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Pitch

UNFCCC-compliance 'inevitably requires' international GHG emissions Contraction and Convergence [C&C]. Che sera sera, the future is C&C.


Description

Please use the template below as a general guide in preparing your proposal.

Executive summary - Contraction and Convergence [C&C] is GCI’s proposal to achieve compliance with the objective of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC].

What distinguishes the C&C proposal from others is the ‘integration’ with the quantitative ‘goal-focus’ of UNFCCC-compliance. It sets out an inclusive model that steers the full-term C&C-event at the right rates needed for this UNFCCC-compliance, reveals the risks that concern insurers and supports investors in the high rates of investment and return required for clean tech and renewables. C&C measures the benefits of sustainability by defining how to politically organise the structure for UNCCC-compliance necessary to achieve it. 

Team

Individuals and/or organizations that played a key role in developing this proposal and their respective contributions.

Logistically GCI has been a very small operation with one person involved full-time and a few others involved periodically on a part-time basis, over a 21 year period.

What

Description of the actions proposed and their anticipated outcomes.

The actions are the articulation and advocacy of C&C, to steer the process ab initio to an outcome of ‘UNFCCC-compliance’.

You will want to refer to the emission and land use target you have chosen using the Actions & Impacts tab: - http://www.gci.org.uk/animations/C1_C2_C3_animation.exe

In addition, you will want to outline the mechanisms by which the world as a whole can transition to the green economy or to an alternative vision of the future you would propose instead.

The growth of the human economy – population, production and pollution - has put the planet’s overall radiation budget out of balance, consequences of which are global warming and climate damages. This has become a survival issue.

GCI’s vision of the future evolution of energy is one where this environmental imperative requires the production and consumption of everything, including energy, to be clean and green and operating within environmental limits.

Also, within the present human economy, the global imbalance between the ‘over-consumers’ and ‘under consumers’, worsens. This augurs conflict over dwindling key resources. So this issue of worsening international and intra-national inequity threatens everyone’s survival interests as well.

Together - worsening climate-damages and growing inequity - these constitute the double-jeopardy in which we are caught. This is why Ban Ki Moon talks at DAVOS about a 'global suicide pact'.

As people’s right-to-be-here and sharing the benefits of the commons is fundamentally equal, GCI’s vision requires that as we go ‘clean and green’, we redress that imbalance with an equal sense of urgency. This recognizes that equity and survival are inextricably linked. Only achieving UNFCCC-compliance at rates that avoid dangerous rates of climate change, leads to sustainability. While investments in clean technology and renewable energy are utterly vital in this, they are also completely tied to success in securing a global climate treaty at the UNFCCC negotiations. So it is vital that the international political log-jam over issues of equity and survival, which has been the obstacle encoded into the negotiations for the last twenty years, must be broken.

Aubrey uniquely managed to break the code for that in devising the C&C framework for GHG emissions. Of itself C&C is not the clean and sustainable future, but it lays out the path that is a key part of the journey that takes us there. Whether this is ‘the right way to frame the solution’ is a question superseded by the more pressing question, ‘what’s the alternative’? Clean-tech and renewable energy investors need to recognize there isn’t an alternative that’s as effective and as helpful to success in achieving the agreement, than C&C. This will in turn, defend and enhance their investments. It is encouraging that an agency of the Chinese Government has now begun a dialogue with GCI about this.

Why: Rationale for the proposal

Explanation for why these actions and outcomes are desirable.

The consequence of a failure to achieve UNFCCC-compliance is becoming helplessly caught in runaway rates of climate change. From a human perspective, the consequences of this are all extremely negative.

UNFCCC-compliance will not happen by accident or just as a result of many disaggregated local designs. It inevitably involves a global agreement at UN level for a global account and C&C addresses this. It calculates and sub-divides the whole emissions- contraction- event needed for UNFCCC-compliance into the convergence parts that sum to that whole. This is a solution that corrects the problem of parties trying to negotiate parts they merely hope will sum to that whole: - http://www.gci.org.uk/ 

GCI saw early that the gap between the climate science and the climate policy debates aggravated the gap between the long-term need for UNFCCC-compliance and the short-term quarrel about who should take action first. Scepticism and denial were influential in IPCC‟s ‘scientific debates’, there has been resistance from ‘contrarians’ and ‘vested interests, there have also been ‘global versus local formulations. All of these conflict combined created a random and absurd political process where for example before Kyoto, US coal interests said, “there isn’t a problem and you can’t solve it without developing countries‟. Environmental lobby groups said, “there is a problem and you can solve it without developing countries‟. The political result of this has been the existing approach – for example the Kyoto Protocol - where with no structure it has just been 15 years of randomly picking numbers out of half a bottomless hat.

This problem persists to the present day: - 
http://www.gci.org.uk/public/COP_15_C&C.swf

GCI’s contribution has been to cut through that with C&C mode to help develop the understanding that C&C is a non-random structure of numbers for UNFCCC-compliance. It was deliberately set up to highlight and get past the deficiencies in the random approach and GCI’s effort over twenty years has so far caused C&C to become internationally recognised as the apex model of how to envision and organise for achieving UNFCCC-compliance.

Analytically C&C acts heuristically. Politically it offers a tool for the ‘truth and reconciliation’ that global agreement needs. It synthesizes the inclusive and teleological nature of achieving UNFCCC-compliance, our ‘absolute international inter-dependency’ and the ‘acute time-dependency’ of acting-out the finite ‘path-integral’ needed for achieving UNFCCC-compliance. Integrating the scientific work of the IPCC, with the political argument at the UNFCCC and the damage cost curves from the Insurance Industry, it distinguishes the ‘rates of C&C’ that are relevant to achieving agreement for UNFCCC compliance, from those that aren’t. C&C applies over a global scale spatially and a full-term time-scale that defines the extent and rate of decarbonisation required to deliver the ‘low carbon economy’ that is integral to overall sustainability: - 
http://www.gci.org.uk/rates.html

How: Feasibility of proposal

Explanation of how the proposed actions will be achieved. Teams are encouraged, but not required, to include such issues as:

  • Overall global economic and environmental governance framework: 
    C&C establishes this international apex agreement, without which we are radar-less and rudderless.
     
  • Mechanisms for financing required investments:
    By capping the entire system globally consistent with decarbonisation rates that are internationally agreed as UNFCCC-compliant, a C&C agreement underwrites the value of all future investment and economic activity. The absence of such an agreement turns the dangerously existing lottery into an un-resolvable nightmare.
     
  • Role of new energy technologies and technology transfer:
    Clean, renewable and low-emissions technology are obviously central to and vital in implementing the transition to a sustainable future that results from the C&C path-dependency that UNFCCC compliance requires. The US Government has tried making this point from the outset only to be snookered by the ‘politics of blame’ that has dogged these climate negotiations.
     
  • Political, educational, or media interventions that can facilitate the transition:
    A general programme aimed at building awareness of what it means to live under global limits and activities aimed at realising this, will obviously be very helpful.

If more detailed models or spreadsheets are useful in demonstrating your proposal’s feasibility, please send them to rjl@mit.edu, and they will be reviewed and linked to your proposal.

http://www.gci.org.uk/rates.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/acidification.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/concentrations.html

Teams are also encouraged to note regional/national proposals that are complementary to their global proposal.

There is now very significant national regional and international support for this proposal: - 
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_UN_Bodies.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_UK_Climate_Act.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_institutions.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_medics.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_religious.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_population.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_ethics.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_equity_fairness.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_sustainability.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_sceptics.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_campaigns.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_sociology.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_academia.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_capitalist_socialist.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_law.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_economists.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_politics.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_justice_eco_debt.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements_publications.html

GCI’s programme has been to engage directly or indirectly with the vast and diverse array of, often agenda-conflicted organisations in industry and other institutions in the UK and all over the world, doing presentations, often providing materials at their request. All of these, as listed below, have publications that make the case for C&C.
[all the orgs below are at links here: - http://www.gci.org.uk/Zayed_Question_Five.html  ]

WB, UNDP, UNEP, WHO, UNESCO, IMF, UNEPFI, NATO, ESCAP, IEA, OECD, WRI, PEW, RCEP, WBGU, RIBA, RICS, IMECH-E, COE, OPT, GHF, ADB, ASEF, CII, GES, CPI, AG, BP, DEFRA, DFID, UK-HoC, TWN, DRC, OST, ICE, DAVOS, GLA, ACGCCC, GLOBE, WNA, FORESIGHT, SAARC, IPCC, SSEE, CICERO, SOCENV, SEPA, FFA, SMFA, WILTON, WFC, CONVERGE, IUCN, STWR, CD, NEF, WWF, SIMPOL, CAT, SIERRA, LANCET, TCJ, CHC, SIA, RCGP, SPOCC, MEDACT, OXFAM, NGLS, SF, VT, PAS-VATICAN, WCC, BTB, SAGE, NOAH, TNS, JRI, FRIEND, EP, CSE, PSN, CIWEM, PA, FFTF, ANU, E-CHARTER, HBF, CNA, APPGCC, ECOLOGIST, ASAHI, CORNERHOUSE, CIBSE, GRUNEN, JRSM, FSFC, UK-TREASURY, MWH, CF, WRM, CEI, C&CF, CCHK, UKYCC, IYF, BWP, HELIUM, IIED, ABERTARENS, PCC, CTBI, CDM-AFRICA, FOETHIOPIA, POSITIVELY-ZAMBIA, ANCC, CCC, ECOJAPAN, ARUP, CLASSOFONE, CGI, GCF, LCE, GMP, FEASTA, TRANSITION TOWN, ENVOCARE, EAF, CCWI, FOE, BBC, BURGHER, ENCOUNTER, ZEITZEICHEN, GEN, ABC, ENCC, POPOFFSETS, SGR, VEGETARISMUS, CETRI, GF, STF, CS, TOCSIN, PEACELINK, JUBILEE-SOUTH, C&CFOUNDATION, SAWF, CSE, GNEC, VENSIS, CALEB, ANPED, ACCAA, NLPC, SUSTRANS, PERMACULTURE, PERMAVEGAN, CHEATNEUTRAL, URBANMINES, CLIMATE-CAPITAL, HSBC, SUSTAINABILITY-HAWAII, GPNZ, GPA, GAIA-EDUCATION,FINDHORN, CIFAL, CACC, HECA, ITASS, CRAG, CIWF, SCAN, WTW, IFG, PIK, GCCR, CASSE, ZEW, EJNF, CIVITAS, DFCE, MEDSIN

 

Vision of the future under this proposal

Creative depictions what life will be like later in the century if the proposal were to be adopted, using such media as videos, images, or narratives.

http://www.candcfoundation.com/pages/whatis.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/movies.html