Sir Nicholas Talk on Climate Change and My Reflection Over Coal and Mongolia

On 29^th of November, 2007, the Climate Change, Ethics and the Economics of the Global Deal by Sir Nicholas Stern was one of the many presented at Manchester campus, but truly distinguished from the rest.

In Withworth Hall at the University of Manchester, the audience consisted from many educational institutions in Manchester, UK. A highly remarkable introduction about Sir Stern brought me a great admire for him. I was thankful for my MESPOM friends John, Elad and, particularly Liming who gave me a chance not to miss this opportunity.

Sir Stern began his speech with genuine briefing on his work and slight a warm-up joke. He described Climate Change economics through stock and flow analysis focused on the risks humankind facing around the globe. His arguments were backed up with ICCP reports and economic modeling he used in his report.

Main message of this speech centered on the risk of climate change to humans and political economic instruments to mitigate those adverse effects. He valued great effort of human commitment and stressed more needs to strengthen and achieve those commitments trough cost effective mitigation tools. Knowledge foundation for all actions is based on economics as Sir Stern noted.

I was fortunate to enjoy fully comprehending his arguments and thankful for my educational background, which I am gaining from MESPOM. Meanwhile, I was tempted to relate climate change issue to my country Mongolia.

As Sir Stern highly warned increasing use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, for major developing countries, it opens a controversial discussion of coal between economic development and climate change. Besides skeptics view of no energy substitute to coal, natural resource management of extracting and exporting coal to global market is a priority in Mongolia today, such as Tavan Tolgoi project. In beginning period of losing its unexploited abundant natural resources, Mongolia seriously considers opening the coal bundled political game for coal ravenous neighbors and rapacious multinational corporations.

From side of saving the planet from ‘unequivocal’ heat-up, the coal favored policy seems to undermine entire human efforts to cut CO2 emissions. However, Mongolian economy, which has been suffered from systematic changes, does not act to be ‘anti-human’. Neither do the coal-lovers. What is missing is substitute policy options for coal that supports whole economic development and Energy in Mongolia. But, there always be alternatives to aid energy need and economic progress, the key is to find it!

Here emerges a missing gap in climate change policies for poor economies. Although the most of the adverse effects from global climate change threaten poor nations in coming days, there has been a huge lack of facilitation for climate change mitigation among leaders and societies in those societies. Promising is that more and more policy tools are emerging such as Clean Development Mechanism and Green Investment etc.

See more on Sir Nicholas Stern on the following site:

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/sternreview_index.cfm