Financial Times - Green streets: can cities take the lead on climat change?
the media pirateJune 7, 2017. Pilita Clark.
Four new books suggest ways of reducing emissions that do not depend on Trump.
In 100 years’ time, when historians try to fathom how today’s leaders handled the daunting problem of climate change, the past 18 months will surely look baffling.
This is a period that began in December 2015 with almost every country in the world adopting the Paris climate agreement, hailed by the then US president Barack Obama as one of his biggest achievements. That groundbreaking accord was followed by two more bursts of global action last October: the first international aviation climate dealand a pact to phase out planet-warming hydrofluorocarbons. Meanwhile, investors sold out of fossil fuels. Green energy use grew exponentially. Large businesses took on their own Paris-inspired goals to cut emissions.
Then came November, when voters in the world’s largest economy elected Donald Trump — a man who had once called global warming a “hoax” and vowed to unravel the Paris accord. Trump’s US presidency began in January, just as scientists confirmed 2016 had been earth’s hottest year on record. Oceans had warmed, sea ice melted and coral reefs bleached as concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surged to new heights.
In response, Trump packed his administration with fossil fuel advocates and then last week pulled the US out of the Paris agreement, a deal he described — in a single sentence — as both “non-binding” and “draconian”. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump told cheering supporters in the White House Rose Garden.
Four recent books suggest that Trump will not prevail. Together, they envision a future in which technological advances, shifting market forces, empowered cities and determined individuals hasten a shift away from coal, oil and gas — with or without the involvement of national governments.
The heavyweight among them is Burn Out: The Endgame for Fossil Fuels, by the Oxford university economist Dieter Helm. This book will surprise close watchers of the influential Helm, whose energy advice has been sought by governments across Europe. He has been scathing about the cost and impact of today’s renewables, criticising the “circus” of UN climate talks and championing gas as an important short-term answer.
Those views remain in Burn Out, but its larger argument is that three “predictable surprises” will spell the gradual demise of the fossil fuels that currently supply more than 80 per cent of the world’s energy. The first has already happened: the end of the China-powered commodities “super-cycle” and the crash in oil prices that began in late 2014. Oil prices are around $50 a barrel today, less than half what they were in mid-2014, and Helm thinks this may be “the new normal”.
That’s partly because of his second and third predictable surprises: widening pressure to combat climate change and the advance of new technologies, from electric cars to more powerful solar panels and 3D printers. “Each will be sufficient to effect a significant break with the past,” he writes. “The three together will result in a radical transformation and the gradual endgame for fossil fuels.”
Helm is too quick to condemn green energy subsidies and other forms of climate action already helping to spur some of the developments he describes. His book would have looked more prescient had it been written five or even two years ago. Today, fossil fuel companies themselves accept the world has begun an unstoppable energy transition.
Still, Burn Out is illuminating, not least when Helm analyses potential winners and losers from the shift. The US and Europe should be big victors, he says, thanks in part to their open societies, diverse economies and thirst for technological innovation. The losers are likely to include resource-cursed Russia and oil-dependent Middle East autocracies.
Helm is especially scornful about Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030” plan to cut its dependence on crude and modernise its economy, partly by selling off 5 per cent of its state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, and using the proceeds to set up a sovereign wealth fund that would invest in new industries. He sees in this the “simplistic approach that comes of dictatorial monarchy”, one that places too much faith in “consultants eager for the fees”. “There is almost nothing in economic history to suggest that this sort of strategy will work, and lots of reasons for thinking it will fail,” he writes.
Two other books have a different solution for saving the planet: cities. More than half the world’s population is now urban, collectively producing more than 80 per cent of global GDP and at least 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet cities’ rising wealth is still out-gunned by the political heft of state and national governments that have struggled to curb climate change. This may explain the spate of green-minded city alliances that have quietly sprouted in recent years, such as the Global Covenant of Mayors, C40 and United Cities and Local Governments.
One name figures in many of these outfits: New York City’s former three-term mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a prominent climate advocate who launched a string of green measures in office, from a bike-sharing system to painting black rooftops heat-reflecting white. He has co-authored Climate of Hope with Carl Pope, a former chairman of the US Sierra Club environmental group, in what amounts to an extended meditation on a technocratic, pro-business approach to climate action.
Forget “doom-and-gloom” green activist scaremongering and tired Washington debates about climate change, they say. Look instead at how climate policies also happen to create what people want: more jobs, cleaner air, lower energy bills and a generally superior quality of urban life.
Bloomberg and Pope are at their best when offering concrete examples of local governments overcoming obstacles to cutting emissions. One of the most important things a mayor can do, for instance, is build cleaner public transport systems that cut polluting, congested traffic. Cities often lack the credit ratings needed to fund such projects, especially in poorer countries. Climate of Hope explains how the World Bank helped the Peruvian capital of Lima secure a better credit rating that allowed the city to borrow $130m to upgrade its bus rapid transit system. Kolkata in India is among other cities taking similar steps.
Yet the book also details the many setbacks that even the mayor of a powerful city such as New York can face. Bloomberg was once keen to borrow an idea from London and impose congestion charges on drivers entering the city centre. The plan proved reasonably popular with New Yorkers. The city’s newspapers largely backed it even though, as Bloomberg writes, “they can barely agree on the time of day”. The city council voted to approve it. But the scheme was killed off by the state legislature in Albany. “So much for democracy,” writes Bloomberg.
Those seeking an intellectual framework for such action could turn to Cool Cities by Benjamin Barber, a US political theorist and author who died in April. Here he builds on themes that underpinned his 1995 bestseller, Jihad vs McWorld, arguing for more decentralised models of democracy that empower local organisations and give less weight to nation-states.
Barber makes the case that sovereign rulers are no longer meeting their side of the bargain on which their legitimacy rests, because they are failing to protect citizens from the calamitous threat of climate change. At the same time, increasingly wealthy cities tend to be “more ‘progressive’ and cosmopolitan” than states, which are often beholden to rural and suburban interests.
Urban centres champion gay rights, gun control and — increasingly — climate action. Yet these goals are frequently blocked by what Barber derides as “a gridlocked and parochial national government that once purported to represent ‘universal values’ ”.
Barber’s solution lies in groups such as the Global Parliament of Mayors, which met for the first time in September 2016 in The Hague in a move he describes as “a momentous if partial step on the road to urban empowerment”. Yet the question remains: can thousands of very different cities really come up with a collective agreement on how to cut their emissions? And, more to the point, why would this multitude fare any better than the nearly 200 countries that have spent more than 20 years trying to negotiate a meaningful global climate deal?
Barber is dismissive of the Paris accord. Bloomberg and Pope think cities helped strengthen it. They suggest in Climate of Hope that a cities summit held in Paris while the global agreement was being negotiated influenced that deal’s inclusion of a reporting provision, which allowed each nation’s progress on cutting emissions to be tracked. This will be news to the national government negotiators who spent years ironing out precisely this fraught point in the lead-up to the accord’s adoption.
Barber writes that cities may have to “declare a certain independence” from nations and “impound money from the revenues their productivity generates”. The road to achieving such a radical devolution of power is unlikely to be straightforward.
Still, the ideas in both Cool Cities and Climate of Hope are suddenly being tested by reality in the wake of Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris agreement. Within hours of the decision, city governments around the world lit their buildings green in protest and declared they would work to fulfil the aims of the accord.
Michael Bloomberg said he and other groups would provide up to $15m to help plug the financing gap left by Trump’s exit from global climate action — “and there isn’t anything Washington can do to stop us”. The mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto, decried the president’s effort to invoke his city’s steel-town history. It was now a case study in green revitalisation, he said, adding that the number of US cities adopting the Paris goals had surged in the wake of Trump’s decision.
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