Above – Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Instutute
Imagine
It is 2016
An Asti Spumante cork has popped, in Rio perhaps
The whole wide world is celebrating – an historic Global Climate Peace Deal Protocol has been ratified
It is grounded in the wit, wisdom and will-power of this man, Aubrey Meyer, of the Global Commons Institute, who ‘discovered’ Contraction and Convergence (C&C) , its beauty, logic, nature, maths and inevitability, more than 25 years before it eventually came into force.
But, eventually, it did.
“Here’s one I prepared earlier” he said
Climate justice without vengeance
And they all lived happily ever after.
Truth and reconciliation; these above all are what we should argue that we are for, as together the are the basis of any winning strategy for peace and justice.
As with Lincoln and later Mandela, and as they both did in resolving great conflicts, we should argue this as the ‘constitutional freedom’ of ‘equality under the law’. It ended the US Civil War. It ended the Cold War. It ended civil strife in South Africa.
Ending the fears of climate change means becoming compliant with the objective of the UN Climate Treaty. This in turn means keeping within the limit of safe & stable atmospheric GHG concentration. Inevitably this limit requires a rapid global contraction of the GHG emissions driving climate changes and the convergent international sharing of that emissions contraction. All that together this is C&C.
Lincoln and Mandela would project this as ‘equality under that limit’ as they would assume it is a sensible basis on which to build the global consent needed for UNFCCC-compliance under that limit.
The imperative of avoiding dangerous rates of climate change means blue-printing C&C so we are guided to do enough soon enough to prevent the runaway rates of change that otherwise ensue. That means rationalizing and presenting rates of C&C in a unifying and transparent way so negotiators can do their job: – http://www.gci.org.uk/cbat-domains/Domains.swf
Of course it also means we should argue, organize and act against what we are against. Fossil fuels need to be left in the ground and tactics to that end do not hinder. On the contrary they both need and help the C&C strategy.
As tactics without a strategy is blind man’s bluff, we really should argue them both as the vision we need and the dreams we have together. Like that a C&C strategy can help bring about the “Truth and Reconciliation” that achieves UNFCCC-compliance.
We should argue this as Mandela would, as “Climate Justice Without Vengeance”.