• ” CO₂ in the atmosphere continues its inexorable rise.
• Higher concentrations of greenhouse gases leads to a hotter planet
• A hotter planet means an intensification of the hydrological cycle
• A hotter planet means disappearing glaciers and ice, especially in the Arctic.
• A warming planet also means more extremes of climate.”

I wish policy-makers, business leaders, and citizens around the world had these conclusions, and the datasets behind them, more deeply in mind. Most of the time, these trends aren’t in the headlines, though. They are crowded out by emergencies that feel more immediate, or by stories that feel more entertaining. Our planetary life-support system is changing quickly, but our collective awareness of that fact is slow to catch up with reality.

Is there anything to be done about that?

At Climate Interactive, we think interactive computer simulations can help. In fact, we’ve seen how, by playing today’s possible decisions out for decades into the future, people can better grasp the long-term implications of the options before us today. We’ve seen how interactive simulations  help foster more rigorous conversations about our choices for the future.

But simulation models are just a tool, just one way to open our minds to a longer time horizon, and our hearts to the fates of people and species living on the other side of the Earth. Simulation models are powerful, but in the end it is the human capacity to care about the future that has the potential to turn a graph into a call to action.

Simulation models can invigorate that capacity for caring, but the fact that that capacity is there at all is our best hope for the future.

Recent reports that unusually low natural gas prices in the US may be weakening homeowner’s enthusiasm for investing in solar panels are  a cause for concern, especially considering a dynamic we have begun exploring with En-ROADS (our interactive scenario-testing tool that explores the dynamics of creating a low-carbon economy). In En-ROADS, just as described in the latest news accounts, when there is a lot of cheap gas around the growth in renewables tends to be slower.

On the surface, these reports seem to be telling the tale of a one-time event: cheaper gas this year means fewer new solar installations this year. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story.

Consider the  virtuous cycle shown in the diagram above: with more units of solar  installed there is more learning by doing. Costs  of solar fall, leading to greater attractiveness of solar and even more units of solar installed, and so on.

But here’s the glitch – if the falling cost of natural gas makes  the attractiveness of solar decline, then the early installations that launch the virtuous cycle falter, and the whole reinforcing process can lose momentum.

The impact of cheap gas is NOT  just a smaller number of new installations this year; it’s a future loss in the speed at which solar becomes more affordable. Think of money not invested in a retirement account; it’s not just that the balance is lower, but that a lower balance earns interest more slowly.

There is growing awareness about the downsides of natural gas, starting with the impacts of its extraction. Like most of our energy options, natural gas comes with side-effects. Some are measured in contaminated groundwater. Others are  even more subtle, woven into economic feedback lops, and resulting in the weakening of a possibility, just when we need it most.

As systems thinkers, this is a lesson we see again and again. From sneakers made in sweatshops to chemical-laced agricultural products, if a society prioritizes the inexpensive above all else, eventually, consequences begin to pile up. If we orient towards what we really want, not just towards what is cheapest now, and if we look carefully at the structure of the systems we live within, we can design smart policies that prioritize the our real goals, from adequate access to energy to a sustainable future for our children.

Check out the interview here.

During the program John discusses how we use role playing to help people viscerally experience some of the dynamics at the climate change negotiations in the World Climate Exercise. As Drew put it, we want to “bring these insights to leaders in forms that really touch people’s minds as well as their hearts.” John goes into this further by explaining that “our job is to give people analytical tools, so that given their goals, they can create the policy to reach them.” Beth uses our work at the UN climate negotiations, most recently held in Durban, South Africa, to explain how others employ our tools, like the Climate Scoreboard, and our analysis to support their efforts to address climate change.

John, Drew, and Beth then explore some of their motivations behind Climate Interactive’s work and talk about our philosophy of rejecting the gloom and doom in favor of showing people that there is a way forward. John explains that we have found time and again that “it is so empowering, when you understand how we are going to get from where we are today to wherever it is you want to go.”

Download and enjoy the entire radio program here.

One of our founding goals was to offer rapid turnaround analysis of the most important climate and energy issues, and to make that analysis available ‘open source’. In doing so, we reasoned, we’d be boosting the effectiveness of the many, many parties –- from negotiators to civil society leaders — who are calling for climate policy ambitious enough to be consistent with the latest science. And, if such groups found our analysis helpful and clarifying, we assumed they would share it with their networks and constituencies, reaching more people than our small team ever would on its own.

Over the years, from Copenhagen to Cancun, this has been a productive formula for us, and it paid off again in Durban, where we analyzed the impact of waiting until 2020 to increase the ambition of pledges.

• The Washington Post covered our analysis on Dec 6th: U.N. climate talks move slowly as new studies urge more dramatic emissions cuts;
• Out of dozens of side events offered that day, the analyses from our team was included in the ECO – the Climate Action Network handout, widely read across the COP;
• In a youth briefing Jonathan Pershing was asked: “The current commitments that are on the table put us on a trajectory to around 4.3°C according to analysis by Climate Interactive.  Are you suggesting that the commitments that have been put on the table are good enough and we should now look at 2020 and beyond?”;
• Civil society groups 350.org and Avaaz organized a global online petition drive that got 700,000 signatures in 48 hours. The petition said: “The world cannot afford delay on climate action. I urge you to abandon your proposal to postpone a binding global agreement until 2020, and stand with vulnerable countries around the world by stepping up your ambition and accelerating your timeline for bold climate action.”;
• The “Climate Progress” blog of Joe Romm reposted our findings; and
• Our analysis was shared within the TckTckTck network (a global alliance of more than 300 civil society groups). It also was included in a joint press release from Greenpeace and WWF.

While celebrating our role in these remarkable events, we also soberly acknowledge that, in the end, Durban did not increase the ambition of 2020 pledges to be in line with a feasible 2°C pathway. Our efforts helped the world to see, without any illusion, what was being decided, but we didn’t get a better deal.

So, we’ll be keeping at it, in 2012 and beyond.  We’ll be ‘adding up’ current pledges, and we’ll be offering analysis of the ‘how-to’ of the  transition to a low carbon economy, which is, after all, the fundamental re-orientation needed to deliver a liveable climate. As long as there are leaders out there calling for policy that matches the science, we’ll be doing what we can to offer analysis that helps them make their case.

As our previous analysis showed, postponing the adoption of more ambitious targets until after 2020 would commit countries to rates of CO₂ emissions reductions after 2020 far larger than what has been seen either historically or in energy system model projections.  By failing to agree to a mechanism to increase the ambition of mitigation targets before 2020, the decisions made at COP-17 place unnecessary burdens  on future generations who will have to work much harder and endure  much greater costs and risks as a result of these decisions.

Without new pledges for emissions reduction on the table, our Climate Scoreboard analysis projects future global temperature increases far above the global goal of 2°C (3.6 °F) , pointing towards temperature increase of 4.3°C (2.6 – 6.9°C) or 7.7°F (4.6 – 12.3°F) by the end of the century.

Even though countries were unable to agree to increase the ambition of 2020 pledges, many cost effective mitigation opportunities exist today; and the costs will fall as low-carbon, efficient technologies develop and scale. Commitments lacking the necessary ambition delay these cost reductions and the maturation of the technologies needed to make a sustainable, low-carbon economy a reality.

The longer the delay in implementing significant emissions reductions, the faster emissions must fall later to limit expected temperature increase to 2°C (3.6 °F).  Such rapid emissions reductions cost more and lead to more economic disruption, thereby reducing the chances that future generations would follow through with such large emissions reductions.

More ambitious action by 2020 would reduce the rates of reduction needed in later decades, increasing the chances of limiting warming to the 2°C goal. Yet, in Durban, delegates failed to agree to increase the amount of greenhouse gas emissions cuts.

Delegates did agree to continue to work towards addressing climate change via international legal agreement (rather than relying only on voluntary action). This is a step forward, given that climate change is a classic, “Tragedy of the Commons” problem with the atmosphere as a shared global commons.

As systems analysis has shown for decades, fundamental solutions to The Tragedy of the Commons require agreements that include all of the major participants in the commons.  Since the breakdown of the UNFCCC talks in Copenhagen, the world has lacked such a forum for the climate change issue. Thus, the establishment of the new body to negotiate a global agreement – the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action- provides a venue for the steps that the world’s nations need to take.

According to Climate Interactive Co-Director Elizabeth Sawin, meeting climate goals calls for urgent action: “Because each year of delay increases the rate of reduction in emissions required in the future, the easiest, cheapest, and lowest risk option would be for the world to move more quickly than the timetable just agreed to in Durban.”  In addition, according to MIT’s John Sterman “more ambitious, binding commitments to reduce emissions will stimulate the flow of private capital into end-use efficiency and clean, renewable energy, speeding the development of a low-carbon economy and creating sustainable jobs.”

To download the full press release, click here.

To see a reposting on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress blog, click here. And a corroborating report by ClimateWorks Foundation here plus another by Climate Analytics here.

Postponing commitment to ambitious targets until after 2020 would commit countries to rates of CO2 emissions reductions in decades beyond 2020 that exceed those typically seen in the current generation of energy system models, making future efforts to limit temperature increase to 2°C more expensive and disruptive than needed. Without deeper reductions than are currently pledged by 2020, future generations will have sustain very rapid rates of reduction in emissions.

In the press and in the halls of the climate negotiations some parties, including the US, have been saying that 2020 pledges are essentially fixed in the form of the voluntary commitments made under the Cancun Agreement, and that current political and economic pressures mean that the time for more ambitious commitments to emissions reductions can come only after 2020.

Using the C-ROADS simulation, we examined two scenarios for future emissions reductions, both of which would limit temperature change to 2°C. The first scenario considers if the world were already on a ‘2-degree path’ in 2020 (the “Ambition now” scenario in the graph to the left). The second scenario sets 2020 emissions to the amount indicated by the current level of ambition of the Cancun Agreement (as calculated by our Climate Scoreboard), and includes a corrective action in 2050 to keep the 2°C goal in reach (the “Wait for 2020” scenario). For the “Wait for 2020” scenario we had emissions fall steeply enough after 2020 that by 2100 the increase in temperature approximated the temperature increase in the “Ambition Now” pathway.

We compared rates of reduction in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use between the two scenarios for the period 2020 to 2050 (as a percentage of year 2000 emissions), and found that in the “Ambition now” scenario emissions fell at 2.1% per year. In contrast, the “Wait for 2020″ showed an average rate of reduction of 4.0%.

What would such a rate of decline mean for the world?

The 2010 Emissions Gap report reviewed scenarios generated by energy system models (Integrated Assessment Models, or IAMs) and reported that “the highest average rate of emission reductions over the next four to five decades found in the IAM literature is around 3.5 per cent per year.”

We also note that a 2011 paper by Rogelj et al (reference below) which examined mitigation scenarios from models with representations of the energy system. That paper found that the average rate of reduction of industrial CO2 emissions (as a percentage of 2000 emissions), even in stringent scenarios with a greater than 90% chance of limiting temperature increase to 2°C, ranged from 3.1 to 3.3 %.

While these studies do not set an absolute upper limit on the feasible rates of reductions of emissions they do contain realistic constraints on the rates of scale-up of low-carbon energy and the turnover of existing fossil fuel-using capital. Achieving higher rates of reduction after 2020 would likely entail more cost and more disruption than the rates of emissions reduction that would be needed if the world reached for a two degree path starting in 2020.

To reduce GHG emissions, the carbon intensity of the economy must fall faster than the rate of economic growth. Given the assumptions in C-ROADS about the future growth of world GDP (3.5 % per year in the reference scenario) the carbon intensity of the global economy between 2020 and 2050 would need to fall at a rate of 5.8% per year in the “Ambition Now” scenario and 8.0% per year in the “2050 correction” scenario. Even a 5.8% per year rate of reduction would be a strong departure from historical trends, estimated to be between about 1.3 and 1.7%/year over the past 40 years[i][ii]. Business as usual will not generate the emissions reductions we need.  Delaying more ambitious commitments, and the policies needed to implement them, until after 2020, will require even more aggressive actions, with even higher costs and disruption to the economy, and, as a result, even less likelihood of implementation.

If they do not commit to greater efforts in 2020, today’s decision makers leave future generations of policy makers, business leaders, and citizens with a very difficult task indeed.

To learn more, and see the data behind these results, click here.

——

Emission pathways consistent with a 2°C global temperature limit. Nov. 2011. Joeri Rogelj, William Hare, Jason Lowe, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Keywan Riahi, Ben Matthews, Tatsuya Hanaoka, Kejun Jiang and Malte Meinshausen. Nature Climate Change Vol 1. P 413.

Additional Data and Notes For Editors:

Table 1 Change in fossil fuel CO₂ emissions and carbon intensity across scenarios

Table 2. Cumulative emissions and 2100 temperature increase

Raw data in xls form is available here.

Additional Background:

The C-ROADS (Climate – Rapid Overview And Decision Support) climate policy simulator is a scientifically sound tool that enables users to rapidly evaluate the impact of national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction policies on key climate impacts including per-capita emissions, atmospheric GHG concentrations, mean global temperature and sea level, through 2100.  C-ROADS has been carefully calibrated to the best available peer reviewed science, including the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.  The scientific review panel that assessed the model concluded that C-ROADS “reproduces the response properties of state-of- the-art three dimensional climate models very well…. Given the model’s capabilities and its close alignment with a range of scenarios published in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC we support its widespread use among a broad range of users and recommend that it be considered as an official United Nations tool.”  C-ROADS was developed by the Climate Interactive, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Ventana Systems. Full documentation and details are available here. 

• C-ROADS draws upon and is intended to complement the insights of other, more disaggregated models such as MAGICC, MINICAM, EPPA, AIM and MERGE.

• The development and use of C-ROADS has been supported by Zennström Philanthropies, The Morgan Family Foundation, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, ClimateWorks Foundation and others.

• Climate Interactive is a non-profit organization and a project of the Washington D.C. based New Venture Fund, USA

As with last year’s report, the Bridging the Gap Report looks across various studies of the emissions reduction pledges within the UNFCCC  and finds that a significant gap still exists between expected emissions under the pledges and emissions consistent with a likely chance of limiting temperature increase to 2°C. The report include CI’s Climate Scoreboard as one of the 10 modeling studies assessing the pledges.

Even in the most optimistic scenarios examined in the report, the gap between expected emissions under the pledges and the 2020 emissions consistent with limiting temperature increase to 2°C was 6 Gtons CO2e. Under less optimistic scenarios the gap could be as large as 11 Gtons CO2e.

The new report goes beyond quantifying  the Emissions  Gap to also look across studies of technologically feasible options for reducing emissions and finds a package of measures, from increasing the rate of improvement in energy efficiency to scaling up low carbon fuel supplies, for reducing the 2020 Emissions Gap to zero.

Just as Climate Interactive is finding with our new En-ROADS model of the transition to a low carbon economy, Bridging the Emissions Gap shows that while the world is currently facing a serious gap between the pledges of nations and the level of emissions reductions that are needed, the gap is actually one of determination and political will, not one of physical or technological constraint.

Travis Franck, Senior Scientist and Policy Analyst

Climate Interactive is attending the UNFCCC’s seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP17). Travis Franck will be meeting with negotiators and partners (old and new) for the first week of the conference. On Thursday, 1 Dec 2011, Travis will hold a side event at the Bellona Foundation side event room. Details:

Title:
Using Interactive Computer Simulations for Energy and Climate Policy Results: C-ROADS and En-ROADS

Description:
Travis Franck will share stories of how analysts and advocates can use interactive tools towards better climate results. Attendees will leave the session with knowledge of a library of interactive climate and energy tools, widgets, role playing exercises, and simulations. Dr. Franck will share Climate Interactive’s insight into how simulations improve stakeholder understanding and decision-making.

Time/Date: 3pm on Thursday, 1 Dec 2011

Location
The Bellona Delegation Room is located on the Lower Level within the main building of ICC, Room 14. The room is near the EU pavilion and the next to the US Delegation Room.

Attendance is free, but seating is limited so come early.

Travis looks forward to meeting as many of the Climate Interactive community as possible. If you’re in Durban, please email him (tfranck at climateinteractive.org) to setup a meeting.

Comment: Climate change could be a ‘serious game’

14 Nov 2011

by Nico Aspinall

C-ROADS doesn’t present itself as a computer game, but underlying its graphs and sliders is a serious challenge: designing CO₂ emissions policies to find one which can keep global warming to less than 2⁰C.

C-ROADS stands for Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support. It has been developed by Climate Interactive, Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to give governments and decision makers a common tool to analyse the effect of their emissions policies.The full version can model the emissions of up to 15 global negotiating blocks but a simpler version with three blocks (“C-LEARN”) is available online for free. The model includes factors of forestation, the carbon cycle and cycles for other greenhouse gases and for a given set of emissions targets, projects a range of statistics like the mean global temperature, sea-level rise and concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Like all actuaries I enjoy playing with models, so I acquainted myself with some of C-LEARN’s features. The greatest shock is that the scenarios it presents are pretty disturbing.

The tool is calibrated to the reference scenario for emissions published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and so are widely studied. Even so, the difficulty in forming policies which contain the global average temperature rise to only 2⁰C is really alarming. The 2⁰C target is intended to be a “guardrail” level of warming in that above this level, the risk of catastrophic effects such as rapid species extinctions and drought, hunger and flooding are expected. The obvious conclusion from the model is that severe cuts in emissions are required, and required now to prevent an unacceptably high risk of the worst consequences occurring.

Of course we can criticise the maths behind the simulation (the website hosts their 77-page reference guide for the interested) and relying on a single simulated view of the world would be naïve. Nevertheless the simulation seems to deliver a clear message and one which is being heard at the heart of the international debate about climate change and CO₂ emissions. So why is the severity of this message not more widely known?

Perhaps it is because there are few ways to play with climate change models in a fun way. C-LEARN isn’t a computer game but maybe if it was it could engage more people with the inevitable conclusion that emissions should be cut dramatically. After all, this is the only way to win the game.

We all enjoy games of all kinds and many serious games tie in real-world objectives from folding proteins, getting fit and, of course, education of a wide range of topics.

The BBC’s “Climate Challenge” game puts you in the hot-seat as a politician trying desperately to balance emissions, food, water, energy and fiscal policies, whilst remaining popular with the voters. But this game doesn’t link emissions to the climate change they produce, so whilst giving you an appreciation of the impossibility of politics, it doesn’t present the dire consequences of failure that C-LEARN does.

Similarly the Department of Energy and Climate Change has produced “My2050” which, though beautiful, leaps to the year 2050 with only a single set of policies.

Maybe there is a need for games linking climate science and policy so more people can play and form a real understanding of the issues.

Nico Aspinall is co-editor of the Actuarial Profession’s Resource and Environment Group’s (REG) Second Literature Review.

Opinion: Utilities need to cut trees, not costs

Author, John Sterman, on skis removing a tree after a New England snowstorm

NEARLY A WEEK after the Great October Snowstorm, thousands were still without power yesterday. Many blame the utilities for delays in restoring the juice, while the utilities argue that trees in full leaf caused unusually high damage.

The real problem, however, is the failure of the utilities to implement the maintenance and system upgrades that would have limited the damage in the first place. That failure includes insufficient preventive maintenance such as trimming branches and replacing old utility poles. It also includes failure to upgrade the grid to be more resilient so that local outages don’t cascade into massive failures like the great Northeast blackout of 2003.

The US electric grid is failing. From 1991 to 1995 there were 41 outages affecting more than 50,000 customers each, but nearly 350 from 2005 to 2009. It needn’t be: Building a smart grid, according to Massoud Amin of the University of Minnesota, would cost $17 billion to $24 billion per year, but generate benefits of $69 billion per year from greater reliability and efficiency while cutting carbon emissions and stimulating the economy.

Why is preventive maintenance so often inadequate? After all, everyone knows an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Our research at MIT shows that effective maintenance programs often yield far greater payoffs.

First, preventive maintenance is not sexy. While the media justly celebrate the heroic firefighter who pulls a child from a burning building, you’ll search in vain for stories about the maintenance workers who prevent fires, though they save far more people. As one corporate executive explained, “Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened.’’

Second, under relentless financial pressure, managers are tempted to cut budgets for preventive maintenance, improvement, and safety. Insidiously, the first thing that happens is . . . nothing. The system keeps running. Managers often conclude these programs were wasteful, cut some more, get promoted. But slowly, inevitably, equipment wears. Insulators crack. Branches grow. Eventually, these latent defects cause failures and the lights go out. The high costs of emergency repairs further cut the resources for preventive maintenance, leading to more breakdowns and still more cutbacks in prevention, improvement, and safety, a vicious cycle we call “the maintenance trap.’’

Now consider a manager who tries to do the right thing by boosting preventive maintenance. What’s the first thing that happens? Costs rise and system availability falls as operating equipment is taken offline. Many organizations then abandon the program, strongly but wrongly reinforcing the belief that preventive maintenance isn’t worthwhile. Stay the course, though, and productivity and reliability eventually rise. Costs fall, freeing resources that can be reinvested in preventive maintenance. The vicious cycle becomes a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement – a win-win-win for companies, workers, and communities. However, the deeper an organization drops into the maintenance trap, the less willing it is to tolerate this “worse-before-better’’ dynamic.

So what can be done? Several states are considering legislation to fine utilities for outages. Incentives matter: Since 2010 airlines can be fined $27,500 per passenger for tarmac delays exceeding three hours. The number of such delays fell dramatically. Since the utilities appear to be unable or unwilling to escape the maintenance trap themselves, penalties may be necessary to kick start the virtuous cycle of improvement.

Financial incentives are only a start. Organizations that excel at continuous improvement invest not only in better equipment, but in less tangible yet more important capabilities. Instead of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’’ their motto is, “don’t just fix it, improve it.’’ They cultivate an environment of trust where employees are rewarded for identifying problems before they cause disaster, despite the cost, where those who prevent failure are heroes – where branches, not corners, are cut.

John Sterman is a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT System Dynamics Group.