UN Climate Talks in China

There are UN talks in Tianjin, China right now, a meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Bloomberg

Among the sticking points are a demand by countries for Chinese commitments to more aggressive emissions cuts as well as for China to accept more stringent verification of its climate change mitigation, said Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman of the National Reform Development Commission of China, the country’s top economic planner.

Some countries tried to tie those conditions to financial assistance to the least developed countries, he told reporters through a translator today.

Developed nations have pledged $30 billion in short-term financing from 2010 to 2012, $2 billion of which still needs to be sourced, Figueres said. The outline of a longer-term climate fund could also be agreed upon in Cancun, she said.

The negotiations around targets for rapidly developing nations like China and for financial transfers are relevant to my research for the Climate Collaboratorium. I have been working on making it possible to see simulations of economic impacts of climate mitigations for different regions.

Copenhagen Analysis by MIT panel

MIT recently had an event assessing the outcome of the Cop15 Climate Conference. It was a pretty positive spin on things. It sounded like a very interesting talk, and I will post the video when it becomes available. Panelists include Ernest Moniz, MIT Energy Initiative Director, Robert Stavins, professor of business and government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Michael Greenstone, MIT Environmental Economist who was chief economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisors for the past year, Steven Ansolabehere, professor of political science at MIT and Harvard, Edward Steinfeld, director of the MIT-China program and associate professor of political science, and Henry Jacoby, co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and professor of management at MIT Sloan.

We had Michael Greenstone speak at the Big Picture Panel event, and Ed Steinfeld was my China policy professor.

MIT's Copenhagen delegation

from MIT News John Sterman led the MIT delegation.

On Dec. 11, John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor in Computer Science at the Sloan School of Management and delegation leader for the MIT group in Copenhagen, will speak about C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support), a computer simulation program that emerged from research at MIT. The simulation model can quickly calculate the climate impacts from mitigation proposals that are presented during the climate change talks.

Throughout the conference, Sterman and his team of modelers and researchers, including four MIT alums — Tom Fiddaman PhD ’97, Travis Franck SM ’05, PhD ’09, Andrew Jones SM ’97 and Beth Sawin PhD ’96 — are providing a “climate scoreboard” that uses the C-ROADS model to assess the likely change in global mean temperature resulting from all the emissions reductions proposals offered by the nations of the world. Sterman’s group is from Climate Interactive, a joint project of MIT, the non-profit Sustainability Institute and Ventana Systems Inc., a software and consulting firm founded by MIT alumni.

Copenhagen Analysis

Good analysis from the Breakthrough Institute on the problem with Copenhagen. It is similar to the comment that Fallows published. Maybe they are the same people, though.

Commandeering Words

Today I found out that a "wicked problem" is a technical term in the field of social planning that refers to

a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.

"super wicked problems" are wicked problems where

Time is running out.
There is no central authority.
Those seeking to solve the problem are also causing it.

the cited example is global climate change. hahaha

China vs. Copenhagen

I turn to James Fallows from the Atlantic for more analysis on the hubbub over China wrecking the Copenhagen climate talks.

The comments of the original article are very interesting, actually. For one thing, very few people support the author's version of what happened.

notbored writes

The fact of having been present somewhere is obviously a powerful device to employ to lend credibility to your account, and Lynas is playing that particular card to the full here. Yet various aspects of his account amount to little more than his own guesswork. He has no idea what China's overall "agenda" was, particularly as it conerned the PR battle with NGOs and Western leaders. He has no idea what Sudan's overall motivations were. He is offering his own speculative interpretation of events, and giving it rhetorical force with the vocal declaration that "I was there". But the mere fact of presence does not give you the ability to read minds. And that is what most of this account (read it carefully) consists of.

Other parts of this account give cause for serious skepticism. Mark suggests, extraordinarily, that the US's offer was "serious" - even though, as David Wearing has very rightly pointed out above, all they were offering was a 4% cut on the 1990 baseline, and in the context of all the issues of historical responsibility, equity and relative per capita emissions we should all be well aware of by now. It's not difficult to see how and why that might reasonably be construed as a pretty insulting offer.

Mark also suggests that the US "was obviously prepared to up its offer". So what's the evidence for this? It certainly seems to conflict with the details reported by this paper in the late stages of the summit, which point to the fact that the US was simply not budging on what it had already offered. If there's real, substantive evidence to the contrary I'd love to hear it, but all we seem to have at the moment is Mark's reading of what was "obvious". And given his highly flattering reading of what was "serious" in the US's proposal, I'm frankly inclined to take that with more than a pinch of salt.

Copenhagen

I haven't really been following, and it was surprisingly difficult to find the official site, haha. http://en.cop15.dk/