The following is a guest post by John Bonine, a colleague and friend to West Coast Environmental Law. He wrote it as a personal observation to friends, and we reproduce it here with his permission.
Nearly 5 years ago, the Ukrainian environmental lawyer and law professor, Svitlana Kravchenko, who would later become my wife, asked a question during a conference in Florida. Her question should confront all of us as a result of the release a few hours ago of the latest proposed text of the “Paris Agreement” on climate change.
“Have you considered the effect of climate change and sea level rise on your analysis?” she asked.
A speaker had just presented a study of planned and proposed modifications to the extensive canal systems in Florida. The study showed how the changes would restore the flow of water into the Everglades. It claimed significant benefits to the protection and regeneration of that unique ecosystem. Svitlana was not an expert in hydrology. She did love national parks. In fact, she helped establish the first national park in Ukraine. But she had no training in ecological science that would qualify her to raise questions about somebody’s scientific presentation.
What Svitlana had was the ability to listen, the independence to think for herself, and the courage to ask questions in public when things just didn’t add up for her.
What would happen to the Everglades in a world of growing emissions of carbon dioxide due to the continued burning of fossil fuels, she wondered. What would happen as glaciers in Greenland melted and ice sheets in Antarctica broke off? “Have you considered the effect of climate change and sea level rise on your analysis?” she asked.
The authors of the study had not taken that into account. It was an embarrassing moment for them.
Here in Paris, the politicians from 196 countries are not taking into account the true extent of the global disaster that business-as-usual in carbon-based energy production is bringing to our world. Seven years ago, Svitlana wrote a law review article titled “Right to Carbon or Right to Life.” She saw the stakes clearly. She argued that a human rights perspective was essential to international and national law regarding climate change. Last night, the diplomats at the Conference of the Parties of the Climate Change Convention removed the term “human rights” from the operative section of the draft Paris Agreement. The term does appear in the Preamble, which can be seen as progress and a vindication of Svitlana’s perspective. But in terms of having an actual legal effect, we who have argued for human rights to be part of the legal regime have not yet succeeded.
There is progress and defeat in other aspects as well. The draft agreement recognizes that a net increase of an additional one-half of a degree Celsius over pre-industrial levels (to 1.5, compared to the one degree we have already experienced) should be the goal, rather than 2.0, as previously stated. But the 1.5 degree target is listed merely as something to be considered. And, most significantly, the voluntary pledges submitted by 185 of the 196 countries are predicted to lead to a temperature rise of about 3 degrees (5 degrees Fahrenheit). Some scientists predict 4 degrees Celsius in the lifetimes of your children.
There will be flooding in India, stronger hurricanes and typhoons in the Pacific and the Caribbean, loss of agricultural productivity in Kenya and Tanzania, and a host of other problems in the world that you and your children and certainly your grandchildren will inherit.
The Paris COP is better than the failures of the Copenhagen COP that Svitlana and many of you attended. But it is still a failure.
Only de-carbonization of the economies of the world can limit the changes that are coming in a significant way. But we fiddle while the planet burns.
You are the future of Mother Earth. Keep asking questions.
By John Bonine, Law Professor, University of Oregon
Note from West Coast Environmental Law: Svitlana Kravchenko, an internationally renowned environmental lawyer and scholar, passed in 2012, and is sorely missed by pubic interest environmental lawyers everywhere.