Will you have to pay for climate change damage?

Businesses have long been acutely aware of the implications of breaking laws or having adverse impacts on others: punishment normally ensues. Recently the latter category has moved up the agenda with tobacco companies being held responsible for the health of non-smokes affected by smoke, for example.

 

The last 2 years have seen less debate and more agreement on the human rights impacts of environmental destruction on local communities. Where there is a proven link businesses have been required to make compensation and their reputation has suffered, although most businesses fight such legal claims and such claims can take several years to be resolved.

 

Now governments are establishing climate change policies with an acceptance of the impacts of climate change, and such policies are impacting businesses directly (and legally). It is safe to assume that there is now agreement that hgih emitting countries and companies are responsible for the impacts of their emissioins, so it is only a matter of time until those affected by climate change seek legal recourse. Though such legal actions might take years to be resolved, the defendents must recognize such claims as liabilities and prepare accordingly.

 

Will such liabilities, risks and, ultimately, financial costs, lead to both companies and governments reassessing the negative impacts of their business and accounting for these as real costs in their business strategies, in addition to their current Kyoto and future Copenhagen commitments with financial implications (from Emissions Trading)?

 

Will we see massive lawsuits against highly polluting companies/countries, particularly by groups in developing countries? Will companies consider the costs of these in their strategies and will that make any material difference to their strategies? Could entire businesses or countries be forced to change by those in developing countries, who rarely have a voice?

Collapse of civilizations

Jared Diamond has moved on from Guns, Germs and Steel, which gave an account of what factors influenced the growth and development of civilisations in certain parts of the World and not in others. Collapse, looks at why civilisations, well, collapse..and why some do not. Well worth at watching his lecture, available online here.

A few key points include Jared's 5 main reasons for collapse:
1) Human environmental impacts
2) Climate change (and how that impacts environmental services provision)
3) Hostile neighbors (to take advantage of internal weaknesses)
4) Trading partners (as the society may be too dependent on successes or failures of neighboring societies)
5) A Society's institutions being able to perceive and solve, or ignoring and failing to solve the other 4 problems.

He also discusses some of the differences between the past and the present such as:
-We have more people with more potent destructive technologies that can cause more destruction more quickly.
-Faster communications and transportation of good and bad things like terrorists, immigrants and diseases.
-Societies cannot really collapse in isolation as there are likely to be consequences elsewhere, including remote countries like Somalia.

On the other hand, greater hope comes from the faster and greater spread of knowledge for us to learn from mistakes and successes around the World now, and in the past. This gives us the chance to know what we are doing and gives the choice to continue or to change.

Some things he seems to believe are not as important include cultural differences and political system differences, which is quite interesting. I have not read the book but am keen too. In particular I find 5) the most interesting issue.

Why don't we care about Climate Change?

Dan Gilbert gives 4 reasons (PAIN):
1) Personal: Our brain cares more about tangible, social (i.e. people) threats that can be personified
2) Abrupt: Our brain cares a lot more about current threats than potential threats
3) Immoral: Our brain cares about unethical threats to us, and no-one has anyone in particular to blame Climate Change on, or any reason to see it as unethical.
4) Now: Our brain does not effectively notice slow changes, and therefore cares less

We are sleeping in a burning bed, and our senses are not aware of it!

Desperate...

We are getting desperate, having messed up the planet so badly, and continuing to do so, and without any real hope of any significant behaviour change until it is too late, we are having to rely on technology to save us from ourselves, technologies like geoengineering (which would change oru atmosphere artificially) or genetic engineering (to create organisms to generate energy from CO2).

Tragedy of the commons and climate change

Sustainable Development is really about the Tragedy of the Commons: the concept that when there is a common resource, each of us seeks to exploit it so much, that it becomes over exploited and thus depeleted so we all lose out.

This can be applied to almost anything and ultimately is an issue of how much competition is good, and how much collaboration is good. Nowadays there are numerous new ideas that are part-competition and part-collaboration, not the least the concept of open-source where something is created and then given away for free, or the concepts of wikis where contributors help create something for free, because they recognise that the value of what is created by all contributors will be beneficial to everyone.

As leaders we need to explore these problems and seek new solutions; we also need to examine waht solutions work and imitate them elsewhere. We need to be fast, we are depleting all known resources too fast. There are very few cases where we have collectively worked together to stop a particular resource being depleted, or even begun to rehabilitate it. Despite knowing that deforrestation is bad, deforrestation is getting worse, globally, not better. Despite knowing our sources of non-renewable energy are limited, we are using more, not less, of them. Despite knowing our population is growing too fast and each of us are consuming more than the planet has to offer, the global population continues to expand and individual consumption continues to expand.

In rare cases, we have managed to overcome issues, collectively, such as the hole in the Ozone layer, that is now no longer getting worse; but this was an easy issue to overcome, one that was really about technology and uncontroverisal political decisions. Even in cases of war, with real-time, immediate consequences of death, we are unable to solve collective action problems. The 'we' is both the losers, the outsiders and the winners.

The search still goes on for ways for each of us to understand the long-term negative impacts of our current actions on our own future. Not just on our children's future -but our own future. Can new forms of media and communication lead to new forms of collaboration, or will they lead to new forms of competition? What mix of collaboration and competition is requried to solve our problems -when is competition better and when is collaboration better, what happens when some want to compete and some want to collaborate?

This is the problem we have with climate change -where some see they lose they refuse to collaborate, but others see that without collaboration everyone will lose. The solution is to ignore the past, forget the past and move on. This is not easy, but is the only solution. We cannot complain about others being richer or better-off. We need to all work together to ensure a better future for us all, without worrying about the past, because if we continue to complain, criticize and seek retribution or compensation, we will not move forward. This is the problem -not just that we cannot see long-term, but that we cannot forget the past. That, the problem with human nature, is the real tragedy.

Can Green be a sign of status?

There comes a point when people move beyond buying out of neccessity and convenience to start buying for greater luxury and status. In China and parts of Asia it's fair to say that the environmental footprint of the poor is fairly low, but the middle classes is higher. Although many that buy cars argue it is a necessary purchase, the reality is that many cars are as much a status symbol than a neccessity. It is reasonable to expect comfort to be an important decision factor but is it unreasonable for status to be such an important factor?

For the upper middle classes, apart from the car, the choice of accommodation also affects one's environmental footprint. Again, though location and comfort are important factors, it is a matter of status: how one's spouse, parents, peers or business partners view your choices matters.

In travelling between Beijing and Shanghai, though the trains' sleeper carriages do contain their fair share of business travellers, most business travellers fly. It can be important to spend the night with one's family, but apart from that, taking the train has many benefits: the stations are on the subway so travelling to/from the station is not just cheap but there is no need to worry about traffic jams. The journey itself is comfortable and efficient -with a few hours to work or read before sleeping. In fact many business travellers i speak to have just never considered the train and are not against taking it, but are just used to flying and are not motivated enough to change.

There is absolutely no status to be gained by being 'green' in China. No-one is proud of taking the train, no-one is proud of buying a smaller (though still comfortable) car and no-one is proud to buy a green apartment. In fact though companies are proud of their environmentally friendly offices, none of them encourage staff to not fly. There are many schemes that work elsewhere to encourage cycling (i.e. suitable cycle storage and showers at work) or public transport (i.e. free public transport cards and financial incentives to use them). It is not cool to cycle to work.

What is needed is a shift in how status is gained, which is not just about being seen in a positive light for being green (like many who buy hybrid cars in the West) but more about being seen ina negative light for not being green. We might start to see this change if public opinion shows distaste at those using plastic bags, instead of a re-usable one. A few are buying fashionable re-usable bags now to seem cool, apparently. but this is not mainstream.

If it becomes mainstream, could it spread? Could 'green' be the real status gainer in China, or will it just affect the youth? If a sense of shame starts to develop that would be great, and maybe have a wider affect than the positive status of being 'green'.

In reality though this needs to lead to something bigger...to the demand for greener cars, greener apartments, environmentally friendly clothing and so on. How can we make 'green' a status symbol beyond the fringes of society, so that demand affects supply leading to retailers, developers, salesmen etc developing greener products, because of the demand for them. How can we create this demand for green life? How can we start to make it embarassing not to use a reusable bag, to fly, to consume too much (waste food or buy too many clothes)?

Although this is yet to even affect the 'cool crowd' in the West it might not be unreasonable to target the 'status' crowd in China (as well as the 'cool' crowd; though the 'status' crowd are those with a bigger impact). It is not just the plastic bag example that could offer a glimmer of hope. The other example is of course the earthquake where amongst the 'status crowd' you were looked down upon if you did not donate a certain amount or attend certain fundraisers. If it was possible to create such an atmosphere because of the earthquake -and that, like china's current environmental crisis, also had no direct impact on the 'status' crowd, is it possible?

The situations are not the same, but there is some hope.

Overcoming differences is neccessary -and maybe even possible

There might still be hope! When I consider nationalism and countries that make progress in extraordinary times; both point to hope in our fight against massive problems like Climate Change. Why? Because when we fight against a common enemy, we bring everyone together and achieve something that otherwise we cannot do.

The world has not worked together to really tackle a common enemy ever before, and this is a big test. However many regions or countries or groups of people have done just this before. By overcoming our differences we can understand that we are, fundamentally, all after the same, and when something threatens that, we can work together. It is not easy, and it is rare that a challenge is so great that it can bring us all together. For the moment, Climate Change is certainly not bringing us all together, in the way that, say World War 2 brought the entire UK (and many of its colonies) together to fight a common enemy.

Many in the World do not care about climate change, because they are not affected by it, or do not think they will be affected by it… and this is a huge issue. This is what must change; otherwise we are accepting that, until the whole World is affected by the issue, we will not tackle the issue. Of course, by that time, it will be SO much harder to deal with the issue. But I suppose this is normal, looking at how much easier it might have been to stop Hitler before 1939, when Chamberlain refused to deal with the issue head-on; instead Britain waited until the problem was so much bigger before actually trying to tackle it.

So, can we learn from these (and other) lessons and get together to fight the common enemy now, when the battle can still be won, and can be won with less disruption, loss of live, damage etc than if we continue to wait? We are evidently starting to find out.

Climate Change affects those who did not cause it

So what does this mean? An acceptance of this fact might help for a start, but that won't happen. Money to help those who need it could be provided, through traditional aid or disaster relief public fundraising campaigns, but this will likely happen after a disaster which is, of course, too late. Some extra aid money is bein provided to help those countries deal with any extra possible disasters and prevent them. Otherwise a market-based system will be needed, like the CDM (Clean Development Mechanism), which allows polluters to pay others to reduce their pollution, since it is probably cheaper and easier for others to reduce their pollution (or not become polluting). Though CDM is not working effectively right now it is a great experiment and we have to hope it will have some impact and continually get better.