoint a moment to pronounce it dead. But Thursday’s announcement that all Chinese couples will be allowed two children is as good a moment as any to write the obituary for this controversial and gratuitously cruel policy: China’s one-child policy died on Thursday, after a long illness.It was thirty-five years old. The long-anticipated announcement came at the end of a Communist Party plenum on the economy. Xinhua, the official news agency, reported that China will “fully implement a policy of allowing each couple to have two children as an active response to an aging population,” but said the implementation and timing would be up to the provinces. Demographers have long warned that, because of the one-child policy, the Chinese economy will be hobbled by a shortage of workers. China’s fertility rate, estimated by the World Bank in 2013 to be 1.7 births per woman, is below the replacement rate of 2.1. One in ten Chinese is now over the age of sixty-five, and that number is likely to double by mid-century. By 2022, China is expected to cede the dubious distinction of being the world’s most populous nation to India, according to the population division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Baby-related stocks reacted Thursday with the giddiness of, well, toddlers. Chinese companies that make strollers, car seats, baby formula, and baby food all advanced , according to the Wall Street Journal. Beyond that, though, the near-term impact might be mainly symbolic. By switching to a “two-child policy,”the Chinese government has signalled that it does not intend to dismantle its family-planning infrastructure. Restrictions will still apply, especially to unmarried couples and single mothers; families that want more than one child will still need to go through an application procedure, although it will be simplified. The English-language China Daily reported on Friday that ninety million Chinese C The English-language China Daily reported on Friday that ninety million Chinese couples will be eligible to have a second child, but it appears likely that only a fraction will choose to do so.In late 2013, the government announced that adults who had grown up without siblings would be permitted to have two children, but, of the eleven million eligible citizens, only 1.5 million have applied.In an online survey conducted by Sina News on Thursday, which received a hundred and seventy-four thousand responses, only twentynine per cent of couples said they would like to have a second child.“Only if the government raises my salary’’was a typical response of those who said they would not. hina’s one-child policy was born in 1980, after years of less severe measures to discourage births.The Communist Party promised that the policy would be temporary.“In thirty years, when our current extreme population growth eases, we can then adopt a different policy,’’the communiqué from the Central Committee of the Communist Party said, according to Mei Fong, a former China correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, whose book,“One Child: The Past and Future of China’s Most Radical Experiment,”will be published in February. Fong describes the policy as “born in haste, dragging on past its sell-by date.”But it won some praise at the time from conservationists and ecologists, who were swayed by books like Paul Ehrlich’s apocalyptic best-seller,“The Population Bomb,”which predicted that hundreds of millions would die of starvation. But all too soon family planning became a powerful bureaucracy, with officials who terrorized parents.They beat and burned down the houses of people who violated the family-planning limits.They snatched over-quota baby girls from the arms of their mothers and gave them to orphanages, which in turn put them up for adoption, earning a three-thousand-dollar “donation”for each baby.“They grabbed the baby and dragged me out of the house,’’ a grandmother in Hunan province, whose four-month-old granddaughter was taken for adoption, told me in 2009. Despite the eventual relaxation of the rules, women with nearly full-term pregnancies were hunted down and forced to abort in poorly equipped clinics.In 2012, a five-year-old girl in Shandong province described to me  how ten officials had chased her six-months-pregnant mother through the fields to prevent the birth of the family’s second child, a boy. She died during the procedure.The family lived in the countryside and should have been entitled to a second child, but couldn’t find the right paperwork. Some of the most tragic consequences of the one-child policy involved parents who lost Some of the most tragic consequences of the one-child policy involved parents who lost their only children.Without a social-security system, children take the place of insurance, pension, and retirement plans—a family’s future often rests on the shoulders of one small child. After the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, in which a disproportionate number of the seventy thousand dead were children whose schools collapsed, thousands of nearly menopausal mothers rushed to fertility clinics to try to give birth again. For years, the rules about family size were enforced unevenly and unfairly, with many variations from province to province. (Ethnic minorities were allowed more than one child.) For the past decade, only about a third of the population has been strictly limited to one child, according to Fong. Not surprisingly, the rich have been able to buy their way out of limitations.The filmmaker Zhang Yimou paid $1.23 million in fines last year for siring excessive children. (He has two sons and one daughter with his wife, and another daughter with a previous partner.) The National Health and Family Planning Commission has long claimed that the onechild policy prevented the births of four hundred million people. But the Chinese demographers Wang Feng, Cai Yong, and Gu Baochang argue that the number is no more than half that, and that urbanization and rising living costs would have reduced the birth rates without coercive measures, as they have in South Korea and Japan.In a paper published in 2013, prophetically entitled “How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy?,”the demographers rank the one-child policy among the Chinese Communist Party’s top blunders—right up there with the Cultural Revolution, which wiped out the intelligentsia for a decade, and the Great Leap Forward, which is blamed for an estimated forty-five million famine deaths. “While those grave mistakes both cost tens of millions of lives, the harms done were relatively short-lived and were corrected quickly afterward,”the demographers write. 

“The one-child policy, in contrast, will surpass them in impact by its role in creating a society with a seriously undermined family and kin structure, and a whole generation of future elderly and their children whose well-being will be seriously jeopardized.” The “most extreme example of state intervention in human reproduction in the modern era,” as the demographers call it, the one-child policy intruded on every aspect of life in China.In the nineteen-eighties, female factory workers were forced to show their stained menstrual napkins to prove they weren’t pregnant.The policy exacerbated a gender imbalance in the population—roughly a hundred and sixteen boys are born for every hundred girls today—leaving million of men, now and in years to come, with little hope of finding a wife. Driving through rural China, it is hard to find a town that doesn’t have family-planning propaganda prominently on display. The policy’s effects were pronounced in New York, too. On Thursday morning, when the The policy’s effects were pronounced in New York, too. On Thursday morning, when the news of the policy change broke,I was riding a New York City bus up Allen Street, at the edge of Chinatown, in which I was almost the only non-Chinese person. Sitting across from me was a Chinese woman with two girls, about six years old, in matching pink parkas. Although I couldn’t talk to them to ask their story (the woman spoke only the Fuzhou dialect of Chinese),I was reminded that many immigrants are here thanks to a U.S. policy that gave political asylum to people fleeing forced sterilization and abortion.I had lunch later with a friend who has two nieces and a goddaughter adopted from China; they are girls who, no doubt, were given up because of the quota. You don’t have to look far to see how China’s one-child policy has shaped the world we live in. (New Yorker Oct. 2015)

Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Lies

                                                     Comments due by Oct. 30 2015 

Over the last few years, a growing number of people have been taking a hard look at what is happening to our planet – historic droughts, rising sea levels, massive floods – and acknowledging, finally, that human activity is propelling rapid climate change. But guess what? Exxon (now ExxonMobil) had an inkling of this as early as 1978.

By the early 1980s, Exxon scientists had much more than an inkling. They not only understood the science behind climate change, but also recognized the company’s own outsize role in driving the phenomenon. Recognizing the potential effects as “catastrophic” for a significant portion of the population, they urged Exxon’s top executives to take action. Instead, the executives buried the truth.

There may be a silver lining to this infuriating story: the recent investigation that exposed Exxon’s deceit could end up catalyzing the action needed to address the looming climate crisis. After all, similar revelations about the tobacco industry – what the major cigarette companies knew and when they knew it – transformed the public-health landscape.

In 1996, a series of lawsuits forced tobacco companies to release millions of internal documents, which confirmed what public-health advocates and policymakers had long suspected: as early as the 1950s, the industry knew that nicotine was addictive and that cigarettes caused cancer. But, to protect its own interests, Big Tobacco deliberately misled the public, doing everything possible to cast doubt on scientific findings that it knew to be accurate. Such tactics enabled the industry to delay, for more than 50 years, regulation that could have saved millions of lives annually.

After the revelations, however, it was clear that the tobacco industry was a malevolent force that did not belong in the policymaking process. With Big Tobacco out of the picture, and armed with evidence of the real effects of tobacco consumption, health advocates were finally able to compel their governments to act.

In 2003, world leaders agreed to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization. Today, the treaty covers 90% of the world’s population and has contributed to a significant decline in sales for global tobacco corporations. Over time, it will save hundreds of millions of lives (and save governments’ health-care budgets huge sums).

Big Oil, it is now clear, has been following Big Tobacco’s playbook. In 1997, almost two decades after it began studying climate change, it quashed its research, claiming that climate science was “far from clear” and thus that it did not “support mandated cuts in energy use.”

Beyond suppressing its own findings, ExxonMobil (and its peers) funded and promoted junk science and attacked scientists who warned of the impending climate disaster. The fossil-fuel companies’ approach was so effective that the media are only now beginning to recognize the leading role the industry played in creating – almost out of whole cloth – the so-called “climate debate.”

But perhaps Big Oil’s biggest success was diminishing the political will to implement appropriate regulation. Even after the international community adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, the fossil-fuel industry managed to block meaningful progress – to the point that, if serious action is not taken soon, the entire process could unravel.

In Europe, Royal Dutch Shell’s lobbying so diluted the European Union’s efforts that there are now no binding targets for renewables or energy efficiency for individual countries. The company even sent a letter to the European Commission’s president claiming that “gas is good for Europe.” Shell and other oil companies are now promising to work as “advisers” to national governments on how to deal with climate change.

Just as the tobacco files drove the tobacco industry out of policymaking processes, the Exxon investigation should compel world leaders to eliminate the fossil-fuel industry from efforts to solve the climate crisis. After all, no policy can succeed if those who shape it are betting on its failure.

The turning point for tobacco-related public-health policy came when the industry’s depravity became indisputable. Now, that moment has come for the climate movement. We cannot simply hope that the fossil-fuel industry will change its ways. As an alliance of human-rights groups, environmental activists, and corporate-accountability advocates already is demanding, we must kick the industry out of the policymaking process altogether.

Exxon’s scientists were right: the effects of climate change on many communities are catastrophic. With so many lives at stake – and such clear evidence of the threat – Big Oil, like Big Tobacco before it, should be treated for what it is: Big Trouble. ( Bill McKibben)

Can Workers Save the Climate ?

                               Comments due Oct 23, 2015
At the UN Climate Change Conference COP 19, the even-more-depressing-than-usual climate summit that took place in Warsaw in 2013, one small ray of light made it through the dark corporate clouds that were otherwise suffocating even the slightest effort to address the ongoing environmental disaster. On the last day of the conference, an unusual alliance was formed as environmental organizations and trade unions together walked out of the venue under the banner of “Enough Is Enough.” Sick of the meaningless talks, they stated:

“We are now focusing on mobilizing people to push our governments to take leadership for serious climate action. We will work to transform our food and energy systems at a national and global level and rebuild a broken economic system to create a sustainable and low-carbon economy with decent jobs and livelihoods for all. And we will put pressure on everyone to do more to realize this vision.”

If not entirely unique, this action nevertheless promised a new hope for a climate movement that never recovered after its (greatly exaggerated) expectations cruelly disappointed at the summit in Copenhagen four years earlier. The relationship between trade unions and environmentalists has often been strained, if there has been one at all. More often than not, those claiming to defend the earth and workers’ rights are operating at a crossroads, sometimes colliding in head-to-head confrontation – especially when jobs are pitted against environmental interests.

Two Crisis

I found myself in that squeeze when the financial crisis hit the auto industry in 2008. The previous year, Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and climate change topped worldwide headlines. But with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the auto industry in free fall, the climate crisis quickly disappeared from general discussion, even more so among auto-industry workers. Profits (disguised as “jobs”) were the main issue, not the complicated and distant phenomenon of global warming.

This was very much the case in Sweden, a small country with two crisis-hit U.S.-owned car producers (Volvo and Saab), two truck corporations (Volvo Trucks and Scania), and a widespread network of subcontractors, making the industry a pillar of the national economy. In the debate over what to do about the crisis, two positions quickly crystallized in Sweden, much as they did in other car-producing countries:

• “Let it die!” This position was represented by true believers of the invisible hand and creative destruction – a rapidly shrinking flock at the time.
• “Support the industry!” In most countries, this became the rallying call of unions, social democrats, governments – and, naturally, the industry itself. They advocated subsidies of various kinds, from “cash for clunkers” to the involuntary quasi-nationalization of GM and Chrysler – and to varying degrees, sacrifices from auto-industry workers.

Needless to say, the “Let it die!” position – notoriously articulated in the United States by Mitt Romney – was no alternative for workers. In the case of Sweden, it would have had huge social implications in an economy in which unemployment was already skyrocketing, particularly in an auto-dependent city like my hometown, Gothenburg. It also would have caused enormous social waste. The auto industry is not merely buildings, robots, and assembly lines: it's first and foremost an organization of people, who together make up an industrial machine built and perfected for more than one hundred years. “Let it die!” targets not just the metal scaffolding but the human component of the industry. And from a working-class point of view, it would have dissolved autoworkers as a collective and the potential social subject for change.

If cars were a social necessity, I wouldn't per se be against the second position of “support the industry!” Governments support all sorts of things, like education, healthcare, culture, and more (albeit, now less than ever). The problem is that cars are unnecessary. The present transportation system, based on mass auto transit, is completely unsustainable. It is a threat to humanity.

Main Contributors to CO2 Emissions

Transport, and primarily road transport, is one of the main contributors to CO2 emissions that threaten to push the globe over extremely dangerous thresholds. Dependent on oil for 95 per cent of its fuel, road transport accounts for 27 per cent of global CO2 emissions and 13 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions, and those shares are rapidly increasing.

Transportation has been growing faster than the rest of the global economy, pushed forward by globalization, just-in-time production, and car-centered city planning – all based on the abundance of cheap fossil fuels. This is not news to the auto industry. After a brief flirtation with denialism, auto makers quickly adapted to equipping products with stickers proclaiming them “green,” “eco,” or some other environmentalist catchword.

The main lines of defense of the status quo have been fuel-efficient cars, bio-fuels, and electric cars. And it is true: the average of CO2 emissions per mile from new cars is going down. But this is thoroughly overcompensated by the increasing number of miles covered by an ever-growing global fleet of cars.

As for bio-fuels, there is simply no way to substitute bio-fuels for fossil fuels at the present scale of consumption. No serious assessment gives them more than a minor role in propelling the world's cars. Moreover, even if the blame for the 900 million undernourished, or starving, in the world today is to be found more in distribution than absolute scarcity of food, production of bio-fuels for cars – more appropriately named “agro-fuels” – is a deeply questionable way of using the world's arable land.

Then there's the electric car. The car of the future – clean, silent, magically propelled by electric energy – a technical fix, now as always, just around the corner, telling us that if we act like responsible consumers, there's really no need to worry. It will be possible to maintain the auto society (and the auto industry), making effort to imagine alternatives unnecessary.

But electric cars don't represent a way out of the fossil society – not today or in the foreseeable future. Electricity doesn't appear out of thin air. Two-thirds of electrical power in the world comes from burning coal, oil, or natural gas, in most cases making the electric car slightly more efficient than the fossil car, a showpiece used to greenwash the auto industry and lull us into the dream that the environmental problems of road traffic will soon be taken care of.

Furthermore, since the production of an electric car generates considerably more greenhouse gas than the manufacturing of a conventional one, it has to run on renewables for tens or hundreds of thousands of miles before it is any better for the environment than a regular car. The talk of the green fuel-efficient car running on renewables is an illusion. Instead, the transportation system has to change in three ways: from private to public, from roads to rail, and, above all, transport has to be drastically reduced.

These, of course, have huge implications for the auto industry. It's just not possible to keep producing 70 million units a year. Basically, a transition to an economy that does not systematically destabilize the earth's climate would entail the end of the industry as we know it.

“None of the Above”
The Case for Conversion

So facing a choice – between seeing the jobs of my co-workers and myself go down the drain or demanding subsidies for pushing the earth further down the highway to hell – I opted for “none of the above.” Instead, I've been arguing for something I call “conversion”: that is, transforming the auto-industrial complex to save jobs and the planet.

At first, the idea was more of a quick one-liner when journalists asked me to comment on the crisis, but, as I dug deeper, I found the case for conversion was very strong – that it's actually a viable strategy against both unemployment and climate change, both practically and politically.

First, breaking free from the fossil economy requires more than a mental or emotional commitment to the idea (though even that commitment is deplorably absent). Its material components, such as the present means of transportation and energy production, would have to be replaced. This has to be done quickly and on a massive scale. And if there is one thing the auto industry is good at, it's mass production of technically complex equipment. The assembly line was perfected in this pursuit. Mass production turned the car from a luxury item into the means of transportation in industrialized countries and the foremost symbol of mass consumption.

Second, conversion of the auto industry is technically feasible. If mass production is the auto industry's first basic feature, change is the second. Ever since GM overtook Ford using a never-ending flow of new models as a method for marketing cars, the constant change of products has been an industry hallmark. Through the marketing genius of GM's Alfred Sloan, the auto industry became the birthplace for “conspicuous consumption” on a broad scale. New models were launched every year to make last year's model outdated.

Far from running out of force, this marketing trick has become the main competitive tool in the auto industry. In the eighties, a new European car had a concept-to-production life-cycle of slightly more than ten years; twenty years later, it's six years; today, the average car is in production for just four, with the time to develop and introduce new models shrinking correspondingly. No matter how wasteful this practice is, it has created organizations that are extremely skilled in rapid change and conversion.

This has also made the industry exceptionally versatile. It was the only American industry that underwent complete conversion to supply the World War II effort: only months after Pearl Harbor, Detroit's assembly lines stopped producing cars to instead churn out tanks, planes, and guns.

This kind of knowledge – both of mass production and conversion – permeates the industry. Even at the lowest level, on the shop floor, where I work, there is deep tacit knowledge of the art of mass production and the methods used. And of no less importance, we are accustomed to constant change.

In short: the auto industry is not a coal mine. It's a flexible machine that society can use to make almost anything on a large scale. Send us the blueprints for socially useful stuff, and we'll make it!

Politics and Social Power

Such practical factors are reason enough to use the auto industry – this amazing machine – for the benefit of society. But they are not the most important. Rather, it is this: the climate question is not about technology, not about science. At the bottom, it's about politics and social power, the relationship of forces: class struggle.

In the 23 years since 192 governments signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, committing themselves to stabilizing greenhouse-gas levels “that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human-induced) interference with the climate system,” there has been a tremendous increase in emissions, parallel to the growth in scientific knowledge about how this threatens our existence.

The reason is, of course, that reason isn't enough. The interests tied to the fossil-fuel economy are so gigantic that the only possible solution – “keep the oil in the soil” – would mean not only opposing the fundamental logic of the capitalist system but also a head-on confrontation with the most powerful corporations of the world – telling them that they can no longer access the assets they build their value on, thus rendering them worthless. However reasonable this may be from humanity's point of view, there's no way they're going to accept this. When it comes to the climate issue, as in so many other cases, reason stands against the power of mighty interests. And in a struggle between reason and power, power wins one hundred times out of one hundred.

To stand a chance, reason has to be armed with social power. The autoworkers’ fight for jobs could be part of arming reason, if we, instead of accepting the usual choice between jobs and environment, decide to tie our struggle for jobs to plans to convert the industry for the benefit of society. This struggle could create a focal point for a broad social movement for conversion of the whole society.

Of course, these arguments for conversion are valid not only in times of economic crisis and not only for the auto industry. All industries have workforces with deep technical knowledge. In many cases, it's both possible and necessary to use this knowledge to radically change the output of the industry. Putting this strategy into practice, though, is probably only possible in a situation in which jobs are profoundly threatened, and broad layers of workers are prepared to look for radical solutions. Given the present volatile condition of the world capitalist system, this situation is never far away, especially in the auto industry, where overproduction is always lurking around the corner.

There are several arguments for this strategy. If we are to win anything at all, we have to keep the collective together as much as we can. More traditional demands of replacement jobs and job training tend to move the initiative away from the shop floor and make it an issue between individual workers and the government or some employer. General talk of “green jobs” can work in the same way, especially if you're not very precise about what a “green job” is. I am not fond of the “green job” concept. Just as less environmentally disruptive cars shouldn't be called “environmentally friendly,” less environmentally disruptive jobs shouldn't be called ”green.”

Moreover, jobs that don't in themselves physically produce many CO2 emissions can have a very disruptive social and ecological impact – like much of the financial sector. Rather than “green jobs,” we should talk about “climate jobs” and “socially necessary jobs” – i.e., jobs that decrease greenhouse-gas emissions as well as benefit society in general. Programs and plans for social investments in climate jobs are an important part of a strategy for breaking away from the fossil society. The problem is that this can be easily transformed into lofty promises by politicians beyond the control of working people.

Conversion: Something We Can Fight For

Conversion of an existing industry, on the other hand, is something we can fight for, as a solution for all, through our unions and in alliance with other social movements. This is essential if we want to win, instead of leaving the initiative to state bureaucrats and the like.

The only significant example of this that I'm aware of took place in Great Britain in the seventies at the Lucas Aerospace Company. Faced with cutbacks in military spending, and encouraged by a new Labour government aiming to nationalize parts of the aviation industry, unions at Lucas broke with their earlier habit of demanding more government funding for armaments to save jobs. Instead, they involved the membership at the various plants in developing a plan for a large number of socially useful products, like affordable heat pumps, hybrid vehicles, and solar cells. Even if their struggle eventually was defeated by fierce corporate resistance, labour bureaucracy, lack of governmental support, and finally the election of Margret Thatcher for prime minister, the plan was used as a means to mobilize support and made an impression throughout the world.

Implementation of “alternative production,” as it was called, faced other, less head-on challenges. In the late 1970s, several industrial sectors in Sweden were mired in crisis: ship building, steel, the last remnants of the textile industry. For a period, “alternative production” became a buzzword among fairly broad segments of workers, with inspiration from Lucas, and even some direct contacts with workers there.

But almost all attempts to save jobs under this banner failed, because “alternative production” came to mean “other profitable products.” The great strength of the Lucas Plan – focusing on social usefulness, rather than profit – was edged out of the game. Advancing that original vision means questioning the private control and ownership of most of the world's assets, and recognizing the broad swaths of workers who want to and can use their skills to produce socially useful and necessary products.

There is another appealing aspect of the Lucas experience: the horizons that open up when we step off the treadmill. In the late eighteenth century, Thomas Paine captured those horizons in a few words:

“Revolutions create genius and talent; but these events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave.”

Having spent decades doing mindless jobs on the assembly line, I think there is great power in this perspective. It's hard to question the content of the whole production process without at the same time questioning the degrading and impoverishing work that has been at the heart of industrial capitalism from the outset, and where the auto industry has been at the forefront of exploitation, from the first division of labour at Ford's assembly line to the hyper-Taylorism developed at Toyota and spread worldwide as “lean production.”

In my opinion, the most important reason to raise the issue of conversion as a response to the double crisis of the economy and the environment is its collective nature. This kind of process is not possible on a local level alone. The auto-industrial complex is too big, and the things we could replace present production with – like wind turbines or railway equipment – need decisions and investments on a social level to guarantee the output. All this points to the need for nationalizing the industry and putting it under social control.

Its present captains, thoroughly drilled in the art of profit maximization, are not the kind needed on the bridge when we undertake the complex maneuver of turning this big ship into the new course of socially and environmentally necessary production. The fight for conversion has to have strong shop floor roots, both for political and practical reasons. After all, it's we who are running the machine today. Who would be better positioned to lead and oversee the conversion? It's important to stress that autoworkers are not, of course, the climate conscience of the world. We're no better or more inclined to make sacrifices for the common good than the next person. But that's not the question.

In the spring of 2008, as the financial crisis was gaining steam, I took part in a debate on national Swedish radio with, among others, the Swedish minister for enterprise and energy, Maud Olofsson. When I spoke in favor of converting the auto industry, the journalist asked me if I wasn't cutting off the branch I was sitting on. I answered that it's the other way around: if we cling to the present unsustainable production and act as a support group for the owners of the industry (a time-honored tradition of our union leaders) – that is cutting off the branch we're sitting on.

With a strategy for conversion, on the other hand, we in the auto industry can be a crucial part of solving the most important task of our time – not by sacrificing ourselves but by fighting for our own immediate interests.

The climate issue in itself is so immense that we tend to be unwilling to think of it at all, since we wouldn't know what to do about the whole thing, resulting in a kind of “socially organized denial.” Even if we accept that things must change, the scope of change needed easily induces a sense of powerlessness. The people most of us think should fix this kind of problem – politicians, industrial leaders, other representatives of the present order – are obviously not doing it. So how could we then do anything? Conversion of our jobs could be a way to put the issue inside everyday reality, within reach for workers, as opposed to looking to distant “world leaders” and “experts” to fix things for us.

Industries ravaged by corporate elites should be transformed into a common asset that produces value for society, not profit for private owners. This also makes the demand for conversion and climate jobs a transitional demand, starting in the most immediate material needs, connecting them to the long-term needs of humanity, questioning the right of a small minority to decide our fates.

The Future: Commitments and Mobilizations

And now? What, then, was the outcome of the promising alliance in Warsaw, the commitment by unions to mobilize people, push governments, and transform the economy? It's probably fair to say that the overwhelming majority of unions have so far failed not only to mobilize their members, but to address the climate issue at all. The leadership has not tried to integrate climate change into everyday union work.

Granted, there are a few examples: the union participation in the big climate demonstration in New York; the climate program adopted by the International Transportation Federation; the unions supporting climate job campaigns in Great Britain, South Africa, and Norway.

But these are exceptions, each with their own history and with no link to the lofty declarations from Warsaw. And in most cases, they too lack the necessary connections to the rank-and-file struggle that is and must always be the backbone of a union's strength.

In the ongoing preparations for the alternative activities around COP 21 in Paris, there are unions involved alongside environmental activists. Climate jobs are on the alternative agenda. But so far, it's mostly individuals who are driving the issue in unions and it's seldom built from the rank-and-file level. It's also easily drowned out in competition with “real” union business.

The powers that be have failed to solve the climate question. They are neither willing nor able to challenge the dominance of fossil capital and the process of accumulation of capital that drive this economic system as well as global warming. The change has to come in confrontation with their power, from below. Demonstrations and gatherings by activists in the streets are all fine, but not enough. The fight has to involve millions of people in our everyday life. The case for conversion is about turning every possible workplace into a battleground against climate change. •

Lars Henriksson is a Swedish auto worker, unionist activist, and author of the 2011 book Slutkört. This article first appeared on theJacobin website.

The Limits of the Sharing Economy

                                                Comments due by Oct. 16, 2015

(Is it practical to think about global welfare without thinking about a serious redistribution of wealth? GK )

The Catholic Church and the United Nations sometimes sound like idle dreamers. But Pope Francis’ concern for “the well-being of individuals and of peoples”, as he put it to the U.S. Congress last month, is actually quite practical. So are the 69 U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Both target the area where economics and finance have so far failed.

For anyone who thinks all people deserve the same opportunities, the state of the world is scandalous. One-fifth of the global population suffers from hunger and malnutrition. Larger portions lack clean water, have little education and live in the midst of toxic levels of pollution.

The components of prosperity are well enough understood to end all of these global-scale tragedies. But people just don’t think globally. Resources, products, ideas and human beings move more or less freely around the world, but economic solidarity still doesn’t.

Consider a prosperous family in a Detroit suburb. Its economic community is global. It extends well past inner city Motown. It reaches to India, Iraq and Mexico, the countries which Global Detroit consultants say contribute the largest number of immigrants to the region. Indeed, it reaches to anywhere in the world the prosperous family might consider visiting.

Suburban Detroiters might say they already struggle to find much solidarity with poor Detroit city, just a few miles away. They are quite right. It is always a struggle to think bigger. It is more natural to think selfishly, or to promote the good of a smaller community – a family, a tribe, a nation or some shareholders. Technology companies like AirBnB and eBay get people to think of distant strangers as peers, but where overall prosperity is concerned the sharing economy still runs up against limits.

The welfare state shows that people can learn to expand their horizons. Systems designed to protect, nurture and equalise take the idea of solidarity and extend it to everyone inside the national borders.

Mobile phones are another example. While nations once jealously guarded domestic producers and technology, the industry is now global. The same mobile handsets are sold almost everywhere, and the raw materials, parts and expertise which create those phones are gathered from almost everywhere. Apple and Samsung design smartphones to be used in Angola as well as America. A similar reliance on global commonality is seen in aircraft, mining, cars, software and pharmaceuticals.

Finance, meanwhile, hasn’t lived up to expectations. Institutions which can safely move funds from place to place have been supporting traders for centuries. More recently, banks and other intermediaries have become more global in their approach to investments. But the record is mixed. Financial globalisation has been marred by recurring problems with trade imbalances, excessive third-world debts, and rapacious demands on poor countries.

Organisations can do more. The United Nations, the World Bank and many specialised bodies are already quite global. In the economy, they spread cash, high standards and noble aspirations. The new Sustainable Development Goals are a good example of the last. These multinational institutions can be expanded. They can also be encouraged to focus on the most needy. If every leading university and research institute adopted a counterpart in a poor country, the gains could be significant. Funds would be found once the global solidarity mindset prevailed.

Multinational companies already do a lot of global sharing, but they too could do more. Shareholders would have to get used to getting only cash left over after increased spending on solidarity. That already happens in the mining sector, where most governments only approve projects which include expensive commitments to local communities. Even if shareholder value purists may not like to admit it, companies already have obligations to their communities which take precedence over profit-seeking. For example, shareholders only get the cash left over after taxes are paid.

There are undoubtedly many other ways to help bring the economic world closer together. Ideas will really start flowing freely when most people decide that global solidarity is more of an obligation than an aspiration. The warm welcome Germany is giving to refugees from Syria and Afghanistan is a moving example of how an enlarged definition of “who we are” changes behaviour.

However, as yet such neighbourly sentiment rarely crosses political borders. That could change. A good way to start the process is to plan to tear down some of the national walls around welfare states. That might sound a stretch. French voters, for example, would never approve combining their government-funded medical system with the comparable arrangement in Bangladesh.

Still, smaller steps towards a welfare world-state are quite possible. A large universal fund for disaster relief might be a good start. The misery caused by floods and wars brings sympathy in rich countries and drags down development in poor ones. Besides, the World Bank has already started, with a Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance facility. It could be expanded. A more ambitious initiative would be a global medical training plan, funded by national contributions set according to wealth and disbursed across the nations according to need. Cross-border migration could be another frontier for shared global policies and funding.

Global welfare might sound like a pipe dream. Then again, universal national pensions, healthcare and unemployment benefits were considered crackpot notions not that long ago. These days, people are encouraged to think big. Nothing in the economy is bigger or better than global solidarity.(Edward Hadas)