World Academy of Art & Science

A rapid reaction to R.Berg's comments, since I have a deadline for another project:

Dear Bob and Walt

Thank you for this survey to assess the interest of Fellows.

Please find attached my response to your Questionnaire, which I am copying Winston Nagan who has some interesting insights on climate change, human rights and law, which he may wish to elucidate at some point in terms of exploring a balance between political and economic rights. You may decide how you wish to handle my responses on the Blog.

I think we should approach the UNESCO Ethics group once we have a project outline - Walt and I met with them when trying to meet the officials conmcerned with Education for Sustainable Development, and we discovered an unusual ally. Johan Hattingh, SecGen of COMEST (World Commission on Ethics of Science and Technology) was in Hyderabad and is a recent Fellow. Then, we could approach entities like IHDP / START, etc.

My own perception is that this issue may help us make a case for placing environment under the UN Trusteeship Council (where the Antarctic Treaty is discussed), which was suggested by Kofi Anand, since presently it is managed in an uncoordinated manner by disparate institutions and UNEP just does not have the clout. If we take this approach, we could find out the interest of the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation in Uppsala, where its new Director is a recent Fellow.

Best

Jose

Strongly support this World Academy initiative as I have told Jeff Schwartz, Walt Anderson, and Bob Berg. Willing to help in any way I can.

Dear Academy friends,

I think your intent in the proposed   establishing  of an activity of WAAS on Climate System Governance with the benefit of its member, is very well taken, not only climate Change system is crucial but most of all its governance  is crucial.

 WASS has certainly  richness in its members capacities and and capability of interdisciplinary to face such an issue.

On your questions I will reply as follows:

    1.  our prime goal should be to  help educate policy think tanks; or possibly,  attempt to influence policy-makers  with specific recommendations

2.  Education (formal and/or informal)
4.  Strive  for a high profile book-length report I think it is a priority but of course has to be seen in terms of the Academy resources.
5.  I agree that  given the WASS  traditional role  to educate about issues it should  foster  the discussion in  different  key areas of the world. It is good that one of such forums is being planed in the Middle East. I shall try and think of possible other forums.     
6.  Maybe contacting scientific Academies in different  parts of the world would be useful. I shall try with the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome what is their interest, when back in Rome at the beginning of October
8.  i have already accepted to contribute to  Garry Jacobs “Trans-disciplinary Dialogue on Individuality” group and hope to do something in the area related to my experience.

Of course I shall always be glad to help with contacts, if useful, on “Climate Change Governance”.

With all the best
Eleonora Barbieri Masini

The foundation for the future conducted a very successful workshop on "Anthropogenic Climate Change: A worst case Scenario.".. proceedings available on our website.. www.futurefoundation.org

Dear WAAS - Far away from books and papers I can only wave my hat and salute the involvement in the Climate System Governance Best regards from Olof G Tandberg

Many thanks for the message. I agree with the content of this message.

Dear Walt, dear Co-Fellows,

I was living in the US 2006-2008 and saw the geoengineering debate emerging. Let me bluntly say: the focus on geo-engineering, significantly, comes from a country that by and large believes that the American Way of Live is something that cannot and must not change. And assuming that 7 billion people are keen on emulating this way of life, geoengineering looks like the only answer to the climate challenge.

I am in the process of publishing a book called "Factor Five", together with Charlie Hargroves from Brisbane and his TNEP team. The book demonstrates that a factor of five is available in improving energy efficiency and de-carbonization with essentially no reduction of the quality of life. But it does assume that Hummers and SUV's and road commuting distances of 50 miles and more will gradually be priced out of the market, and that renewable energies will become dominant within fifty years. The scenario works without nuclear, carbon capture and storage and, most important in this context, without geoengineering. (The book is at the printers, Earthscan, London, and should be out in November or so; it's a sequel to "Factor Four" that I did with Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, published in 12 languages between 1995 and 2000.)

Many technological geo-engineering fixes seem to be rather hype than reality with the risk that the solution may cause new problems of the same order of magnitude as the ones they are promising to solve. I welcome a sobering engagement of WAAS in the geoengineering and related governance debates and research. And I applaude my friend Raoul Weiler's initiative in Hyderabad to take it up. I regret having been unable to attend the Hyderabad Assembly. I am sure that Fellows engaging in the debate are fully aware that a simplistic American view of geoengineering as the only remaining hope is harming the use of other available options and should not be accepted. I am at the moment largely absorbed by other duties and regret that I , therefore,  cannot offer a significant involvement in the proposed very important project.

Best regards

Ernst

_______________________________________
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker 
Co-Chair,  International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management
P.O.Box 1547, D-79305, Emmendingen, Germany
Fax +49-7641-17   

As someone who has worked with many of the actors who have been involved in trying to bring to the attention of the political decision-makers the effects on the climate of Man's activities may I ask what is the object of the Academy's initiative? Surely there have already been enough studies going back to the late 19th Century with an increasing certainty in the role that Man's activities are in the changes taking part in the climate. Is one more study going to change the situation? Logically the recent economic downturn (theft?) should have been used as a point at which a policy of non-development (stability) could have been introduced but, no the mania was to put in more non-existent money into re-launching the global economy to use yet more of the World's declining natural resources. 

Greetings

Thank you for the information and questions.

I am personally extremely interested in the manner in which the
climate change debate is being framed and in the manner in which
efforts are being made to focus consideration on geoengineering. I was
indeed present at the climate change session in Hyderabad.

There I believe I indicated my concern at the complete and utter
inability to mention the population dimension in any discussion of
climate change. To what degree this is now relevant (as originally
figured in the world dynamics study of 1972) or not, the most
significant factor now is the inability to consider that dimension in
any objective study of the context of climate change. This might be
construed as intellectually dishonest, notably if it is assumed that
continuing population explosion will not counteract any achievements
on the carbon emissions front. This challenge is also excluded from
current debate, which may be especially significant in the event of
widespread social unrest, variously predicted -- and therefore a
problem for governance.

I have produced separate sets of papers on:

-- the climate change issues and how it is perceived and framed
including one on geoengineering proposals

-- the overpopulation issue and how it is framed and shunned

-- strategic challenges to global governance for the future

My sense is that we are entering a period in which governance will be so extensively abused (and framing and implementation of
geoengineering proposals may prove to be the ultimate example) that
assumptions regarding the possibility of rational communication,
debate and choice on the matter need to be challenged. However it is
my sense that they will not and that other factors -- a variety of
Black Swans -- will reframe the situation in totally unforeseen ways.

It is increasingly probable that climate change will be framed like
al-Qaida as requiring unilateral effort by the willing to meet the
"greatest danger" to humanity -- as was al-Qaida but a few years ago. National and global security will preempt all other discussion.

The question is then what indeed it is useful to do under such
circumstances -- if the die are already cast. I detect a strong WAAS
commitment for the climate change issue. Is it appropriate to question that rather than allow that framing to develop as it may? This will be the case with the Copenhagen event which I have analyzed in a posted paper as the United Nations Overpopulation Denial Conference.

Hence my most recent interest in what I have named and explored as
"lipostrategies", namely global strategies carefully crafted so as to omit consideration of a significant dimension -- otherwise usefully to be recognized as some form of Big Lie. The global financial bubble might be considered one past example of such a strategy. I see geoengineering -- and the obscuration of the stars -- to be another.

The challenge of governance is implicit in the spread of responses you are likely to receive to the questions asked. As with any global
initiative we continue to assume that viable strategies can be crafted by ensuring agreement, if only by assuming that a majority vote will sustain such coherence. The fact of the matter in multiple domains is that we have to work more creatively with disagreement -- or be faced by the binary challenge of "us and them", and the need to frame "them" as betrayers of humanity. It is this challenge that is currently an active focus of my writing.

You ask about possible partners and finance. I know of other groups
pursuing such matters and assume there are many others. .One relevant factor is, as always, that they are effectively competing for resources and relevance. Would one expect coherence to emerge from this process in the light of global project track records?

Naively I do not think that huge resources are required for creative
effort. Provocatively I would ask, when air travel contributes to
emissions, whether conventional meeting processes are effective in the light of what they produce?.

So as to the final question, I am indeed deeply committed to these
matters and will continue to apply my creativity to them to the extent of my ability. However I see little value in disruptively challenging a bandwagon about which significant numbers are enthusiastic.

As Gregory Bateson pointed out, "we are our own metaphor". And as
Geoffrey Vickers indicated, also long ago, the challenge we face,
individually, as a group, or globally, in our current trapped state,
is that "a trap is a function of the nature of the trapped". Hence my interest in the cognitive trap out of which global strategies are
currently framed

I note your encouragement to use the WAAS blogs, but as I have
previously indicated and analyzed, there is a widespread illusion that engaging in blogs (and many do) is moving us collectively forward. There is a need to question whether, like Twitter, they distract from the fact they they do not engender the creative coherence we would like to assume that they enable.

I hope this is helpful in some way

Best regards

Anthony Judge
http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/

Hi Walt,

Even if instruments arrangements were adequate there is no assurance they would solve the problem if they don’t know what to build in the first place, if they set the targets wrong due to not understanding the principles behind what we are building now and likely into the future,  if they don’t have a clear idea of what makes sense to build as our largest structures.

Biology gives us self-replication on a massive scale impossible for humans to manufacture without enormous and usually destructive side effects. That means massive tree planting (and one would hope in rich biodiversity for stability and scale of CO2 uptake) will work where we haven’t already destroyed soil capacity beyond repair in any reasonable amount of time. In parallel with that move we could start reshaping cities to take up less room on the surface of the Earth and run on a very small fraction of the energy that they now require, with the target of getting practically all of it from sun and wind in the long haul. We’d have to face up to displacement of forests and natural biodiversity, habitat destruction in other words, by simple massive human numbers, meaning back to Paul Ehrlich 50 years later when his premature premonitions seem to be coming due. Deal with those things and diet  that requires less meat and hence land, and you are beginning to deal with biogeoengineering. Making it out of oil or rare metals – the engineering – is likely to not self-replicate so fast!

Here’s one thought for you. I lived in Los Angeles during the worst of the smog and they went for the obvious metrics: clean air, healthy lungs, sparkling beaches and breezes for the surfers etc. They put smog devices on the cars and really did solve the problem (about 95% of what you could see  of it anyway). Now 40 years later we have collapse of the climate system  because they fixed not the whole thing, the built environment of the city of sprawl/cars/paving/cheap energy, but a component of the system, the part of the car that produced the stuff the metrics were measuring, the smog. We fixed LA, made it look pretty good, the world followed its example and so is well on its way to suicide. We STILL don’t know what to build! Ask the climate scientists and they will look as stupid as people get.

More thoughts to answer your specific questions in bold below....

On 9/12/09 11:06 AM, "Climate Management, WAAS" <climatemanagement@worldacademy.org> wrote:

Dear Academy Fellows,

We request your guidance and involvement in proposed Academy work on Climate System Governance, a topic we believe will be one of the most critical public policy issues in the decades ahead.  This has already become a hot topic under the heading of “geoengineering”  -- referring to a variety of methods to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.  We believe such approaches should not be embraced or rejected out of hand, but should be considered within a larger perspective on the co-evolution of humanity and the biosphere.  And we also recognize that this is a matter of the highest urgency.

Now we have a series of questions for you. By agreement with the Academy's board, we have said that only if there is strong interest in the Academy will we propose a major program of study on the larger governance issues involved in humanity now needing to actively manage the world's climate.

Background:

The topic of geoengineering the world's climate was first discussed at the Academy's October 2008 General Assembly at Hyderabad, in a panel organized by WAAS Fellow Raoul Weiler, president of the EU Chapter of the Club of Rome.  In subsequent discussions, Prof. Weiler introduced to the Academy the study on geoengineering being organized by the Technical University of Munich in which he proposed that the Academy take on the topic of Governance issues.

In March 2009 a small group of Fellows including Professor Weiler (and augmented by the president of the World Futures Society and a member of the US Environmental Protection Agency's policy advisory group) met in Washington, DC and recommended development of an Academy program.   

A day prior to the Academy's recent Board of Trustees meeting at Menlo Park, CA, we conducted a symposium on geoengineering that featured three presentations. One on thescientific issues by Prof. Kenneth Caldeira <http://www.worldacademy.org/forum/%22/files/GE_Ken_Caldeira.pdf%22> of Stanford University (who chairs the US National Academy of Science study on the topic), one on general governance issues by Prof. Granger Morgan <http://www.worldacademy.org/forum/%22/files/GE_Granger_Morgan.pdf%22> of Case Western University (who chaired a recent international conference on risk assessment and geoengineering), and one on governance of geoengineering by Dr. Jason Blackstock <http://www.worldacademy.org/forum/%22/files/GE_Jason_Blackstock.pdf%22> of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (who is involved in a number of studies, particularly on research protocols).  Each of these presentations involved power point presentations which are now posted on the Academy's website. (If we are able to post a video of these presentations on the Academy’s web site, we will do so.) In the discussions at the symposium it was agreed that a wider look at governance issues relating to humanity's management of the environment was called for, and that the immediate driver of the discussions would be the issues arising from geoengineering proposals.

Following the symposium, our Board of Trustees endorsed the proposal of a study on Climate System Governance to include consideration of the role of geoengineering.  

With the September 1, 2009 release of an important study by the Royal Society calling for fairly aggressive research on climate geoengineering, and with a similar on-going study by the US National Academy of Science likely to parallel their recommendations, there is growing interest in the scientific and public policy communities on whether it will be necessary to artificially reduce the temperature on the earth as a fail-safe step given the already serious build-up of greenhouse gases and the inadequate steps being taken to reduce future emissions. An organizing working group within the Academy believes that the scientific and policy issues involved will constitute one of the largest challenges to have faced humanity. The report of the Royal Society can be found at the following link:www.royalsociety.org/geoengineeringclimate <http://www.royalsociety.org/geoengineeringclimate>  

An added background observation. As one contemplates the largest climate governance issues, the history of governance of specific environmental issues is relevant. A conference on Global Environmental Governance held in Glion, Switzerland (June 28-July 2, 2009) reviewed much of this history. While there has been important progress on a number of specific issues (e.g., environmental protocols, the work of the International Panel on Climate Change, etc.) governance of environmental issues at the multilateral level is fragmented and underfunded, and hampered by a long term political stalemate over the questions of compensation and the right to development.  In other words, existing institutional arrangements are not adequate.

Questions for you:

We have opened a discussion page under the project heading of Climate System Governance. We invite your comments and suggestions on these questions and any others you believe we should collectively address. We hope to identify the comparative advantages of the Academy in generating discussion and direct or indirect policy follow-through; and we hope to craft a study outline that responds to the interest of the Fellows.

1. What should our prime goal be: a) increase knowledge among the Fellows of the Academy; b) help educate policy think tanks; or c) attempt to influence policy-makers with specific recommendations?

1.
Attempt to make specific recommendations very soon. You have to know your recommendation to do that, though, of course. I have a sense of certainty about that but maybe many others don’t – or disagree.

2. What fields ought to be involved in the Academy's study, in addition to climate science and public administration?  Psychology?  Education (formal and/or informal)? Philosophy?  The history of humanity’s relationship to its environment?

2. Proportionality and prioritization. Somehow it never dawns on the climate scientists, activists, politicians and sympathetic journals that the largest thing humans build has anything to do with this largest of our problems, meaning the are NOT discussing city, town and village (built environment) design and planning in relation to the problem. Maybe there is something in the science of proportional statistic blended with the cause and effect chains and networks of influence of ecology that might be very helpful in getting people to wake up to this crucial connection.

3. What research approach for the study do you think is most appropriate for the Academy?

3. Maybe researching the history of the built environment and its environmental impacts with a look at limited resources. For example, many of the rare metals, it is now becoming evident, are likely to not be scalable in advance complex technologies for more than the elite to enjoy due simply to the rarity of those metals in the crust of the Earth and cost in money and energy in process them – then required rigor in recycling if they are to be around for anyone at all in the long run. Their concentration in useable quantities is a rare and very finite gift it turns out.

4. How ambitious should we strive to be?  Should we strive for a briefing and technical findings or for a high profile book-length report?  This question relates to your view of the importance of the question and your estimate of the Academy’s resources.

4. Should try to get ALL (very ambitious) the major climate change outfits talking about what it is us humans are building in most basic principles. Population and diet also put enormous strain on climate “dynamic stability.” If we can’t face  these very un-techno-gizmo-like problems face to face we’re doomed! I think a lot of the geoengineering is a  distraction from what would obviously work if we had the courage to face the difficult questions.

5. There is agreement that at a minimum the Academy's traditional role is to educate about issues. So far the discussions on geoengineering have largely been in the North. Regional impacts from climate change (at an early stage of examination) will likely vary with relative winners and losers. At a minimum, the Academy could stimulate discussions of Climate System Management in various key forums around the world. (We are already  arranging what will probably be the first major discussion in the Middle East on geoengineering and Climate System Management. Financing for this discussion will be provided by the host institution, the Library of Alexandria.) If you feel other such discussions would be useful, kindly suggest other venues in regional settings where the Academy might foster such discussions.

5. Sounds good. Don’t have ideas right off.  Someone from Cairo who spoke at the Seventh International Ecocity Conference in San Francisco wants to hold an International Ecocity Conference at the Alexandria Library, by the way.

6. Are there logical partners that should be involved in the work on Climate System Management that you envision for the Academy? Or should the Academy pursue its own independent course at least for a while?

6. I’d think alone for a while.

7. Since all Academy projects must raise their own finance, what sources of support do you recommend that might be interested in a study?  

7. I just learned of the Divecha Center for Climate Change at the Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. Maybe there is a connection with their financing stream and therefore a (#6. Above) maybe they would be a partner for the issues I’m talking about: linking the built environment with climate change problems and solutions – depending on what that built environment actually is...

8. Would you like to be involved in this study?  What would you most like your involvement to be?

8. If seriously facing the built environment for the first time in climate change circles, sure!

We encourage use of the Academy's blogs, but if there are aspects of your answer (such as the last question above) that you prefer to convey privately, you are invited to be in direct touch with both of us.

Walt, I don’t have too much time beyond what I’m already doing trying to push  exactly these idea. Swamped, swamped, swamped. Already I’ve been to China three times this year, Korea, Singapore, Canada, Brazil, Israel and am going to Istanbul in less than two week to try to get all this into our Eighth International Ecocity Conference which is happening there for three days in the middle of the Copenhagen conference’s three week period, hoping to influence them. I always stress the connection between the built environment and climate and am always amazed that so few take it seriously. I think it’s time some larger funder took it seriously. There is massive funding for amping up funding for ever more renewable energy, including incredibly damaging biofuels, but very little I’ve ever heard of for seriously connecting energy conservation through design of the built infrastructure to climate stability.

Many thanks for your interest and ideas.

Well, there are a few!

Richard

With good wishes,

Walter Truett Anderson                                                               Bob Berg
President Emeritus and Co-Coordinator                                      Trustee and Co-Coordinator
waltanderson1@gmail.com                                                        bobberg400@cs.com

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Please note the attached, just completed.  I am happy to provide you with more information if you wish it.

Cordially,

Burns Weston