One of the aims of the roundtable was to ascertain what the community believed to be the most important ways to address the challenge of climate change and education came out on top of the list.
The community's insight was reiterated moments after the roundtable when I was approached by a group of grade 11 students who were the leaders of their school's environmental group. One of the questions they had for me was: what is COP 17? They did not know and yet they attended one of the top schools in South Africa. That probably would have shocked me considerably, had it not been for my experience volunteering in township schools on various different educational field trips and workshops where I continually discover learners quite unaware of what climate change is. I know that the Eastern Cape is a disaster area when it comes to education, but nonetheless I am appalled that so many learners do not know about one of the most important issues of their time, as well as about the conference their government is spending R350m hosting. What makes this even more unacceptable is that this is occurring across the Eastern Cape which is likely to suffer from the effects of climate change and where many are already citing climatic irregularities.
In light of this gap in education I thought I would write a brief introduction to COP 17 in the hope of shedding some critical light on the matter. Let me start, as philosophers like to do, with a thought experiment - adapted from John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance. Throughout I will assume a basic knowledge of climate change and an acceptance of the scientific consensus on humanity's role in inducing global warming. Imagine that you are the architect of the global response to climate change - a climate dictator or even climator if you will. However, you don't have knowledge as to which generation, group, class, nationality or gender you will be after you have constructed the response (and if you're a deep ecologist you can also add species to this list). Because of this ignorance you are no longer biased towards any of the categories mentioned, and are thus an impartial architect. Let's go through some of the considerations you will have to take into account as a climator:
Firstly, in order to stop dangerous human interference with the climate system there is a global carbon budget of about 870 Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent between now and 2100, which needs to be distributed fairly in order to keep CO2 levels at below 450 parts per million and temperature increases below 2'C. This would mean that globally we will have to reduce our CO2 emissions by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. But in reality last year a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon was created by the burning of fossil fuels, which is 40% higher than 1990 levels according to the IEA. Because of this budget only about a third of economically recoverable oil, gas and coal reserves can be burned, an amount of fossil fuel that would be burned by 2029 if consumption remains at today's levels. However, in clear denial of the gravity of this situation over $400 billion is still being used to subsidize the use of fossil fuel in comparison to $57 billion for renewable energy.
You will also have to consider that developed countries have already benefitted substantially from fossil fuels, and through doing so have contributed significantly to greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Developing countries on the other hand, with 80% of the world's population, have contributed only 1/5 of historic global emissions according to the Global Carbon Project. However, developing countries, especially the BRICS group, are playing a more significant role through increased emissions. A lot of those increased emissions, however, are being used to create goods for the developed world. Nonetheless, despite the difference in historic emissions climate change is a global problem and requires international cooperation especially from the developed and rapidly developing countries.
Given this need for global cooperation you will need to survey the global political scene to see what the possibilities are to create a response that will allow us to stay within our budget. Of course as an impartial climator I am assuming you will want to share the budget fairly among the global community now and into the future… that is where things start to get tricky. India, China and the USA, in order to protect their own carbon-laden interests, are among just some of the countries bringing global negotiations to a deadlock as they do not want to adopt legally binding emissions reductions. The European Union has somewhat valiantly declared their willingness to implement emissions reductions, but even that depends on USA China and India, for alone there actions won't be enough as any meaningful agreement cannot be made without the cooperation of the USA (at 20.1 tonnes per capita), and China and India (with 6.1 and 1.5 tonnes respectively and growing). Together their emissions are too significant to leave out of a global deal. Because of this deadlock and many other stumbling blocks encountered during global negotiations, much of the developed world is now pushing for a delay in securing a new globally binding agreement until as late as 2020. The current legally binding emissions treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, expires next year and is by any means insufficient to stay within our carbon budget. So it seems we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Read the full report here.
Source: by Alex Lenferna, The Adopt A Negotiator Project.
