Do we go to Qatar?

It's official. The next meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is to be held next November (2012) in Doha, Qatar. Personally, I was pulling for South Korea but they didn't ask my opinion. At least in Doha, negotiators will have a ready illustration of extravagance and living beyond your means.

So the real question is virtual Qatar or real Qatar? Or will it matter at that point?

A carbon-neutral experiment

This year is different for Mark and I in that we are experimenting with a (mostly) carbon-neutral experience. In 2009, we both traveled to Copenhagen. Last year I was in Mexico while Mark blogged from Columbia. This year we are both stateside and attending the climate talks on a virtual basis.

The obvious advantages to this is the fact that we are not traveling around the world to attend the meetings in person. The net result is a savings in fuel and real costs as well. It also takes it's own mental toll to be constantly on the move and eating not much more than granola and almonds for two weeks straight. I look forward to eating real meals and being able to tuck my daughter into bed at night.

Having attended the talks for a couple of years we are in a pretty good position to be able to interpret what we are seeing and hearing via the live webcasts. Things make much more sense to me now than they did that first year in Copenhagen. In that sense, I anticipate there will be little content lost due to our virtual attendance.

Jevons Paradox

Can energy efficiency be bad for the environment?  How can electric cars and LED lighting result in higher rates of overall energy usage when they are meant to have the exact opposite effect?  This is the crux of the Jevons Paradox which indicates it is going to be even harder than previously thought for society to reduce the overall amount of energy usage (and therefore CO2 emissions).  

William Stanley Jevons was a British economist who argued way back in 1865 in his book The Coal Question that energy efficiencies designed to save or reduce the amount of fuel used tend to have the paradoxical effect of increasing energy consumption in the long-term. Jevons noted that the introduction of James Watt's innovative steam engine resulted in each individual engine using less coal. A good thing. But because each individual engine used less coal, they were more cost-effective to use. This resulted in steam engines being rapidly employed in a wide range of industries where they had previously not been used. In the long-run, Watt's development of the steam engine led to a dramatic increase in the overall amount of coal being burned because steam engines were now all over the place.

Green Development vs. Social Development?

Ban-Ki Moon has made climate change and the UNFCCC negotiations one of his highest priorities since taking office as Secretary General of the United Nations. For him, "the reason is simple, climate change affects everything the United Nations does: poverty, peace and security, and human rights. We cannot sustain gains in Millennium Development Goals or preserve ecosystems that sustain us. We cannot ensure safety and stability for the poor and vulnerable without progress in climate change."

The Millennium Development Goals that he refers to are part of a project spearheaded by the United Nations with a number of laudable goals anyone can agree with: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger throughout the world, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combatting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and ensuring environmental sustainability. While world leaders signed on to this agreement in 2000 to my knowledge, it has never been fully funded.