Climate talks end without… any coverage
The UN Climate Talks which ran from 2-13 June in Bonn, Germany, to pave the way for a new agreement on how to tackle climate change, have ended with no national or regional UK press coverage.
The opening and close of the climate debate was covered by the wires (Reuters, AFP), by the Chinese news agency Xinhua, and by WWF the wildlife charity. Reuters reported from the middle of the debate on the “lack of leadership from Western countries” (surely a story worth reporting?), as did the WWF. In the UK, the talks were announced by just one newspaper. Fiona McCloud, writing in the Scotsman on June 1, opened her news piece (500 words, page 6) with:
CRUCIAL climate-change talks get underway today to discuss the next steps the international community needs to take to tackle global warming. Some 2,000 delegates from 162 countries and dozens of specialist agencies will gather… to get into the nuts and bolts of a new global-warming agreement meant to take effect after 2012.
Note that word: Crucial. Fiona got it right–what is decided in this conference and those to follow is one of the, if not the, most significant piece of lawmaking of our future societies. But as Reuters, AFP and Xinhua all reported, the outlook is not good: Read more
Development of a story: carbon credits
Good news in a way today, in environment reporting terms at least, that comes about through a story focused on a waste of environmental activity and money.
Bad news first
That is, as John Vidal writes today in the Guardian, billions are being wasted on projects funded through the UN Climate Programme. Following the work of two Stanford academics, Vidal reports:
the UN’s main offset fund [the Clean Development Mechanism] is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission reduction credits for projects that should not qualify. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.
Programmes need to be additional to planned activity or planned CO2 reductions to qualify for this programme. But as the authors of the study, by David Victor and his colleague Michael Wara, found,
nearly every new hydro, wind and natural gas-fired plant expected to be built in China in the next four years is applying for CDM credits, even though it is Chinese policy to encourage these industries. “Traders are finding ways of gaining credits that they would never have had before. You will never know accurately, but rich countries are clearly overpaying by a massive amount,” said Victor.
A silver lining in reporting
The good news is that this story has moved up from its apperance as an opinion piece, last Wednesday, written by International Rivers NGO director Patrick McCully, to today’s front page story. The issue has gained traction in the Guardian newsroom, picked up by Vidal, shifting from specialist to mainstream, and having more chance of pushing the issue–which I began following about six or seven years ago, through my work with OneWorld and then ID21–into public consciousness. It means that there is further opportunity to check the veracity of the story, and make calls to the UN and the UK government, which Vidal does. Both dispute the study by the academics.
Story development to bring about breakthrough issues
Story development is a standard practice in reporting, as is the promoting of certain stories from the specialist sections, e.g. environment, into the mainstream news agenda. Interestingly, for those of us scanning and researching, the opinion headline (’Discredited strategy’, which did not need to be specific about its subject because of appearing in the environment section) has changed to ‘Billions wasted on UN climate programme’, which means the theme is set at the headline level, not within the story. In today’s news consumption practices, this is critical (think RSS feeds, scanning online, and the time poor lunchtime executive).
A piece of research I’ve been reading recently (and writing about a fair bit) by Hargreaves, Lewis and Speers (2003, PDF), clearly identifies the importance of bringing the key themes of climate change out of the domain of science and into the mainstream, where it is more likely to connect with public opinion and public policy. Research from Neil Gavin at the University of Liverpool (to be published) also touches on the subject of the coverage of emissions trading, suggesting, in a different direction, that it is a broader European media issue. And one, I’d argue, it is important for the British intelligent press to champion.
What next?
I hope that Vidal will take the next step and keep quoting the academics, not just the new studies but also the historical research that would help keep the issue (emissions trading specifically, climate change in general) under scrutiny, where it needs to be. And get the story on the front page again when it’s not a bank holiday. A special news investigation on emissions trading impacts?
Green capitalism and democracy
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is one of three ‘flexible mechanisms’ that allows signatories of the Kyoto Protocol (all developed countries) to purchase ‘credits’ which they can then ’spend’ by investing in clean energy projects in the developing world.
On April 15th last month, the CDM approved its 1,000th project. Analysis and disclosure of its impacts is of critical importance, argued Patrick McCully in the Guardian on Wednesday, because a system intended to help reduce CO2 is instead supporting polluting and often corrupt programmes to benefit from huge pots of money.
According to McCully,
evidence is accumulating that it is increasing greenhouse gas emissions behind the guise of promoting sustainable development. The misguided mechanism is handing out billions of dollars to chemical, coal and oil corporations and the developers of destructive dams - in many cases for projects they would have built anyway.
Green Capitalism
Sociologists of the Ecological Modernization school would call emissions trading a mechanism of ‘green capitalism’, a paradigm of capitalism where “production processes are increasingly constructed using ecological criteria” (Mol and Sonnenfield, 2000: 4). As referenced by Constance Lever-Tracy in the latest issue of Current Sociology, this school was influenced by Huber’s arguments in the 1980s “that a green capitalism was both possible and desirable” (Lever-Tracy 2008: 458).
But green capitalism is failing the environment. And its mechanisms are receiving limited coverage in the media to help the public to make informed judgements on important environmental issues. Is the paucity of media coverage contributing to a lack of democratically accountability? Read more
Neuroscience and the Kyoto Protocol Pt2
I believe a method that approaches the Kyoto Protocol (and other international agreements) as an ‘object of research’(.doc) (Fairclough, 2000) through the application of neuroscientific understanding would show that such documents of law, the environment, politics and of the international, can be read as indicators of the individual and collective human executive functions of the brains of the people involved in agreeing the documents.
This would encompass the negotiators but most explicitly the politicians, but would not exlcude the other influencers, including the electorate, NGO, business and media. Documents such as the Kyoto Protocol are then moments of illumination of the collective workings of the higher cognitive functions of those involved in their decisions and agreements; and because the extent that these decisions reach as far as the electorate, their collective higher cognition should be taken into account in the analysis.
Well, so that’s the hypothesis. And it turns around the crux of reciprocity as I suggested in an earlier post. The point is that reciprocity in human congitive behaviour and its influence on decision-making is a function of the higher cognitive executive system in the human brain, parts such as the human striatum, as reported by Alan Sanfey, and which have a significant role in social decisions whether or not to reciprocate (Science, 2007). From where I turn to read this:
Nations and individuals typically are unwilling to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions unilaterally, because in doing so they would pay the full price of abatement but gain only a fraction of the benefits. Indeed their sacrifice may be futile if other actors do not exhibit a similar constraint.
Harrison and Sundstrom (2007)
Here, for self-interest, the authors could be seen to say Read more
The Kyoto Protocol / human striatum enigma
Here’s an interesting one: quoting from an article in Science from October 2007 that I just got round to reading:
neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that the striatum tracks a social partner’s decision to reciprocate or not reciprocate cooperation, appearing to encode abstract rewards such as the positive feeling garnered by mutual cooperation. (600)
The striatum provides a common-reward metric for decisions that offer rewards/outcomes in different modalities. That is, it offers a base equivalent, a converter, to measure the different, abstract, rewards. Particularly for social reciprocity.
Now, from the Kyoto Protocol:
The Parties included in Annex I shall, individually or jointly, ensure that their aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gases listed in Annex A do not exceed their assigned amounts… [etc.]
Now I know this is back of the beer mat theorizing, but all ideas start somewhere. So. The Kyoto Protocol is, if anything, a contract for reciprocity - we will cut emissions if you will. And not only are the different greenhouse gases made into carbon dioxide ‘equivalents’ (e.g. methane, nitrous oxide, all measured up against the CO2 factor), what is fascinating is that the rewards for reciprocity have also been, at some level, turned into their financial equivalent: hence, carbon trading.
I believe that what we do at the global, international, mass multitude level, can be thought through not just the metaphors that neuroscience brings us, but the actual science: that what happens when countries come together to agree the equivalents and reciprocation of an international agreement is no different, or an amplified record, of what is going on in the human brain for the same factors.
There is a way that neuroscience can illiuminate the abstract social processes of not only people but the structures of people: countries, governments, international agreements. It is this which fascinates me so much about the study of neuroscience and its application to the meta-narratives of our society. More on this as I develop the thoughts and do my research.
