 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Sivan Kartha from Stockholm Environment Institute who's been working on what is known as greenhouse development rights. Sivan, good to have you with us. Thank you very much. Good to be here. Sivan, the climate change negotiations of course are completely deadlocked at the moment so we're not going to discuss that. Let's discuss what is your core of your work that how do you see the global climate crisis and what is it that countries have to do and in this the framework that you have built what is the responsibility of the developed countries? I think the question itself really has to be put in the context of what the climate system and climate scientists are telling us which is that we really are in a state of emergency. We're at a point where climate has already started to change damages are already starting to be felt impacts on development are already very real to many people whether it's floods or droughts or increasing food insecurity and given that it means that a dramatic response is necessary a response that involves fairly radical reductions in emissions particularly in the north but actually globally and of course that has to be seen in the context of the larger crisis of development that still is occurring around the world where the majority of the world is still struggling for basic energy needs. So how do you reconcile those two seemingly irreconcilable demands reduce emissions and expand energy services and so the sort of process of thinking that that my collaborators and I have gone through is to from the very start think of burden sharing in the climate regime in the context of development and think of a burden sharing arrangement or regime that would acknowledge that the majority of the world is still poor and seeking energy services but that would shield that group from the costs of this rapid and and and fairly radical transition so that was sort of the basic thought how do we how do we allocate costs in a way that shields this group and so there's very interesting you know long-term studies about the sort of levels of income that people need to attain before they achieve those basic energy services so we look through that to try and think about okay who is this group that should be shielded how large are they and what is their population in each country and of course the results are helpful in terms of having numbers and having analysis but they're entirely unsurprising in terms of of the basic intuitions of ours that they accord with there's a vast majority of poor people in the South there's a vast majority of wealthy middle-class consuming class in the North and then there's there's a minority of emerging middle class in the South in India and China and other countries and a group that's sizable in numbers in terms of absolute numbers maybe you know 80 million hundred million in India could be called part of a consuming class maybe a couple hundred million in China could be called part of a consuming class and then the majority of Europe of the US even if you look at forms the Princeton study which talks about one billion emitters India really figures in one two million in that sense of emitters who really are causing according to Princeton study the global exact a few million and then depending on and what you call high emitters what you call low emitters it may be higher but that's right it's a small percentage of the Indian population really high emitters in that of the really high emitters that's right and similarly for the Chinese population and so let's take those those people that group of people in India and China in the US and in the EU and talk about what is their capacity to reduce emissions and equally what is their responsibility for having contributed to the climate problem let's look at at those subpopulations the people who have risen to a certain level of development they've met their basic energy needs they've overcome these you know these classic plagues of poverty like no access to health care no access to education low life expectancy high infant mortality take this group of people and calculate what's their potential to contribute to solving this problem and you can run through a fairly simple fairly straightforward exercise to compare countries on that basis and again you end up with results that are not too surprising but very helpful in terms of trying to talk in a very specific quantitative way about what each country should be contributing to the problem and if you look as a fraction of total global income above this sort of minimum level of development or total global emissions to this contribution to the stock above this level of consumption you see that the US has a large fraction despite its population of 5% of the global average it has about one third of the total global capacity and responsibility that the EU has about 25% and then China despite being one fifth of the world's population has about 5% contribution to the world's capacity and responsibility India also being one fifth of the world's population has you know something like half a percent contribution to the stocks and and income so let's think about obligations to the world obligations to a climate regime obligations to solving the climate problem in terms of those kinds of allocations of the burden a third to the US a quarter to the EU you know a few percent to China almost nothing to India and use that as a basis for talk about emissions efforts mitigation efforts so what you're saying is that the world needs to cut emissions globally at a certain rate and if it has to cut at that rate this is the amount of money that is required and that money really is to be built with a fund transfer fund if you will in which each country pays either actually or notionally in terms of the mitigation effort required based on the past emissions it has done historical emissions and its capability at the moment depending on the income levels either purchasing power parity or an actual terms income levels there that these two are really going into that so-called notional fund which will pay for this mitigation have I understood you that's exactly right that's exactly right and I also would put it in terms of a notional fund in many cases the mitigation would happen domestically it wouldn't need to be channeled through an external fund in many cases a fund a multilateral fund that's properly managed and has appropriate governance would be the appropriate way in other ways maybe between particular countries trading maybe a workable way an acceptable way leaving out the mechanism of the transfer but as you said that domestic transfers would be basically notional transfers because they take place within the economy other transfers are real transfer which would have to be made in some mechanism what is the the size of this transfer we are talking about say cumulative up to 2050 or per year the estimates of the total cost of a very serious program of climate stabilization they range there's a wide range because basically nobody really knows we've never done this before we don't know how rapidly the technologies will advance and and how quickly economies will be able to adapt that's why I said one scenario one so so typically estimates are maybe a few percent of gross world product so let's take the year 2020 when gross world product will be something on the order of 100 trillion dollars so a few trillion dollars of costs per year by 2020 2 trillion 3 trillion per year so and a significant fraction of that those costs would be provided by transfers from the north to the south so compare that few trillion dollars to the numbers that are now being politically discussed the Copenhagen Accord and its sort of formal official adoption through the Cancun agreements suggested that the north would work toward mobilizing 100 billion 0.1 trillion by 2020 that is a sum that would be allocated to both adaptation and mitigation so maybe half of that would go toward mitigation so 0.05 trillion compared to what may be a trillion or more that would actually be needed we know that in the United States for example the types of emissions cuts that are on the table that are politically seriously being talked about range from a few percent below 1990 by 2020 to 0% actually to a significant rise above 1990 levels no effort whatsoever to a bit of effort but if you take the kind of approach that that we've been discussing it would suggest much greater cuts clearly cuts that are something or mitigation effort that's something more like 60% below 1990 levels by 2020 continuing to increase 100% by 2025 and 130% by 2030 so numbers that are much beyond much beyond what is politically considered realistic today and actually much beyond what could be taken undertaken solely through domestic action implying some of the action would have to be domestic the US has to cut emissions but a large fraction perhaps a half maybe even more than half would be undertaken through this type of international mechanism for providing finance and technology to other countries developing countries that also need to undertake cuts but not necessarily by providing their own finance she been looking at these numbers there's really no political appetite in the developed world today to go anywhere near the speakers how do you think the situation can change but that's really the the trillion dollar question if I may say how can the situation change I don't know I don't know how I can change but I know precisely how it cannot change and it will not change if people aren't talking about what the actual obligation of the north to the world and to the south is and there is such a tremendous willingness to to simply accept political reality in the US as an immutable object and to accommodate to it the tea party as a immovable barrier exact against the climate as an irresistible force that's exactly right that's exactly right and I put my money on the climate I think that the tea party will give before the climate gives thank you very much like what you're saying is the climate has to take a hand yes the worst case scenario that may be the best case scenario is that we see climate change fairly rapidly and focused on the the locuses of power like Washington DC large typhoons and hurricanes and so on unfortunate events as it were but in the current but preferable to the large typhoons hitting Bangladesh or drought hitting that depends on if you're in Washington or in Bangladesh unfortunately the powers that we are sitting in Washington thank you very much even come back to you on this as it unfolds and see how it goes okay my pleasure thank you for having me