Contraction & Convergence: The Global Solution to Climate Change
Aubrey Meyer
Reviewed by David Cromwell
(Schumacher Briefing No. 5)
Green Books (Totnes), 2000
94pp., ISBN 1-870098-94-3
Human-induced climate change is the greatest environmental threat today. Rising to this terrible challenge means overturning the global apartheid between rich and poor. For example, the United States, with a twentieth of the world's population, usurps a quarter of the global atmosphere to dump its pollution. Such inequity motivates this book's author: Aubrey Meyer, a musician who grew up in South Africa. In 1990, Meyer helped found the London-based Global Commons Institute to promote a simple and powerful concept that may yet break the deadlock of climate negotiations.
Simply put, everyone in the world has an equal right to emit greenhouse gas emissions. First, take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figure of 60 per cent cuts to stabilise global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by 2100. Second, calculate the level of pollution each nation should be allowed. The book's eye-catching computer graphics illustrate past emissions and future allocation of emissions by country, achieving per capita equality by 2030. Emissions thereafter fall to reach safe levels by 2100. Climate damage will still result, but disaster should be averted. Global emissions trading of per capita shares will ease transition costs to a zero-emissions lifestyle, Meyer argues.
This 'contraction and convergence' (C&C) framework has gathered the support of a majority of the world's countries, including China and India. It may be the only approach that developing countries are willing to accept. That, in turn, may spur even the US to ratify the Kyoto protocol. However, Meyer warns that the 'sub-global framework' of the protocol with its 'guesswork' of market mechanisms and 'inadequate' cuts 'could prove worse than useless' because the public would be lulled into a false sense of security 'that something is at last being done'. Meyer's argument is powerful, fuelled by compassion for the poor.
The crux of the matter is whether grassroots support for global equity will defeat the powerful elite interests that currently enjoy the status quo. As one US delegate put it: 'We won the Cold War. Contraction & Convergence is Communism'!
Communism or not, accepting C&C would require that the developed world eschews dirty economic growth. If global weather-related damage continues its present trend of doubling every 7 years, then by around 2050 the costs of climate change could exceed the total value of everything that humanity produced over one year. Has global capitalism finally destroyed itself by its own success? Let's hope so.
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