The Durban Platform sets out a “roadmap” to creating a new global deal on climate change, which would involve commitments from all countries.  If you’re an international lawyer, this looks like a pretty radical step.  The key bit in the text is where it says they’ve decided “to launch a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change applicable to all Parties”.  Legal force.  All Parties.  The US, China, India – everyone.  If this actually happens – and it’s by no means set in stone yet, because they’ve got until 2015 to agree on the actual deal – it will represent a decisive shift in the dynamics of global climate politics.  Since climate negotiations began in the early 1990s, the world’s nations have been grouped (in the typically obscure language of the UN) into “Annex 1” and “non-Annex 1”.  Annex 1 are those that were classed as industrialised or economies in transition, back in 1992, and these are the ones that have emissions reduction targets under Kyoto – if they signed up to Kyoto, that is – so not the USA.  Non-Annex 1 is everyone else.  The Annex 1 / non-Annex 1 divide has grown more and more contentious as countries classed as “developing” in 1992 have grown into some of the world’s most powerful economies – China’s the obvious one, but also India and Brazil, and others have grown significantly too, like Mexico.  The Guardian’s interactive map is a great illustration of the different ways of thinking about “who’s to blame”.

So what the Durban Platform does, in committing to adopt an agreement “with legal force” that applies to ALL countries, is overcome the Annex 1 / non-Annex 1 divide.  This is no mean feat, given the squabbles between the US on one side, and China and India on the other (delightfully depicted in this video from the UK Youth Climate Coalition, of the Cancun talks last year: “you sign first, USA” – “no China, you sign first” – “noooo, you sign first!”).  It’s been a victory for the EU, which came up with the roadmap idea and worked with the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and less developed countries to push it throughout the negotiations.

Some other important developments are worth mentioning.  The Kyoto Protocol will continue for a second commitment period, meaning the countries that have emissions reduction targets (not the USA, because it didn’t agree to it, and not the non-Annex 1 countries) will see their targets extended for another 5 years, until 2017.  Progress was made on the design of a Green Climate Fund to help less wealthy countries adapt to climate change and develop greener economies: the Fund will have staff and an office, but the crucial detail – where the money will come from – is yet to be decided.  D’oh.  There’s this thing called the “global recession” and also “sovereign debt crises” which mean that none of the rich countries seem to have that much cash any more.  Or, more accurately, not much cash they’re happy to give away, amidst austerity drives and IMF bailouts.  The sensible thing to do would be to establish a tiny tax on financial transactions that would generate billions of dollars a year, known as a Robin Hood Tax.  The idea has been endorsed by President Sarkozy of France, Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and even the Pope.  But the UK government is not keen, and neither is the US.

So, some progress, but it’s not fast enough.  Unfortunately, you can’t cut deals with an ecosystem.  The physical, chemical and biological processes at work on Earth – in and between the atmosphere, oceans, plants, rocks, ice – do not respond to political manoeuvring and fancy ways of wording the texts of international agreements.  Climate change will respond to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and not much else.  But, in an effort to be optimistic, Kyoto isn’t the only game in town.  It’s the only global game, so we’ll have to continue to work at it and puuuush global leaders to get their act together.  But while that’s happening, there is a plethora of national and sub-national initiatives plugging away at the problem.  In the UK, we’ve got climate legislation that commits us to cutting our emission by 80% by 2050.  Other countries, like Costa Rica and Norway, have pledged to go carbon neutral.  Even the bad boys of the global negotiations, China and US, are quietly making some progress.  China’s  12^th Five-Year Plan puts climate targets into law.  The US is beginning to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under its Clean Air Act.

Let’s keep at it.  As David Attenborough points out, it is a Wonderful World, and it continues to inspire me to try and conserve its wondrousness.

My last train-neighbour was an 80-year-old Iowan woman, bound for the same stop as me.  A couple in front of us were headed there too, leading the ticket collector to joke, “Mount Pleasant will be busy tonight!”  My travelling companion’s father was Dutch and had emigrated to Iowa in 1899.  His father had died and his mother moved to be with her parents, who had already settled in the US.  She travelled with her five children by ship to New York, and then by train to Iowa.  “The farms now are huge and mainly grow corn, soy, and now they do wheat as well.  It wasn’t like that when I was a kid.  We had a small farm, maybe 200 acres, with hogs, corn, cattle, wheat, sheep, and a vegetable garden.  There was something called a Depression in the 1930s but we hardly noticed it because we had everything we needed.  Meat and vegetables, and my mother used to sew our clothes out of feed sacks.”

She had lived in Mount Pleasant since 1969.  “It’s a nice place, 6000 or 7000 people live there, and we have some banks, a few post offices, and downtown there are plenty of grocery stores, and there used to be some places where they made things, um, factories, that’s the word I was looking for.  They made Blue Bird buses there.  But then they moved them to Georgia and that was bad for our economy.”  She looked slightly subdued for a moment, but, brightening up, “We’re a very rural area though, lots of farmers.  And we have a tractor show every year, which is pretty well-known.”

We rolled past fields and fields of corn, a golden carpet stretching out towards the flat horizon, where it dimmed into a dusty blue, punctuated by the occasional set of wind turbines, electricity pylons, or a cluster of houses surrounded by trees, and often the flicker of a red-and-white-striped flag.  Slowing to a 10mph crawl, we crossed the great Mississippi, and the Iowan woman pointed out the cable-stayed road bridge.  “It’s not quite as big as the one in San Francisco, but it’s still pretty nice, isn’t it?”

I asked Montana Man why he didn’t fly there.  He said he’d never been on a train before and wanted to see what it was like.  I was impressed.  When I tried out a train for the first time, it was the 35-minute trip from Edale to Sheffield.  He had another 25-hour train ride coming after the 17-hour one to Chicago.  “I got a 25-hour flight once, when I went to Vietnam,” commented his neighbour.  “How long were you there?” asked the woman.  “A year.  I was in the army four years, but in Vietnam for one.”  “One year too long,” the woman said.  “Oh yes.  You know, what I say to everyone now is, there’s only one good thing about war”, he said, looking at us over his spectacles.  “Once you bin in a war, afterwards, every day feels like Christmas.”

He told us about having post-traumatic stress.  “It didn’t come out when I was working, because I kep’ myself busy – I was teaching microbiology at the medical school.  But when I retired, that’s when I felt it.  I was crying a lot, shaking.  I can’t go walking in the woods without taking my gun with me.  I tell anyone who’s been in a war, go get yourself tested for PDS.  They give you $3000 a month, you’re classified as disabled.  You get yourself down the VA and they look after you real good.  Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of.  I reckon, most people who’ve been in a war, they’ve got it.  It changes you.  You go there for just a year, it changes you.”  He looked at the young guy next to him.  “Imagine if you was in Afghanistan for a year, young guys like you, they’d different when they come back.  And you” – looking at me – “even young women are going now, fighting alongside the men.”  He raised his eyebrows.

“There’s only two types of people – them wi’ the Devil in them, and them wi’ God in them.  You see it.  One time, we found a man strung up on some barbed wire, all his insides hanging out, and our commander said “just kill him.”  Well, he weren’t gon’ do me no harm.  I ain’t never killed someone who was wounded.  But some o’ the guys, they’d shoot anyone, and feel nothing.”

As I sat back down at my seat after breakfast, Ada made another announcement, saying the mechanics were working hard to get us going again.  The Boston woman across the aisle from me said to her sister, in a satisfied voice, “We already said our prayers, didn’t we.  We just gotta let Him do his work.”  “Mm-hmm,” her sister concurred.  “I ain’t complaining – He’s probably protecting us from something bad up ahead.  He’s probably saved our lives.  So I ain’t complaining.  I just wish we could get goin’ again soon.”  The train started moving.  “See?  I told you!”

Boarding the train the previous afternoon, my enthusiasm for the adventure had dipped somewhat when I realised I would be sitting next to the most enormous man I’d ever seen.  He was probably about four times my weight and was overspilling into my seat.  But I told myself this was all part of the American travel experience, so swung my rucksack down in front of us and wedged myself between him and the window.  The seats were actually pretty wide, and after all I am only A Small A.Mount, so it turned out fine.  He asked me where I was going – the standard greet-your-train-neighbour question – I said Iowa, how about him.  “LA.”  “LA?  Wow, I thought my journey was long!”  “I came from Boston,” chimed in the woman across the aisle, not to be outdone, who turned out to be my neighbour’s sister.

I asked him why he was taking the 3-day train journey, and he said he guessed it ran in the family, adding (unnecessarily) that it would’ve been much quicker to fly.  I wondered if maybe he wouldn’t fit in airplane seats; there’s much more space on trains, both widthways and lengthways.  His two sisters across the aisle started watching a video clip on their laptop without headphones.  It was some sort of pastor, very excitable, all Hallejuh!s and “thank the Lord our Father, he’s such a wonderful Father!”, getting louder and louder until he was shouting with a religious passion I’ve never heard before.  The two women seemed to think it was lovely.  No one else in the carriage batted an eyelid, and I assumed this was because they were used to hearing this kind of thing, rather than doing the pretend-nothing’s-happening, stiff-upper-lip, it’ll-be-over-soon British thing I was engaged in.

The train rumbled through a landscape of rolling hills, with lots of woods, occasionally breaking into open spaces.  Tree silhouettes fingered the darkening sky and were reflected in a wide, calm river.

My neighbour heaved himself out of his seat.  “Where you goin’?” demanded his sister.  “Nowhere” he grunted.  He turned around, leaning on his seat.  “Say you, know how the Eagles did in the game today?” he asks the bloke seated behind us.  “Nah, I don’t.  Could phone someone.”  “OK.”  The second guy rang his friend, asking about the game.  He had a hoarse voice, sounded like it had grit in it, which trapped the consonants so his words came out strung together, and gave the impression of being transmitted over radio from far away.  Made “Maryland” sound like “Merlan”.   He hung up, leaned forward.  “Hey, the Eagles play tonight, man.”  “OK, buddy.”

I had to admit that Amtrak, the rail company, did not have a great reputation.  But I was determined to give it the benefit of the doubt, in the land where the automobile is king.  I was concerned about the ballooning carbon footprint that comes with the transatlantic lifestyle.  I find airports a hassle.  It wasn’t any more expensive to get the train.  And after three months of library-bound Ivy League life, I was ready to “see America”, meet some of these “Real Americans” that politicians here go on about all the time – apparently Yalies don’t count.

I left New Haven in the pre-Thanksgiving rush on Sunday morning, piling into Union Station with throngs of other students off to see their families for the week.  I’d managed to fit everything in my rucksack, and my only concern was that the fruit cake I’d baked for my friend’s family would survive the 1,200-mile journey to Iowa City.  I’d wrapped it in newspaper and put it in a shoe-box stuffed with clothes for padding.

My first train-neighbour was a dear old lady off to see her son and daughter-in-law. “They’re both doctors”.  She was one of those talkative people, who asks you questions but then doesn’t give you much of a chance to answer.  “Where are you headed?” “Iowa.”  “What?” – she was a little deaf.  Or didn’t think anyone would be taking the train to Iowa from New Haven.  “Iowa.”  “Ah. I love farmland.  Some of it’s beautiful. [Pause]  It was very hard for the English people, they were used to everything being all squashed together.  Then they came here, and it was difficult for the women.  Sometimes they’d go for days without seeing another white face.” “Hmm.” I wasn’t sure if she meant they’d only seen Indians, or that they hadn’t seen anyone at all.  “Strong people, in Iowa.” “Mm.”  I went off to find a cup of tea in the cafe car – the Dunkin’ Donuts queue at the station had been too long.

The Amtrak cafe cars are wonderful.  They have booths to sit in, and tables you can fit four people round.  The longer-distance double-decker trains have a sight-seeing lounge on the top floor, with huge windows, dark-brown plywood panelling at the end of the carriage, and comfy seats of dark blue leather.  I spent a lot of time there, feeling as if I was in another age – except for the cardboard sleeves for the cups, which under the Amtrak logo read “Rail Consumes Less Energy Than Car or Air Travel”, reminding me I haven’t in fact slipped through a time-window into the mid-twentieth century.

I had an hour and a half to spend in Washington DC, so after “detraining”, I headed straight out the station and gazed about, wondering where to go.  Behind a stone memorial to Columbus (“whose high faith and indomitable courage gave to mankind a new world” – not sure they consulted the Native Indians on that one) I spied a domed roof at the top of a slope and, West Wing knowledge kicking in, realised it was the Capitol building.  I joined the Sunday afternoon tourists taking photos of the famous cupola, passed the Supreme Court with its motto of “Equal Justice Under Law”, admired the stately trees dotting Olmsted’s lawns, then boarded the 2pm sleeper train to Chicago.

I just had a class on green energy policy, where we explored the different ways of telling the story of Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer based in California that just went bankrupt.  Solyndra was one of the companies to do well out of Obama’s green jobs stimulus package a few years ago.  It received a $535 million loan guarantee from the federal government.  (Note: a loan guarantee means that the government only spends money if the company cannot pay the loan back; if the company thrives, there is no cost to the government.)  This was a scheme set up under the Bush administration, but it began under Obama.  Solyndra became an example of the green jobs scheme: both Obama and his deputy, Joe Biden, went to visit the company and deliver speeches.  Biden declared Solyndra was an example of creating ‘permanent’ jobs.

Solyndra just went bankrupt because its business model didn’t work.  It makes solar panels without using silicon, and it was betting that the price of silicon would keep rising so the Solyndra panels would get more and more competitive.  But the price of silicon has been falling for a while, and Chinese companies especially are undercutting this US company.  The interesting part of this is that there’s evidence to suggest the Department of Energy knew Solyndra would fail, but still allowed it to receive the federal loan guarantee.  Other evidence also suggests a key Solyndra backer donated a lot of money to the Obama election campaign.

So, on to the principles we can draw out from the facts.  Let’s pretend we’re Republicans, a nice place to be right now because they’re having a heyday with this story.  The government does not make a good venture capitalist! we cry.  It’s rubbish at picking winners, which shows we should leave these matters to the market, to the investors who really know what they’re doing, not the career bureaucrats.  Real businesspeople would never have made such a schoolboy error.  And also – what’s this about Solyndra paying lobbyists?  Shocking, absolutely shocking: the government is obviously biased and we shouldn’t let it make these sorts of decisions in future.

Ok, now let’s stop pretending to be Republicans (unless you are one, in which case you could consider stop being one) and look at the bits of the story they missed out, which don’t make sense even on their capitalist terms.  Firstly, it’s not easy being a start-up company.  Most start-ups fail.  Venture capitalists know they won’t see returns on all their investments, green or otherwise, which is why they have investment portfolios with lots of different companies.  This particular portfolio of loans is worth roughly $30 billion, which means that if Solyndra is the only business to fail, the government will still have leveraged $30 billion of private capital with only Solyndra as a cost (remember, it was a loan guarantee from the government, not a loan).

The second non-Republican argument is that new technologies need a leg-up to be able to compete with more established ones, like oil.  Oil companies have had decades to improve their efficiency, and new companies need some initial investment to help them reach a more efficient stage and be able to compete.  Note that despite their mature age, oil companies still receive enormous amounts of US government subsidies: the Environmental Law Institute estimates traditional fossil fuels received $70 billion between 2002 and 2008, while traditional renewables got $12 billion.

The third rebuttal to the free-marketing Republicans, is that currently there is not a free market in energy.  The prices of fossil fuels do not accurately reflect their real costs to society, which include costs to human health and the environment on which all human activity relies.  This is the biggest subsidy we give to fossil fuels.  For more on this, see the Hidden Costs of Energy report by the National Academy of Sciences.  Giving subsidies to clean energy companies is a way of making price signals more accurate reflections of reality.

The only argument that holds any water is the one about lobbying, which I strongly agree is a real problem in US politics.  I do not know, however, how Republicans can make that argument with a straight face because when it comes to dishing out political favours to their wealthy friends, they’re just as bad as the Democrats.  But that’s a topic for another blog.

But then I got this image in my mind of political debate as essentially a war of the titans – a battle between millionaires, with Tom Steyer on one side and the Koch brothers (famous for using their billions to undermine environmental legislation, trade unions, Obama’s healthcare reforms, among other terrors) on the other.  And I felt a bit left out.

Is it right to depend on a former hedge fund manager’s goodwill to ensure future generations’ needs are considered in public decision-making?  Can we be proud of a modern democracy that responds to big wads of cash and big advertising campaigns, no matter who they’re wielded by?  It feels less like ‘one person, one vote’, and more like ‘one rich person, as many votes as you can buy’.

I’d feel better if future generations and children were better-represented within the institutions of government, with a formal procedure for taking their needs into account when making decisions.  Hungary has a Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations, supported by a line in its constitution that enshrines the right to a healthy environment.  WWF-UK and the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development have done some interesting work on governance options in this area – see Peter Roderick’s informative document on Taking the Longer View.

We shouldn’t be protecting the interests of future generations because a few wealthy individuals think it’s a good idea.  Quite apart from the moral reasoning (we should be doing it because human beings have an obligation to leave the world a better place for the people who come after us),  in a battle of funds, those who benefit from the fossil-fuelled status quo have the odds stacked in their favour.

I am very glad the Center for the Next Generation exists, because it will add a much-needed counterweight to the campaigns against the public interest waged by Koch brothers and co.  But I’m not sure we should call this democracy.

One of Wagner’s key points, which I agree with, is that currently we citizens all pick up the bill for businesses’ environmental mess-ups, and we need a regulatory system that ‘compels us to pay our fair share to limit pollution accordingly’.  But I’m flummoxed by his curious claim that the result of the current way of working is ‘planetary socialism’.  There’s nothing egalitarian about allowing wider society to pay for the cost of irresponsible polluting industries while the latter accrue most of the benefits.

The main point of his argument – that there’s no point in individuals’ efforts to reduce their personal emissions – is way too pessimistic and unhelpful.  Rather, increasing consumer trends towards buying more green products sends signals to politicians and businesses that lower environmental impact is something the public wants.  And yes, just one person doing it by themselves won’t have a huge direct impact, but they’ll have a considerable indirect impact by contributing to changing social norms, whose force should not be underestimated.  Although changes happen painfully slowly, there have been profound alterations in the way we (governments, businesses, NGOs and individuals) manage our relationship with the biosphere over the past few decades, prompted by increased environmental awareness.

We obviously need to change the economics, and the government needs to show more leadership in this arena (e.g. by letting the Green Investment Bank start borrowing right away, rather than in 2015), but we shouldn’t dismiss the importance of personal action: both for creating a sense of a shared undertaking, and for effecting measurable changes.  A particularly annoying thing about the op-ed is that Wagner slags off personal carbon savings without providing a concrete alternative except to ‘learn some basic economics’.  It doesn’t fill me with a ‘get up and go’ mentality.  I’d be more sympathetic towards his article if he’d told people to put pressure on their elected representatives to get the UK’s Energy Bill fit for purpose, or switch their bank accounts to ones that don’t invest in Canadian tar sands, or change their electricity tariffs to ones that invest in renewables.  Or even to join the September 24th global day of action to demand we move beyond fossil fuels.

It was written for a US audience, and maybe I’m exhibiting an excessive amount of British optimism (sounds almost oxymoronic doesn’t it) given the relatively – relatively – healthy state of our environmental politics compared with the US.  As one of my professors said the other day (and I apologise that I’m not yet able to comment on this), national green energy policy in the US has achieved almost nothing.  Whereas in the UK, we’ve built more offshore wind turbines than any other country, according to the European Wind Energy Association [I need to be careful here - a side-effect of living in the US is that you start thinking that EU and British environmental policies aren’t that bad after all, which ain’t necessarily so].

But there is some truth in the oft-repeated Gandhi quote that you should “Be the change you want to see in the world”.  If you’re not rejecting plastic bags in favour of the sturdier and longer-lived versions, what grounds do you have for persuading anyone else to do the same?  How can you expect others to take the environment seriously if you’re not walking your talk?  It’s also a matter of personal conscience, which, although probably seen as irrelevant by economist Wagner, is something to be valued and nurtured.  Some of us need to compensate for its apparent absence in many of our public figures today.  American plastic-bag-reducers can feel good in the knowledge they won’t be adding anything more to the 100 million ton plastic bag soup currently drifting across the north Pacific.  Feeling good is important!

Now it’s not the earth moving but the air, howling through the streets, with gusts every now and then that shriek as if with delight.  A Category I hurricane has sustained winds of around 75mph: imagine zooming down a motorway and sticking your head out of the car window.  Hurricane Irene has been downgraded to a tropical storm, which is still impressive because at 41 degrees North of the equator we’re well out of the tropics.  But from the safety of my room, it just feels like I’m back in Edale on a typical summer’s day.

The rain began last night and is still puddling the streets, though there’s no sign of flooding near me.  All the shops here are shut and there’s no public transport, although from my window I did see one brave soul battling down the road on his bicycle.  We’ve been advised not to leave our buildings until given the all-clear by the Yale Alert system, and luckily we still have electricity on campus, though 700,000 houses across Connecticut are without power.  Apparently hurricanes are usually followed by a heat wave, so I feel for the people who won’t be able to cool down their homes with air con.

As well as giving us packages of food to last us through the day, Davenport College gave us a really good low-down on how hurricanes work (which I’ve supplemented here with info from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which delighted the geographer in me!  ‘Hurricane’ is the name given to tropical cyclones in the Atlantic; elsewhere, it’s called a typhoon.  To form, it needs warm sea surface temperatures of more than 26 degrees C, because below this temperature, the atmosphere is relatively stable so you don’t get strong enough upwards convection.  Moisture evaporates from the ocean surface; warm air rises and as it rises it cools, so the moisture condenses into water droplets.  This condensation process releases energy, which drives the circulation of the cyclone.

As soon as a hurricane moves over cooler waters, or moves over land, it loses the driving power of the warm water, so starts to calm down (as this map demonstrates).  Irene has got so far north because along the USA’s east coast runs the Gulf Stream, which transports warm water from the Gulf of Mexico northwards.  In the northern hemisphere, hurricanes spin in an anti-clockwise direction, so the winds pile up the seawater on the eastern side of the storm and can cause a storm surge, which is why they were worried about serious flooding in New York City.  Apparently in New Haven we’re protected from storm surges by Long Island, which has borne the brunt of the weather.

Lastly, tropical cyclone scientists cannot yet say whether or not hurricanes are getting stronger and more frequent due to climate change.  It’s hard to make out long-term trends with the evidence currently available, so they can’t draw firm conclusions.  But they point out that it is likely that as tropical sea surface temperatures increase, cyclones will have higher peak wind speeds and rainfall.  And as sea levels rise, the risk of storm surges will be amplified.

Founded in 1637 as a Puritan colony, New Haven grew into a port city and later developed a strong industry producing coaches, carraiges, watches, tools, and firearms [1].  But its industrial base began to decline in the early 20th century, hit by the Great Depression and the fact that automobiles became trendier than horse-drawn carraiges.  It’s now the fourth-poorest city in the US, despite its location in the richest state, Connecticut, home of a disproportionate amount of millionaires [2].

Yale University is now the city’s largest employer.  But even with an endowment worth $16.7 billion [3], it won’t pay a living wage to its employees [4].  And it doesn’t pay property tax.  Private universities in the US get tax exemptions – effectively a state subsidy.  As Professor Bill Domhoff argues [5], it would be understandable if these subsidies benefitted local youngsters who’d be able to use their education to better their struggling communities.  But the people attending Yale tend to be well-off students from across the US and abroad.  So the New Haven public purse is subsidising my education, while a quarter of its residents live in poverty [6].

It was quite surreal being guided round the facilities on offer within the faux-Oxbridge walls of Davenport College, where I live.  We may not be able to afford a living wage for our cleaners, but thankfully the purse can stretch to a printing press, bookbinding studio, digital media and arts centre, pottery studio, 72-seat auditorium, and a common room housing not one, but two grand pianos.

Is enlightenment really that expensive?