Mike Hulme & The Hartwell Paper
Mike Hulme, founding director of the UK's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and author of "Why We Disagree about Climate Change," joins a group of 14 coauthors on "The Hartwell Paper," published by Oxford University's Institute for Science, Innovation and Society and the London School of Economics Mackinder Programme.
Hulme writes in a BBC op-ed, "After the crash - a new direction for climate policy":
Climate change has been represented as a conventional environmental "problem" that is capable of being "solved." It is neither of these.
Yet this framing has locked the world into the rigid agenda that brought us to the dead end of Kyoto, with no evidence of any discernable acceleration of decarbonisation whatsoever. ...
Fossil carbon emissions contribute only about 45% of the human forcing of the climate system. We should not allow the difficulty of decarbonising energy technologies to hold hostage moves for addressing the other 55%. Instead, we should aggressively pursue a diversity of public health, welfare and sustainability goals, recognising the climate co-benefits of doing so. … We need to stimulate new thinking for enabling societies better to manage climate risks that they face today.
From "The Hartwell Paper":
Rather than being a discrete problem to be solved, climate change is better understood as a persistent condition that must be coped with and can only be partially managed more – or less – well. ...
[A] distinctive characteristic of the climate change debate has been of scientists claiming with the authority of their position that their results dictated particular policies; of policy makers claiming that their preferred choices were dictated by science, and both acting as if ‘science’ and ‘policy’ were simply and rigidly linked as if it were a matter of escaping from the path of an oncoming tornado. ...
Politics is not about maximising rationality. It is about finding compromises that enough people can tolerate to allow society to take steps in the right direction. So, contrary to all our modern instincts, political progress on climate change simply cannot be solved by injecting more scientific information into politics. ...
We believe that we should begin with the actions that can command the broadest assent and achieve the quickest results. Once there are some palpable achievements to show, we believe that a constituency of public trust may be rebuilt and that a constituency of public permission may grow. ...
[W]e propose a low hypothecated carbon tax that is not justified on the basis of trying to alter short-term consumption behaviour as the once popular “Cap & Trade” approach hoped to do…. [O]ur strategy is more modest and specific. Under it, the political priority of governments would switch from the preoccupation with emissions targets under the previous “Kyoto” regime to credible long-term global commitments and methods to invest in energy innovation. ...
[T]he all-inclusive “Kyoto” type of climate policy as it had become by late 2009, needs to be broken up into separate issues again, each addressed on its merits and each in its own ways. Adaptation, forests, biodiversity, air quality, equity and the many other disparate agendas that have been attached to the climate issue must again stand on their own. We believe that this will, in many cases, make the possibility of political action more likely than has been the circumstance in recent years when carbon policy was asked to pull the whole load of our aspirations for a better future.
