In a recent interview by McKinsey managers in Brussels to economists Nicholas Stern Chair at London School of Economics and Michael Grubb, along with European Commissioner Janez Potočnik, they discussed their views on prospects for a global climate deal at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009.
We selected here wat we considered a brief of the most important definitions
Nicholas Stern: We have to make the agreement, which will guide the world economy after Kyoto, guide the international understandings on climate change after Kyoto. If we miss it, we will undermine confidence in the carbon markets, which will be of vital importance in getting this whole set of investments—which are necessary—going. So, 2009 is a vital year. What we see is the biggest technological opportunity that we’ve had for a very long time—as big as the railways, as big as electricity, as big as the motorcar, and most recently, information technology.
It’s the opportunity to go for low-carbon growth. And we understand, roughly speaking, what technologies are needed. Some of them will be very quick, like insulating houses, promoting energy efficiency, and that will put unemployed construction workers back into work now, this year. Others, like bringing forward infrastructure investment, take a little longer.
Nicholas Stern: We have to make the agreement, which will guide the world economy after Kyoto, guide the international understandings on climate change after Kyoto. If we miss it, we will undermine confidence in the carbon markets, which will be of vital importance in getting this whole set of investments—which are necessary—going. So, 2009 is a vital year. What we see is the biggest technological opportunity that we’ve had for a very long time—as big as the railways, as big as electricity, as big as the motorcar, and most recently, information technology.
It’s the opportunity to go for low-carbon growth. And we understand, roughly speaking, what technologies are needed. Some of them will be very quick, like insulating houses, promoting energy efficiency, and that will put unemployed construction workers back into work now, this year. Others, like bringing forward infrastructure investment, take a little longer.
The idea that the economic crisis takes precedence over the climate crisis just misses the point about how we can put our policies on these two things together in a very constructive way.
So we can be much more energy efficient. We can insulate our homes and get unemployed construction workers back into work. Those are the kinds of ways in which we can put things together.
A second one is that there are always collections of vested interests, people who have a vested interest in the high-carbon economy. And that’s not just the oil producers. It’s also the people who make the cars, the people who are driving the coal industry, and so on.
Thirdly, we really have to show developing countries—those of us who live in the rich world—that we ourselves mean business, that we’re not just asking them to do things and not doing things ourselves. In that discussion, we have to ask how we can support them in moving to a path of low-carbon growth.
It’s not there’s an opportunity to do it now. It’s that there are actual, real dangers in not doing it now—huge dangers in delay. [President] Obama is very clear on the challenges that we have. He’s been talking very clearly about the need for a green stimulus. He’s been talking very clearly about the scale of cuts which the US should commit to: 80 percent reductions between 1990 and 2050. Europe continues to move forward. China is now discussing its 12th five-year plan, starting in January 2011. And President Hu Jintao has argued that low-carbon growth must be a key theme, the key theme, in that plan.
Michael Grubb: I think there’s quite a few big steps that need to be taken between now and Copenhagen. And that is still against a backdrop of my expectations being, say, a bit lower than some of the commentators out there. I mean, I think that there’s no question the US election has changed the atmosphere. I would put two big ones before any others; one of which is that currently we’ve got the really odd situation where we’ve got an ongoing political process to try to set emission targets for most of the industrialized world and a separate political process with the US sort of indicating it’s probably willing to negotiate a target, but it’s not clear what that could be or remotely how it could get it through the political system in time for Copenhagen. There’s huge reluctance to set a target globally and then try to tell the US Congress, because it doesn’t work that way around terribly well. So, I think the biggest thing is for the US to officially say it will rejoin the global group of industrialized countries that set quantified caps post-2012; and that it will sign up to the majority of the architecture involved in that and to some of the mechanisms behind that, including some of the flexibility.
The other big one, intimately bound up with that, is: where’s China going? What will China really put on the table? Clearly, it cannot stay in the same position as the whole of the rest of G77.
A lot of people are wondering how the financial crisis is going to hit the climate change agenda. To be honest, I still find it very hard to read.
So we can be much more energy efficient. We can insulate our homes and get unemployed construction workers back into work. Those are the kinds of ways in which we can put things together.
A second one is that there are always collections of vested interests, people who have a vested interest in the high-carbon economy. And that’s not just the oil producers. It’s also the people who make the cars, the people who are driving the coal industry, and so on.
Thirdly, we really have to show developing countries—those of us who live in the rich world—that we ourselves mean business, that we’re not just asking them to do things and not doing things ourselves. In that discussion, we have to ask how we can support them in moving to a path of low-carbon growth.
It’s not there’s an opportunity to do it now. It’s that there are actual, real dangers in not doing it now—huge dangers in delay. [President] Obama is very clear on the challenges that we have. He’s been talking very clearly about the need for a green stimulus. He’s been talking very clearly about the scale of cuts which the US should commit to: 80 percent reductions between 1990 and 2050. Europe continues to move forward. China is now discussing its 12th five-year plan, starting in January 2011. And President Hu Jintao has argued that low-carbon growth must be a key theme, the key theme, in that plan.
Michael Grubb: I think there’s quite a few big steps that need to be taken between now and Copenhagen. And that is still against a backdrop of my expectations being, say, a bit lower than some of the commentators out there. I mean, I think that there’s no question the US election has changed the atmosphere. I would put two big ones before any others; one of which is that currently we’ve got the really odd situation where we’ve got an ongoing political process to try to set emission targets for most of the industrialized world and a separate political process with the US sort of indicating it’s probably willing to negotiate a target, but it’s not clear what that could be or remotely how it could get it through the political system in time for Copenhagen. There’s huge reluctance to set a target globally and then try to tell the US Congress, because it doesn’t work that way around terribly well. So, I think the biggest thing is for the US to officially say it will rejoin the global group of industrialized countries that set quantified caps post-2012; and that it will sign up to the majority of the architecture involved in that and to some of the mechanisms behind that, including some of the flexibility.
The other big one, intimately bound up with that, is: where’s China going? What will China really put on the table? Clearly, it cannot stay in the same position as the whole of the rest of G77.
A lot of people are wondering how the financial crisis is going to hit the climate change agenda. To be honest, I still find it very hard to read.
Janez Potočnik: The success is obviously getting a global agreement. I think it is obviously clear to everybody that this is a global challenge and we are breathing the same air and we don’t have any other choice than to deal with that together. But it’s also obvious that some of us are more responsible for this situation than the others. But that does not change the fact that, if we don’t work together—developed and developing [countries]—if we don’t commit to the same goal, then we will certainly not change the reality in which we are stuck.We would like that, in Copenhagen, we would get a global agreement, in which major things would be agreed about how we deal with the questions of the future. I think it’s from everything: from understanding it, mitigating it, accommodating it, technologies, and so on. These are many of the issues. But certainly, there will be the issue of developing countries and developing technology for them. And I think many of these are commonly known. So, I do believe that climate change, that this crisis, is certainly more of an opportunity for the changes which we try to do.
In the technology area, there are just as many questions. I think energy efficiency is of course one of the utmost short-term focuses because it is obvious that it is the cheapest way and the fastest way to get some of the solutions which we would like.
It’s also a question of energy prices. My personal belief is that all these changes which we talk about are hard to be done in a low-energy price kind of a system. But we can more boldly think of what technologies can help us bridging some of the troubles which we have today; from CCS [(carbon, capture, and storage)]—which is a bit closer, I would say, in time span—to fusion, which is probably the most distant. But there are many things in between, connected to various renewable solutions or questions which are related to the hydrogen fuel cell center, all that.
We work on all that because we simply believe that there is no magical solution at this very point. You can’t put, as people used to say, all your eggs in one basket. So, we simply spread them out. We believe that we have to work practically in all these directions with enough attention.
Getting an agreement is a win, not getting an agreement is a loss.
It’s also a question of energy prices. My personal belief is that all these changes which we talk about are hard to be done in a low-energy price kind of a system. But we can more boldly think of what technologies can help us bridging some of the troubles which we have today; from CCS [(carbon, capture, and storage)]—which is a bit closer, I would say, in time span—to fusion, which is probably the most distant. But there are many things in between, connected to various renewable solutions or questions which are related to the hydrogen fuel cell center, all that.
We work on all that because we simply believe that there is no magical solution at this very point. You can’t put, as people used to say, all your eggs in one basket. So, we simply spread them out. We believe that we have to work practically in all these directions with enough attention.
Getting an agreement is a win, not getting an agreement is a loss.
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