Finland and Sweden revive debates on NATO membership.
VALENTINA POP, September 1, 2008, the EUobserver.

Until recently, discussion of possible NATO membership has not been a lively political topic in neutral Finland and Sweden, but Russia’s actions in Georgia have encouraged those who back membership to become more vocal.

“We need to reconsider our security policy,” said the Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb in an interview with Austria’s Die Presse on Saturday, August 30, 2008.

Traditional conflicts are making a comeback in the post-9/11 era - he argued - saying Finland needs to begin to consider NATO membership, that the Georgian conflict has highlighted the UN’s problems and the need for a more active security policy.

***

“The talk about how nothing has changed is inconceivable to me,” said the conservative Mr Stubb, who represents the smaller coalition party in the government.

“It makes sense now to take into consideration a NATO bid. The time for a decision in this regard has not come yet, but we need to be flexible and quickly adapt our security policy. This must not take place in slow motion.”

In Sweden, the liberal People’s Party – a government coalition partner - is also trying to launch a NATO membership debate.

Allan Widman, the party’s foreign policy spokesman, championed his country’s membership to NATO in an interview with the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

The People’s Party has always been in favour of membership, but respected the coalition agreement not to place the topic on the public agenda. This has changed since the Russian invasion of Georgia.

The leader of the Social-Democrat opposition strongly rejects Sweden’s NATO bid, however. The Scandinavian country has had a long tradition of being a neutral country, even though neighbours Denmark and Norway are part of the Western security alliance.

Finnish NATO split: In Finland, Mr Stubb was appointed earlier this year as foreign minister, after being a member of the European Parliament for four years. He is a vocal supporter of his country’s membership in NATO but promised to be reserved on the issue in his new job, due to internal division within the governing coalition.

The Centre Party lead by Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen is split on the issue, as are the Social Democrats.

The current president, Social Democrat Tarja Halonen, is a strong opponent of the NATO bid. Her mandate ends in 2012.

Finland has a 1,200 km long border with Russia, something that caused much consternation for Finnish foreign policy during the Cold War. The country inched closer to NATO in March when it announced its intention to join future operations of the alliance’s rapid reaction force. It has developed technical capacities alongside NATO for several years and would be ready to join quickly if the decision was made.

*****

We visited him on his boat right here in New York, then later in Tel Aviv. He was one of a kind. His bringing ice cream to the children of Gaza did not end the will to fight - but showed that it is possible to be humane.
Yes, we know, some of the children that got his ice cream are now in the Hamas. But then, would they have been any better without that ice cream? It did nevertheless attempt to put a human face to the conflict, and it is not his fault that it did not lead to a more solid understanding.

If not the Palestinians and the Egyptians - there were hundred of thousands of Israelis that understood him. His spirit continues to be present at the Uri Avneri round table - every Friday night at least.

A coincidence - his death was announced on the day Barak Obama assumes the leadership of the Democratic Party of the US. We wonder what he would have said and post also the following tidbit:

And the New York Times correspondent from Jerusalem wrote the following version:

Author Solzhenitsyn, who exposed gulag horrors, dies at 89.

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin’s slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89. Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment.

Through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human “meat grinder” that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His “Gulag Archipelago” trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe. See photos from Solzhenitsyn’s life »

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.

After a triumphant return from exile in the U.S. in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn’t read his books.

During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.

But under Vladimir Putin’s 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn’s vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.

Putin now argues, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can’t be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions.

“Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking,” Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. “For 1,000 years Russia has belonged to such a category.”

***

Born December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II, where, in the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called “certain disrespectful remarks” about Stalin in a letter to a friend, referring to him as “the man with the mustache.” He served seven years in a labor camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia.

That’s where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn’t be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin’s gulag — a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon.

He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan.
***

The first fruit of this labor was “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.

The book was published in 1962 by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all.

Abroad, the book — which went through numerous revisions — was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language.

After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred.

***

“A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country,” he wrote in “The First Circle,” his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin’s “special camps” for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential.

Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest.

***

The novel “Cancer Ward”, which appeared in 1967, was another fictional work based on Solzhenitsyn’s life. In this case, the subject was his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin’s death, until June 1956.

In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. “A man sprouts a tumor and dies — how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?”

He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin’s reign.

“Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs — and they believed it? … Or all of Lenin’s old guard were vile renegades — and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people — and they believed it?”

The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, prisoner.

***

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author’s life after decades of work. The academy cited “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”

Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the non-fiction “Gulag” trilogy appeared in Paris.

“During all the years until 1961,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in an autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation, “not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known.”

The following year, he was arrested on a treason charge and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of the regime of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Solzhenitsyn then made his homeland in America, settling in 1976 in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, with his wife and sons.

Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life’s work, a multivolume saga of Russian history titled “The Red Wheel.”

***

Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn longed for his native land. Neither was he enchanted by Western democracy, with its emphasis on individual freedom.

To the dismay of his supporters, in his Harvard speech he rejected the West’s faith in “Western pluralistic democracy” as the model for all other nations. It was a mistake, he warned, for Western societies to regard the failure of the rest of the world to adopt the democratic model as a product of “wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension.”

Some critics saw “The Red Wheel” books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire.

“Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the gulag, had exposed his major weaknesses,” D.M. Thomas wrote in a 1998 biography, theorizing that the intensity of the earlier works was “a projection of his own repressed violence.”

***

Then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship in 1990 and the treason charge was finally dropped in 1991, less than a month after a failed Soviet coup. Following an emotional homecoming that started in the Russian Far East on May 27, 1994, and became a whistle-stop tour across the country, Solzhenitsyn settled in a tree-shaded, red brick home overlooking the Moscow River just west of the capital.

While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak “the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before.”

He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming Yeltsin for the collapse of Russia’s economy, his dependence on bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, his tolerance of the rising influence of a handful of Russian billionaires — who were nicknamed “oligarchs” by an American diplomat.

Yeltsin’s reign, Solzhenitsyn said, marked one of three “times of troubles” in Russian history — which included the 17th century crises that led to the rise of the Romanovs and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia’s highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.

***

The author’s last book, 2001’s “Two Hundred Years Together,” addressed the complex emotions of Russian-Jewish relations. Some criticized the book for alleged anti-Semitic passages. But the author denied the charge, saying he “understood the subtlety, sensitivity and kindheartedness of the Jewish character.”

***

Yeltsin’s successor Putin at first had a rocky relationship with Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Russian president in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on Russia’s oligarchs. Putin was also a veteran of the Soviet-era KGB, the agency that, more than any other, represented the Soviet legacy of repression.

But the two men, so different, gradually developed a rapport. By steps, Putin adopted Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of the West, perhaps out of a recognition that Russia really is a different civilization, perhaps because the author offered justification for the Kremlin’s determination to muzzle critics, to reassert control over Russia’s natural resources and to concentrate political power.

Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia was following its own path to its own form of democratic society. In a June 2005 interview with state television, he said Russia had lost 15 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union by moving too quickly in the rush to build a more liberal society.

“We need to be better, so we need to go more slowly,” he said

***

Following the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. He is survived by his wife, Natalya, who acted as his spokesman, and his three sons, including Stepan, Ignat, a pianist and conductor, and Yermolai. All live in the United States.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is pictured at his home in 2007 with former Russian President Vladimir Putin.

————————

Mary Dejevsky: Farewell to the keeper of Russia’s conscience - All that Solzhenitsyn wrote rang true. It was suffused with personal experience of bitter conflicts.

Tuesday, 5 August 2008

Related Articles in The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/com…

A champion of freedom and justice: Putin leads the tributes to Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: His final interview
Yelena Tregubova: The principles of the Gulag are still with us
89 years in the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
An excerpt from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Dissident writer whose accounts of life in the gulag exposed the moral infamy of Soviet Communism

Moscow; the afternoon of Monday, 18 December, 1989, and the grey day was already fading to dusk. The temperature had fallen to more than 20 degrees below; flakes from the intermittent snow squalls dusted hats and gloves; the powder underfoot had long packed into ice.

Yet still they queued: thousands upon thousands of dark-clad Russians, heads bowed, exchanging the merest snatches of conversation. An out-of-towner – who else would have posed such a question at that place and on that day – approached and asked, as a new-arrival habitually asked of any long queue in those days, “What are they selling up there?” To which the answer, borne on the perishing wind from somewhere further up the line, was this: “Conscience, that’s what they are selling. Fragments of our conscience.”

This was the day they buried the nuclear physicist, Nobel laureate and Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov; I had just arrived in Moscow as a reporter, and the Soviet Union still had two years of its faltering existence to run.

The times now could not be more different: the height of summer, rather than the bitter depths of winter; the colourful chaos of plenty, rather than the grey and white of deprivation; a society that has burst open, compared with one that was still essentially closed. But the announcement of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn conveyed me instantly back, as it doubtless conveyed many Russians old enough to remember, to that winter’s day when the country re-discovered its national conscience and brought the end of Soviet power that much closer.

Solzhenitsyn was then living in Vermont – where he spent most of his enforced exile – and resisting the still-secret entreaties of the Kremlin to return. Mikhail Gorbachev’s loosening of Soviet constraints through the late 1980s brought many former dissidents, including Sakharov, in from the cold. But Solzhenitsyn was an infinitely tougher nut to crack.

His eventual return to Russia in 1994, after 20 years of enforced exile, was intensively negotiated and planned. A progress across the country, east to west, his homeward journey was hailed – as he surely knew it would be – as proof that Russia had finally recovered its soul.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s life mirrored in an uncanny way the fate of his fellow-countrymen and of Russia itself. Born in 1918, he was destined always to be as old as the Bolshevik revolution. Decorated for bravery as a young officer in the Second World War, he was denounced almost immediately for criticising Stalin. At which point his long peregrinations through the Soviet system of prison camps – chronicled in his later work, The Gulag Archipelago – began.

In common with many of the more original writers and artists of his generation, he had to wait until his forties, and the later stages of the cultural “thaw” initiated by Khrushchev, to have his first work published. Even then, it was a brave editor – Alexander Tvardovsky at Novy Mir – who ventured to print the novella that made his name, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. An account, in minute detail, of the daily drudgery of a Gulag prisoner, the work was lionised – for political as much as literary reasons – by a Western world in the grip of the Cold War.

With Khrushchev’s tenure, and the “thaw”, summarily ended two years later in 1964, Solzhenitsyn’s major novels were all published abroad and smuggled back to Russia. There, devotees spent many hours copying them out in minute script, word by word, page by page, for distribution through the burgeoning – and risky – network of Samizdat. The Nobel Prize for Literature followed, along with internal exile in the provincial city of Ryazan. In 1974, the year in which the first volume of his magnum opus on the prison camps appeared, he was summarily expelled from Russia to Switzerland.

Solzhenitsyn is not one of those dissenters of whom it can be said that Western exile made him. His reputation in the then Soviet Union was built on his courage in tackling quintessentially Russian subjects that many knew about, either personally or second-hand, but few were prepared to address in print. All he wrote rang true; it was suffused with personal experience of the bitter conflicts that intellectual life demanded in those years, and his utter – some would say, pigheaded – refusal to compromise. As an artist, he addressed universal dilemmas, but he remained a very Russian writer-hero.

While some Soviet-era dissidents courted Western attention as strengthening their cause and, perhaps, keeping them alive, for Solzhenitsyn such considerations always seemed immaterial. His was an internal Russian world that did not go much beyond the book-lined walls of his study.

In Vermont he rarely strayed beyond the bounds of his walled estate, where he and his family lived almost in the manner of Russian intellectuals before the Revolution. As his polemics against Western secularism showed in later years, he never ceased to tend the flame of his brand of Russian-ness – espousing the priorities of Orthodoxy, autocracy and national identity by which Tsarist Russia defined itself.

And in a Russia where cynicism about Soviet life and its increasingly discredited values was mounting, Solzhenitsyn provided something constant, an alternative standard to which many felt they should aspire, but knew they could never meet. When Gorbachev – another child, incidentally, of the Khrushchev “thaw” – unleashed the cacophony of “glasnost”, and the Soviet Union collapsed under its weight, there was Solzhenitsyn: still as stern, as uncompromising and, in his patriarchal way, as enduring a guardian of the Russian soul.

Solzhenitsyn was among those cultural luminaries – Rostropovich was another – who, by what they were rather than what they did, helped Russia re-emerge as a state from the ruins of the Soviet Union. His work, now freely available in every Russian bookshop, fostered not only a sense of continuity, but a sense of conscience. It supplied many of the less edifying chapters edited out of the country’s fractured past.

Had Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia even a year before he did, he might have been accompanied across his native land by hundreds of thousands, flocking to him for some sort of absolution. The quieter reception he was accorded in 1994 reflected a country settling into its new life and starting to reconcile itself – albeit fitfully – to its chequered past. Today’s Russia is also more sceptical of the very 19th-century brand of Russian exceptionalism that distinguished his thinking. To this extent, Solzhenitsyn had outlived his age.

When he died, on his estate outside Moscow, Solzhenitsyn was culturally back on his country’s margins.

Then again, for a writer whose place in history is guaranteed as the keeper of Russia’s conscience through the grimmest of times, the margins are probably where he would most like to be.

 m.dejevsky at independent.co.uk

Nordic Climate Solutions – Scandinavia´s annual marketplace for low carbon economy leaders – takes place on November 25th and 26th, 2008, in Copenhagen. The event is jointly organized with the Nordic Council of Ministers and a series of industry leaders from the Nordic Region.

Nordic Climate Solutions takes form as a combined conference and trade show. While the conference identifies current challenges and opportunities, the tradeshow presents state of the art solutions for achieving a low carbon economy.

Towards and beyond the Copenhagen UN Summit, NCS gathers a significant number of business and industry leaders. In 2007 the event gathered more than 600 decision makers. This year more than 1000 delegates are projected for the event in November.

As we would like to offer our delegates key insight from experts WE ARE CURRENTLY LOOKING FOR SPEAKERS for the following sessions:

- Building the Future – Energy Efficiency:

What energy and carbon savings could be realized if older commercial buildings had the energy consumption of the newer commercial building stock? How can we improve the incorporation of different energy efficiencies into different types of domestic and non-domestic buildings? And what will it take to achieve mass deployment of carbon neutral buildings?

- Adaptation in the Third World – Markets Beyond China and India:

As a global problem, climate change demands global solutions – yet the majority of the technology and financing for these solutions are not accessible to emerging economies and developing nations. India and China are naturally the center of attention when it comes to CDM projects or other climate action projects and policies, but how can we ensure that countries in Africa, Asia and South and Central America also have the capacity and the technology to develop in a sustainable and climate friendly manner?

- The Future of CDM – The Post 2012 Scene:

At the moment, there are more than 3,000 CDM projects in progress. What is the potential of the CDM on the post 2012 scenario and what concrete measures will be presented a the COP15 to improve this mechanism and ensure that it is contributing to global emission reductions and to technology transfer to all developing nations

Climate Solutions for China:

China is on its way to become the largest energy market in the world, with the greatest environmental challenges. This creates an enormous potential for the Nordic companies. The current five-year plan of China contains 250 billion dollar for investments in energy savings and environmental considerations and a range of ambitious goals.

Thinking Outside the Barrel:

President George W. Bush has stated that: “America is addicted to oil.” At times when the price approaches $150 per barrel – it is an expensive addiction to have. Fortunately, several alternatives exist.

The Finance of Climate Change – A Guide for Governments and Corporations:

The financial markets hold an increasingly important role in government and corporate initiatives designed to fight climate change and make the transition to the low carbon economy.

Less is More – Energy Efficiency (End Use):

Improved energy efficiency is often the most economic and readily available means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, there exists a difference between the actual level of investment in energy efficiency and the higher level that would be economically beneficial from the consumer’s point of view.

The Local Market of the Nordic: Russia:

Recently the Russian economy has been developing at a very high pace and significant investments are being made in the energy and environmental sector, as well as in restructuring.

Adaptation - Urban Climate Solutions:

Even with substantial reductions in emissions today, the delay in the climate system means that emissions we have already released into the atmosphere will continue to affect the climate for years to come. The impact on cities and the people living there will be significant.

De-linking Economic Growth from Emissions – Bypassing the Western Route to Low Carbon Economy:

The interrelations between economic growth, energy and CO2 have a tremendous influence on the possibilities of a global ambitious treaty being drafted at the COP15.

EU – Framework Conditions:

This year a new EU energy market package has been submitted. The ambition is to create framework conditions for efficient and functioning sustainable energy markets. How can the EU balance energy policies between the aims of security of supply, competitiveness and sustainable energy?

Renewable Energy Production;

With a raising stream of billions of dollars into the sector, the investments in renewable energy production reach new records each year.The Nordic Region has great experience in renewable energy production from a wide spectrum of sources. How may this experience and knowledge be utilized in the global market and what are the barriers to expanding the renewable portfolio standard?
If you are an expert who could speak on any of these issues or know someone who is, we would greatly appreciate any recommendations you could pass on.

Please reply to  mwi at mm.dk

Thank you for any guidance/recommendations you can provide.

Meik Wiking
Project Manager
Nordic Climate Solutions

Monday Morning
Huset Mandag Morgen A/S
Valkendorfsgade 13
P.O. Box 1127
DK-1009 København K

T: +45 33 93 93 23
F: +45 33 14 13 94
E:  mwi at mm.dk
W: www.mm.dk

NORDIC CLIMATE SOLUTIONS - NOVEMBER 25TH AND 26TH - 2008. WWW.NORDICCLIMATESOLUTIONS.COM

The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World. Ideas posted by Tiempo, as per Eco Equity and SEI.

Greenhouse Development Rights - GDRs!

What is the Greenhouse Development Rights framework?

The Greenhouse Development Rights framework is designed to support an emergency climate stabilization program while, at the same time, preserving the right of all people to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development free of the privations of poverty.

More specifically, the GDRs framework quantifies the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s official principles — which call for “the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” — with the goal of providing a coherent, principle-based way to think about national obligations to pay for both mitigation and adaptation.

GDRs overviews and introductions

For a more detailed and precise explanation of Greenhouse Development Rights, see the Executive Summary of the second edition of the GDRs book, “The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World.” The second edition itself is still forthcoming, but when it’s done (soon) it will contain this, our short, official, scrupulously precise summary.

More informally, you might take a look at “Squaring the Climate Circle: A New Politics of Solidarity Can Heal a Divided Planet,” by Tom Athanasiou of the GDRs author’s group. It begins on page 16 of Bad Deal for the Planet: Why Carbon Offsets Aren’t Working… and How to Create a Fair Global Climate Accord, a new report by International Rivers that also includes Patrick McCully’s critique of the Clean Development Mechanism: “The Great Offset Swindle: How Carbon Credits are Gutting the Kyoto Protocol, and Why they Must be Scrapped.” The two essays, you may notice, go together quite nicely.

GDRs presentations

To see a recent presentation of the Greenhouse Development Rights slides, click here. This link will take you to an official UNFCCC recording of a Bonn side event (28th sessions of the SBs) on June 10, 2008. It’s a pretty interesting 2 hours, but if you want to skip right to the GDRs presentation (as interpreted by SEI’s Sivan Kartha) just click on his name. (Also note that this video link is sometimes a bit flaky).

To actually download a set of the latest GDRs slides (reflecting the 2nd edition reference trajectories and definitions) with extensive notes, here is the latest Power point presentation. The presentation is of course a moving, evolving target, but this is a good snapshot, which was finalized on June 18, 2008.

By the way, we should say that the Greenhouse Development Rights framework was developed and modeled by Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou of EcoEquity and Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, with the support of Christian Aid and, recently, the Heinrich Böll Foundation. At this point, Paul, Tom and Sivan are collectively knows as “the authors’s group,” and the project is picking up an expanded set of freinds, supporters, and sponsors. These now also include Oxfam Great Britain, the Stockholm Environment Institute, Norwegian Church Aid, and the Dutch Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation.

The authors can be contacted at authors@ecoequity.org.

Download the first edition of the book: “The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World”

If you’re looking for the Greenhouse Development Rights book, The right to development in a climate constrained world, this is the right place. You can download a low-resolution version here, or a larger, high-resolution version with somewhat clearer graphics here. Note that you can (and probably should) skip the technical appendices

Note too that a second edition is in development, and that you can download its executive summary here.

Not that the first edition isn’t still really useful, but the second edition will include many refinements. Many are localized matters of precision and style. But others are more significant:

• Just after our initial (November 2007) publication, the World Bank released new income data and PPP (purchasing power parity) conversions. These are critical in the calculation of the Greenhouse Development Rights “Responsibility and Capacity Indexes,” and this new edition fully integrates these new data.

• Earlier versions of GDRs relied heavily on two IPCC SRES scenarios (A1B and B1). A1B was taken as our “business and usual” case, and B1 was contrasted to it to estimate the size of the global “no regrets” potential – the size of the emission reductions that could be made for free, or indeed profitably. The SRES scenarios, however, are being overtaken by events (for example, actual emissions rates are overshooting even the most worrisome of the SRES cases) and so, following current usage, we have taken the 2007 World Energy Outlook reference projection as our new BAU case. Our new estimate of the “global no regrets potential” is based on an influential McKinsey estimate, which too is based on the 2007 WEO reference case.

• We have decided to change our treatment of “no-regrets” reductions. We no longer interpret their standard definition (zero or negative cost reductions, including co-benefits) to imply that all countries, whatever their level of development, should be obliged to achieve those reductions alone. Now, recognizing the importance of various non-cost barriers (e.g., structural, institutional, financial, and technological barriers) to achieving no-regrets reductions, we oblige countries to achieve only a specified fraction of their so-called no regrets obligations. The remainder is included in the global mitigation requirement that is allocated among countries according to capacity and responsibility.

• We have modestly changed the value of the development threshold, from $9,000 to $7,500, i.e. from 150% to 125% of the $6,000 global poverty line. This was found to be more consistent with national estimates (in China and India specifically) of the size of the consuming class.

• Many of the charts have been rescaled so as to focus on the 2020 time horizon. Longer term projections are often problematic, at least for our purposes, and in any case we wish to emphasize 2020, which has emerged as the key near-term benchmark in climate policy discussions.

• Finally, and significantly, our discussion of the political landscape has been updated to account for developments in Bali. Section 6 is the place to find these changes, but here’s the headline: the frozen politics of the pre-Bali period are, if not actually breaking up, at least developing deep cracks. This is of course good news, for in change there is hope, but as the new science makes clear, we are running out of time.

Note, too, that other changes are planned for the future, particularly if, as now seems likely, the Greenhouse Development Rights framework is widely judged to be useful, and thus worthy of further development. The way to think about this is that the GDRs architeture is pretty stable, but that the details — numerical, political, insitutional — are evolving with the times. And of course, in practive, anythink like GDRs would have to be negotiated, which would lead to huge changes. Still, the shape of the GDRs framework is no longer in rapid flux.

January 2008

Greenhouse Development Rights at the Bali climate COP

Bali was quite a milestone for the Greenhouse Development Rights project. Not only does the GDRs “book” look great, but our side event (the slides are here; the UN’s archived video, which may or may not work, is listed at 10:30 AM on this page) went very well indeed. And GDRs was also presented or discussed in six other side events, which may be some sort of record. It’s certainly a sign that, against a background of interminable “negotiations as usual,” there’s substantial interest in facing the real challenge — a principle-based burden sharing system designed to be fair, and thus viable, even under the stress of an emergency transition.

This interest is rising among the NGOs, and is already high in the developing world. See for example “The road from Bali”, an excellent piece in the Business Standard (a major Indian business magazine) by veteran diplomat Nitin Desai, which explains the GDRs approach with admirable simplicity. Or Business Rules, a far more “radical” analysis (though published in Frontline, a national news magazine) by grassroots activist C.E. Karunakaran that embeds the GDRs analysis in prose that’s far less restrained than Desai’s.

Why has GDRs hit so strong a cord in India? We could speculate, but it’s more important, at least for the moment, to note that the cord is resonating across a wide political spectrum — from “Business Standard” to “Business Rules.” And that the real debate, here as around the world, is not about GDRs but rather about Bali. GDRs is relevant only insofar as it helps us to make sense of what happened there, only insofar as it helps us to measure Bali’s progress (and Bali’s failure) against the real challenges of climate stabilization.

The Bali debate is everywhere, but one easy place to dip into it is via the three articles on Bali that EcoEquity’s Director Tom Athanasiou wrote on Gristmill: Rational expectations, Elephants in the room, and Where do we go from here? The third of these, in particular, raises the key question, well expressed in the old quip about the optimist, who thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist, who fears that this may well be the case.

Who’s right? We’re going to find out soon enough.

November 2007

An “open source” policy framework The Greenhouse Development Rights framework is based on a simple idea, that there are only a small number of reasonable ways in which the UNFCCC’s famous “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capacities” can be quantified. We’ve proposed a specific method for making such a quantification, but we do not presume to have the last word on the matter.

Accordingly, we’d like to see Greenhouse Development Rights develop into an open source policy framework. That is, we want people who are sympathetic (or even unsympathetic) to our basic idea to be able to work with our analysis, our data, our assumptions, and our models, and to develop their own versions, variations and extensions of the GDRs approach. Accordingly, we’ve put our database, along with some of the computer code used in our calculations, into a public repository at http://gdrs.sourceforge.net. It needs more work, but the basics are already there, and we invite the nerds among you to visit, download the “GDRs Calculator,” and give us your feedback. We’ll take it seriously, because this is very much a work in progress.
Address correspondence to GDRs@ecoequity.org

May 2007

Our recent study for the Heinrich Boell Foundation, with the snappy title of A Brief, Adequacy and Equity-Based Evaluation of Some Prominent Climate Policy Frameworks and Proposals, briefly compares six approaches to a post-Kyoto climate regime, all of which claim to be fair. One of them, unsurprisingly, is Greenhouse Development Rights. Another, and please note this if you’re a fan, is Contraction and Convergence. We evaluate each on its own terms, and also in terms of its ability, or potential ability, to deliver the all-important quality that we call “developmental equity.” (June 2007)

A recent Oxfam report, Adapting to climate change: What’s needed in poor countries, and who should pay?, is a major step in the evolution and diffusion of the GDRs approach. Not that Oxfam’s “Adaptation Financing Index” is exactly the same as our “Responsibility and Capacity Index.” For one thing, we apply the RCI to mitigation as well as adaptation obligations. But the two systems share both a common DNA and a common vision. Most imposrtantly, they point in the same direction. (May 2007)

November 2006

The Nairobi Overview of the Greenhouse Development Rights approach: Greenhouse Development Rights: An approach to the global climate regime that takes climate protection seriously while also preserving the right to human development. (Nov 2006)

Years ago, when we first spun up EcoEquity, we saw equal per-capita emissions rights as the essential foundation of a just and effective global climate regime. It’s been a long trip since then, and for better or for worse this has changed. Our goal remains the same — the proper marriage of justice and realism — but we’ve come to take the diversity of “national circumstances” very seriously indeed when trying to understand what such a marriage implies.

And when we say that national circumstances have to be taken into account, we don’t simply mean that some countries are hotter that others. We also mean that some have a great deal more responsibility for the climate crisis, and that some are a good deal richer than others. The bottom line is that we still see per-capita rights as crucial, but no longer see them as emissions rights per se. In fact, we think that the best way forward, for those of us who still see rights-based approaches as critical, might well be the entirely different terms of “rights to sustainable development.”

Such rights are asserted by the Berlin Mandate, though working out what they mean in practice isn’t easy. One thing that seems pretty clear is that sustainable development rights must be animated by a system that leverages the Polluter Pays Principle to fund a rapid global clean-energy transition. Beyond that matters get less clear, though we think we’ve worked out a useful approach to the problem, one which we intend to be taken as both a proposal and a reference framework by which other proposals can be judged. We call it Greenhouse Development Rights.

The Greenhouse Development Rights approach is very much a work in progress. Given this, we’ve decided to set up this page to make it easier for interested parties to follow its evolution.

First, the people behind the curtain. The original “Greenhouse Development Rights” group, which evolved from the group that, after the Climate Action Network’s 2002 “Equity Summit,” set out to further develop the “Per Capita Plus National Circumstances” approach. There are three of us: Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer of EcoEquity and Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, all doing business, at least as far as GDRs is concerned, as EcoEquity. There was a forth in our ranks, Steven Bernow of the Tellus Institute, but Steve died just as we really picking up steam. Still, his name belongs here.

The Greenhouse Development Rights approach debuted at a side event at COP 10 in Argentina, with a paper and presentation by Siv, Paul, and Tom that was introduced by Deborah Cornland of Sweden’s Mistra, an early supporter of the GDRs project. This paper was called Cutting the Gordian Knot, but this, alas, did not translate well. The final, reworked version was published on April 15 2005, under the title Cutting the Knot: Climate Protection, Political Realism, and Equity as Requirements of a Post-Kyoto Regime.

There followed a long pause in the development of approach, during which we bemoaned our lack of funding, debated the feedback which we had received at COP10, and pursued other projects. Recently, however, things have picked up speed. For one thing, a number of people and organizations have become interested in the Greenhouse Development Rights approach, most notably the estimable British development group Christian Aid. For another, we have completed and published two relevant new papers.

The first is a brief, well-focused new paper, with the snappy title of Greenhouse Development Rights: An approach to the global climate regime that takes climate protection seriously while also preserving the right to human development. We call it “the Nairobi draft” because, while it’s ready for COP12/MOP2 in Kenya, it’s hardly the last word on Greenhouse Development Rights.

The Nairobi draft does, however, mark real progress since we debuted the GDRs approach at COP10. Since then we’ve been grinding slowly through the issues and improvements needed to make it really useful. For one thing, we’re no longer treating countries as monolithic, but rather calculating their “responsibility and capacity indexes” in a manner that is sensitive to intra-national income disparities. Not to say class. For another, and just as importantly, adaptation, and obligation to pay for adaptation, are now fully integrated into the GDRs framework.
And we’re happy to say that the GDRs drafting group is not alone in trundling the Nairobi draft around the halls of the conference center. Christian Aid is now a full partner, and some other prospective partners are also in the wings. Our hope is to put our core point onto the political agenda as quickly as possible - that if we actually intend to build a climate regime that can hold the warming to 2C or less, we had best think very clearly indeed about how that regime can preserve, and actively promote, the right to human development.

Finally, and only a bit tangentially, we’d like to mention second report, this on precautionary emissions pathways, published by the UK’s Institute for Public Policy Rese and authored by EcoEquity’s Research Director, Paul Baer. It’s called High Stakes: Designing emissions pathways to reduce the risk of dangerous climate change , and it was written by Paul Baer of EcoEquity and co-authored with Michael Mastrandrea of Stanford University.

“High Stakes” has already gotten a bit of high level attention, and it’s a key contribution to the intensifying debate over precaution and long-term objectives. This is because it shows, by way of fairly robust but transparent risk calculations, that even if we could orchestrate an extremely steep and nearly immediate decline in global emissions, we would still face a risk on the order of 10-20% or more of exceeding the 2ºC threshold, the most broadly endorsed “precautionary” target.

The relevance of this work should probably be pointed out — the GDRs approach begins with an explicit calculation of the “mitigation shortfall” that has to be filled by any viable global climate regime. That shortfall can only be calculate with respect to a true “soft landing” emissions pathway. Which is where “High Stakes” comes in.

Opinion: Polar Race.
Monday 28 July 2008
by: Guy Taillefer, Le Devoir

 http://www.truthout.org/article/polar-ra…

Guy Taillefer argues in Le Devoir that the US Geological Survey’s most recent evaluation of the polar depths - that they contain 412 billion barrels of oil, or a third of the planet’s proven reserves - will put additional strain on the already-fragile international understandings with respect to polar sovereignty and development.

The North Pole. Guy Taillefer writes, “Northern governments and oil companies have never salivated to quite the same extent over the Arctic, which becomes all the more hospitable to them as the ice melts … If one were a cynic, one would say that in this instance it is altogether to Ottawa’s advantage to drag its feet in the fight against greenhouse gases …”
Four hundred and twelve billion barrels of oil. A third of the planet’s proven reserves. That’s what the depths of the Arctic contain, according to the US Geological Survey’s most recent evaluation. One may count on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to take advantage of the opportunity to reassert Canada’s “unquestionable” sovereignty over the North - and to reduce the debate over the development of the circumpolar world to a war of flags and icebreakers.
Last Wednesday, after four years of research, the US Geological Survey, the American scientific agency specialized in hydrocarbons, delivered the first exhaustive estimate of potential oil and gas situated north of the polar circle: 90 billion barrels of crude, three times as much natural gas, 20 percent of the probable global reserves of liquefied natural gas…. The news is guaranteed to have a strong impact, given the present context of tightening energy supplies, surging prices at the pump, and the extraordinary growth of demand in developing countries. Northern governments and oil companies have never salivated to quite the same extent over the Arctic, which becomes all the more hospitable to them as the ice melts…. If one were a cynic, one would say that in this instance it is altogether to Ottawa’s advantage to drag its feet in the fight against greenhouse gases.
Moreover, quite by chance, the US Geological Survey estimates were made public one year, almost to the day, after two little Russian sailors dove to a depth of 4,000 meters in the beginning of August 2007 to plant a flag on the North Pole. This striking gesture - without any legal effect, however - relaunched the debate on the subject of sovereignty over the Arctic in great style.

Cut to the quick, then-Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay decreed that the region Russia coveted was “unquestionably” Canadian.
Unquestionably? That remains to be seen. Experts from the UN, guarantors of the Convention on the Law of the Sea, will say between now and 2013 which between Ottawa and Moscow has the better-founded pretensions from a scientific perspective. At the moment, however, it seems that Russia is better placed to prove geologically that the Lomonossov Dorsal, a chain of undersea mountains that cross the Arctic, is the prolongation of the Russian continental plateau, and not of the Canadian plateau.
Politicians, unfortunately, don’t bother much with such scientific details in their communications with the electorate, preferring to play a nationalistic rhetoric that is easily digested. So the bad scenario would be that, in this race for the summit of the world, the sharing of the Arctic will be less the result of a UN judgment and multinational dialogue than of power struggles between the five countries involved - Canada, Russia, the United States, Denmark, and Norway. That scenario is altogether plausible.
“The Canadian Arctic is at the heart of our national identity,” Stephen Harper declared last year. He has announced, among other military measures in the last year, an investment of $7 billion over 25 years for buying naval patrol boats. A depressing prospect: that Canada seeks to take on its northern identity is laudable, that it proposes to get there by emphasizing military defense to the detriment of social, ecological and diplomatic initiatives, is much less so. It is difficult in any case to imagine that pugnacious Prime Minister-President Vladimir Putin will allow himself to be intimidated.
Nonetheless, the Harper way remains very questionable, in that it is a thousand leagues from the Canadian Way - based on dialogue and cooperation. Still, the most recent decades have demonstrated that it’s by balancing its own interests with those of its circumpolar neighbors - and not by sticking out its chest - that Canada has succeeded in preserving its Arctic sovereignty.
Moreover, in order to calm tensions, the five held a big meeting last spring, which ended in the participants’ commitment to settle any litigious question “in an orderly way,” to “strengthen their cooperation based on mutual trust and transparency” and to “assure the protection and preservation of the fragile marine environment of the Arctic Ocean.” Empty phrases? The future will show how these beautiful promises that we’d like to see kept will withstand the lust for 412 billion barrels of oil.
———————

We posted several days ago: “Reuters Reports That China Is Planting its Flag in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions. Actually they started already at least in 2003, so this is not just a reaction to the Russian Flag-posting of August 2007.”

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 27th, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz ( PJ at SustainabiliTank.com)

So, face up to it - China is also in this game. And why should not Nauru or Grenada also be entiled to some of the profits? if they cannot afford the expense of drilling - bet you Brazil or Japan, even Korea and India, and who knows who else - can!

OK - Now Let Us Sit Down And Talk. For Once We Are Behind China and Expect The Dragon To Stand Its Ground.

The North Pole. Guy Taillefer writes, “Northern governments and oil companies have never salivated to quite the same extent over the Arctic, which becomes all the more hospitable to them as the ice melts … If one were a cynic, one would say that in this instance it is altogether to Ottawa’s advantage to drag its feet in the fight against greenhouse gases …” (Photo: NASA GSFC Direct Readout Laboratory / Allen Lunsford).