Calling the tune

From the New Scientist print edition.

With the Kyoto Protocol on the verge of collapse, the search is on for a formula to get us off the hook of global warming. One of the main contenders is a proposal by a professional violinist with no scientific training. Aubrey Meyer has entranced scientists and enraged economists and many environmentalists with his idea, but it is winning high-profile backers, such as China and the European Parliament. He says it embraces science, logic, fairness, even art. Could it yet save the world? Fred Pearce gets to the bottom of it.

How did a musician get into the high politics of global warming?

I had been a practising musician and composer for 20 years. In 1988, I wanted to write a musical about Chico Mendes, the assassinated Brazilian rainforest campaigner. I began to explore rainforest politics and was overwhelmed by a sense of tragedy. I could not understand why anyone would want to murder a butterfly collector. Soon afterwards I joined the Green Party, where four of us formed the Global Commons Institute in London to fight to protect the planet's shared resources—the forests, the atmosphere and so on. We scraped together money from supporters, and I've never stopped since.

Did you have any background in science?

I didn't have any background in maths or science. My only real contact with numeracy until GCI got going was the kind of kinetic numeracy of music, its structure, and the discipline which goes with that.

You developed the formula called contraction and convergence. What is that?

At the early conferences on fighting climate change I saw this hideous charade being played out in which the politics was divorced from the science. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said we needed a 60 per cent cut in emissions of greenhouse gases to halt global warming. But the politicians had no plan even to stabilise emissions, let alone cut them. So I did some simple calculations. To do what the IPCC wanted meant reducing global emissions to an average 0.4 tonnes of carbon per person per year. That was the contraction part. It seemed to me that the only politically possible way of achieving that was to work towards national entitlements based on size of population. Today, some nations are emitting 20 times more per head than others. The US, for example, emits 5.2 tonnes per head, Britain 2.6 tonnes, India 0.2 tonnes. This means that India could double its emissions while the US would have to come down by more than 90 per cent. That is the convergence part. Clearly no country is going to be able to make those changes immediately, but the beauty of the system is that it allows them to trade in emissions permits.

Other people, like Anil Agarwal, the Indian environmentalist, had similar ideas at that time. Why did yours stick?

Yes, Anil had got very angry when some leading American environmentalists tried to suggest that India, which has one of the world's lowest per capita emissions, was one of the leading causes of global warming because of its large population. But the case against such crazy views wasn't getting anywhere—we needed a new language. I had become fascinated with the graphics capabilities of computers as I saw them as the visual equivalent of musical communication, a universal language. So at GCI we produced large colour graphics showing how countries could converge towards equal per capita emissions while bringing overall emissions down by 60 per cent. You could argue about the rate of the contraction and convergence, of course—whether it should take 20 or 50 years—but basically we had synthesised the whole problem and the whole solution onto a single graphic (www.gci.org.uk). For musicians, mathematicians, scientists, it was, frankly, beautiful. I took 300 of these graphs to a climate meeting and put them outside the conference door. They went in 30 seconds. I think contraction and convergence cuts to the chase. It flushes all the politicians out of their hidey-holes.

Why did it take a musician rather than scientists to come up with it?

Many scientists have taken to it, but perhaps it needed a musician to produce it. Maybe the idea is not intellectual in the usual scientific sense. It has rules but it is also active, and it embraces creativity. It has harmony, rhythm and form. And it embeds an ethic—of equity and survival. We musicians spend a lot of time on repetition and variation. I kept taking variants of these graphics to UN climate meetings.

But it sounds rather idealistic. It may be a fair carve-up of the atmosphere, but the world doesn't really work fairly, does it?

Initially, fairness was just what we were pushing for. I remember quizzing a woman economist at the World Bank on her cost-benefit analysis of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. I pointed out that small island states like the Maldives would almost certainly disappear under her plan. She said: "What's all the fuss about small island states? They will just be compensated; and we can send lifeboats." She had no sense of the depth of disregard for real people contained in that. But the truth is that the rich are as vulnerable as the poor to climate change. So while the fairness of contraction and convergence is a powerful argument, I personally don't think it is the key. The stronger argument is the purely logical one. It doesn't solve all our problems at a stroke, but it creates the framework in which we can solve them. If people disagree, then the challenge for them is to think of something better.

Presumably, the big environmental groups embraced the idea.

Far from it. Many have refused to talk to us or even acknowledge our existence.

How come?

I think they took a judgement at the start of the climate debate that the enormity of what we faced was so devastating that you couldn't spring it on ordinary people all at once. And they didn't want to frighten the politicians with grand strategies. They thought contraction and convergence would do that. Instead, they called for sharp cuts in the emissions of developed countries only. It may have been politically correct, but the approach was random and timid.

Greenpeace, timid?

Yes. They were part of this timid approach. They avoided facing the global dimension of the problem. It was tokenism.

But broadly that was the route taken by the Kyoto Protocol. So the timid approach worked, didn't it?

Well, I'd say that the timid approach is why we are in the mess we are in today. The US has ripped it up.

You have annoyed the economists, too.

They annoyed me. The analysis produced by the mainstream economists suggested that this problem was insoluble; that it was too expensive to save the planet. This is because their work conceals daft and immoral assumptions not only about the expendability of natural resources but also of human beings. Climate change is not an economic problem. It is an organisational problem to do with protecting the real atmosphere, the only one we have. It is not good enough for them to just nod at the scientists and say: "Thank you, now we'll tell you how the world works."

What response do you get from scientists?

They really do make an effort to remain calm and neutral in their judgement. Many see that contraction and convergence tries to mirror that objectivity by attempting to respond directly to what scientists say is the situation. But many identify with us in a moral as well as a logical sense. They are also human beings. They have children and think about the future.

Politically, your ideas have not got far yet. By criticising the Kyoto Protocol, have you played into the hands of its opponents, like President George W. Bush?

Bush acknowledges the problem is real and serious and like everyone else he has to face this. Kyoto is probably better than the chaos that is now on the cards, but the odds for getting this deal are dwindling. Anyway, as I see it, the protocol is Plan A. At best, it will moderate increases in emissions a bit—until 2012. So, regardless of what happens to it, there has to be a Plan B. The real question is whether contraction and convergence follows on from the protocol or picks up the pieces when it falls apart.

Who backs it today?

The European Parliament, China, the non-aligned movement, many African nations, the Red Cross, Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and Jacques Chirac have all said they support the idea in principle. Many economists say they have no real quarrel with it, provided it allows countries to trade their emissions entitlements. If the revenues from trade are spent on renewable energy, it will bring the efficiency gains that the economists are so keen on. And it will allow the poorest countries with the low emissions to sell their spare entitlements for profit.

What about the US government?

Some senators already support it. It is the only practical proposal that does what they've asked for, namely simultaneous emissions controls on all countries. It promotes economic efficiency through emissions trading and enables progressive American firms to get involved and make money. That's certainly what I would tell George W. Bush.

That makes you sound like an arch-capitalist, rather than the communist you have sometimes been labelled. How come the Chinese like it?

False dichotomy. The Chinese came on board, at least tentatively, when they realised I was talking about distributing emissions rights. They liked the idea of equal rights rather than equal restrictions. But this is high politics. The US Energy Department got very interested when I said I was going to Beijing. They said: "You'd better watch your back because you're gonna be watched." I got quite nervous. I'm not a diplomat, I'm just a musician. But the idea is not leftist, or even rightist. The morality you can take or leave, but the logic is inescapable.

But don't developing countries have the right to tell the rich countries that they created the problem and should solve it?

So far, most developing countries have indeed united around that message. That may be morally valid, but it is a disastrous strategy for them as well as for the rich world. The carrot for them in adopting contraction and convergence, apart from saving the climate, is that in return for controlling emissions they could get paid to convert their economies to run without fossil fuels.

So your formula meets the needs of both the US and the developing world?

Yes. It's a framework for the retreat from our dependency on fossil fuels. The way I see it, the world starts a race to get out of carbon rather than a race to get into it.

Fred Pearce

New Scientist, vol 171, issue 2298 - 07 July 2001, page 46.