Climate Change Action

The insurance giant Lloyds of London has just published a report presenting an overview of opinions in the business community and beyond about climate change.

As with several other inusrance companies--Munich Re being the best example--Lloyds has really started to grasps the stakes involved when it comes to climate change and have been doing more in the corporate boardrooms than Greenpeace could do in a century.

This latest report is a collection of views from its forum on climate change, risk 360.

“In the decades ahead, climate change will come to dominate everything in our lives; everything we do... Even if we act now to drastically curb emissions, things are going to be bad. If we do nothing, they will be far, far worse.”

The 'scientific view' in the report also explicitly supports Contraction and Convergence as the only framework currently in existance that is both in some degree equitable and yet simple enough to be implemented. I`m gald this point is being made to business leaders by scientists, yet i think the discription of C&C is somewhat ham fisted. C&C states that people have rights to emissions, not nations, and that everyone has an equal right. It also states that the framework will aim to win, the cap is therefore set by scientific consensus not negotiation. The negotiations occours on the rate of convergence, which is de facto done on a country by country basis. Carbon quotas within a given country would give nations a mechanism to implement this process and make it more equtable.

"The best hope is a system called contraction and convergence, which works on the
premise that everyone on the planet has the right to produce the same amount of greenhouse gas. A level is set for the planet and it is divided by the number of people, so that each country knows how much it can emit per head of population. The overall level is then brought down by agreement."