How We Make Real Progress on Climate Change
The upcoming UN Summit threatens to devolve into recriminations and finger-pointing if we are not realistic.
This week, diplomats from around the world will arrive in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP), the annual UN-hosted climate negotiations many are counting on to drive climate progress this century. It’s probably the most hotly anticipated COP since 2015, when political and business leaders crafted the international accord on climate change known as the Paris Agreement.
If nations use the COP to incrementally build upon the realistic emissions reduction commitments they made at Paris, while strengthening global cooperation on technology, climate adaptation, and economic development, then these annual meetings could be worthwhile. By contrast, if the COP meeting is captured by the global climate commentariat and activist class that is demanding sweeping action to avoid a looming catastrophe, it is virtually guaranteed to descend into finger-pointing and posturing by rich and poor nations over who has the right to pollute the atmosphere. Ultimately, COP26 leaders should embrace the art of the possible, which will mean deemphasizing abstract temperature and emissions targets in favor of practical commitments from nations to deploy clean technology and infrastructure.
To understand how we got here, a basic overview of the past 30 years of climate negotiations is necessary. Since the early 1990s, the international community has treated climate change as a problem akin to ozone pollution and nuclear weapons, two major global hazards that have been effectively redressed by international treaties. But climate change is a far more difficult problem to solve because reducing dependence on fossil fuels and attendant carbon emissions requires that the world remake the entire global energy economy.
Making matters more complicated, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which took force in 1994, has from the beginning distinguished between wealthy “Annex I” nations and less-developed “non-Annex” parties. Under that framework, rich nations that were responsible for the vast majority of historic emissions were expected to cut emissions before poor nations would be asked to take action.
But as deindustrialization and outsourcing gathered steam across the West, the notion that developed countries would undertake deep and costly emissions cuts, while their rising economic competitors would not, became politically untenable. This led to calls from the late 1990s onwards for non-Annex nations, and especially China, to make binding emissions reduction commitments as well. Developing countries understandably rejected these demands, seeing them, correctly, as commitments that would significantly hinder their efforts to catch up to levels of wealth and development enjoyed in the rich world.
For twenty years, international efforts to address climate change foundered on these problems. But in Paris in 2015, the COP delivered a diplomatic breakthrough. Emissions reduction plans would not come from top-down temperature targets set by the United Nations itself, but from bottom-up technological and infrastructure plans set by individual countries known as “intended nationally determined contributions,” or INDCs. Though the INDCs proposed at Paris fell far short of what would be necessary to keep warming below the long-standing international goal of 2°C above pre-industrial levels, it succeeded in at least getting the world moving towards some form of climate action—something that 25 years of negotiations had largely failed to do. It did so by basing global climate action on commitments that nations were actually prepared to make, rather than on wishful thinking that is reverse-engineered from abstract and ultimately arbitrary temperature targets.
And despite its limitations, the new bottom-up approach appears to be working. In the six years since Paris, nations have steadily ratcheted up their climate commitments. Most major economies have made ambitious climate commitments over the last two years. China, now the world’s largest emitter, has committed to net-zero emissions by 2060. India, much poorer and faster growing than China, has also made ambitious commitments to scale up clean energy and reduce emissions. Where commitments made in Paris put the world on a trajectory for as much as 3.5°C of warming, new modeling from the International Energy Agency suggests that subsequent commitments might result in the world stabilizing temperatures not much above the longstanding 2°C target.
Long-term commitments of this sort, of course, are not necessarily worth the paper they are written on. Policy-makers today have no ability to constrain the actions of future policy-makers, and all manner of economic, geopolitical, and technological obstacles may prove difficult to overcome. But national programs to deploy clean energy, agricultural, and transportation technologies are the stuff that climate action is made of and the fact that policy-makers today are prepared to make ambitious climate commitments reflects growing confidence in their ability to meet them.
Unfortunately, decoupling national emissions reduction commitments from top-down temperature targets had an unintended side effect. Untethered from any legally binding framework that would tie global targets to national policies, delegates at Paris effectively moved the goalposts from 2°C above industrial levels to 1.5°C. This is an unrealistic benchmark, given that global average temperatures are already 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels; that most of the planet still remains poor compared with Western living standards; and that technological alternatives to many emissions-intensive activities remain, at best, nascent and uneconomic, if they exist at all. Nonetheless, the 1.5-degree goal has dominated the global climate discourse, and political leaders across the West increasingly pledge obeisance to it.
As global leaders head to Glasgow, the new demands to stabilize temperatures at 1.5°C have reproduced the conflict and paralysis between developing and developed nations that the Paris Agreement was designed to alleviate. Both China and India have resisted the 1.5°C target. At a G20 meeting in July, the two nations declined to sign onto common commitments that were seen as decisive ahead of Glasgow. India conspicuously failed to attend key climate negotiations that same month. Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to skip the upcoming COP altogether.
The preference among activists, journalists, and many politicians for dramatic posturing over incremental action has had significant consequences as world leaders get ready to meet in Glasgow. Last week, a group of major emerging economies including China and India called demands by western leaders for all nations to achieve net-zero commitments by 2050 “anti-equity and against climate justice.” On the eve of the COP meeting, the proceedings appear on the verge of descending into disorder and recriminations.
By contrast, the slow but steady ratcheting of ambition put in motion after Paris creates a virtuous cycle where success can breed success, nations can learn from each other's achievements, and falling technological costs and shared commitments to technology and development increasingly replace zero-sum geopolitical calculations.
That approach won’t inspire climate activists and certainly won’t result in emissions trajectories compatible with a 1.5°C target. But ultimately, climate change is a matter of degrees, not thresholds. Just as every tenth of a degree in increased warming represents a greater risk to human and non-human well-being, every tenth of a degree of avoided warming represents progress to be celebrated. In Paris in 2015, it appeared our climate negotiators finally understood that essential truth. Today, it is clear they have regressed. It is unlikely at this point that the looming diplomatic calamity at Glasgow can be averted. But in the years and decades to come, policy-makers, environmentalists, and climate advocates would be wise to return to a more pragmatic and promising approach to climate negotiations and, ultimately, climate action.
Alex Trembath is deputy director and Ted Nordhaus is executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center in Oakland, California.
The climate-poppycock pandemic looks like this: “The slow but steady ratcheting of ambition put in motion after Paris creates a virtuous cycle where success can breed success.” --Above post and the whole United Nations
How can we explain this pandemic of poppycock? --Steven Pinker
“Poppycock” was deemed “my favorite word” by someone at Pinker’s terrific zoom talk yesterday.
This “ratcheting up of ambition” poppycock was made up at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference to justify not having any real commitments.
That claim has been checked experimentally more times than any other behavioral claim. I would say at least 1,000 experiments — in political science, psychology, and economics.
Every single time it was proved wrong. They ratchet down, not up.
This is why we were sure the Kyoto agreement would fall apart, just as it did.
This is why the Paris agreement will not work.
Here’s how it goes. Typically four people (countries) participate (when you add more, the outcome gets worse). They are all given $10 and told to contribute as much as they want to the common pot. This represents each spending $10 on C02 reductions.
Because the climate benefit to the world is greater than the cost of reductions, the experimenter doubles the money in the pot and divides it evenly among the four players. (Climate benefits are spread over all countries.)
If they all contribute $10, that’s $40 in the pot. Doubled is $80, and they each get $20. That’s smart. Or is it?
What if they all “commit” to that and then three keep their commitment and one doesn’t. Then there’s $30 in the pot. Doubled is $60 and ALL four get $15. So the three honest players end up with the $15, but the cheater keeps his $10 and gets $15 from the pot and ends up with $25. That’s “smarter.” He gets his climate benefit for free.
What actually happens in these experiments? The first time they play, they are somewhat cautious and contribute about $6 or $7 on average. Then they play again. Some may contribute more but on average they RATCHET their contributions DOWN. And after playing 10 times they are down to about $2 each on average.
There have been 1000 variations on this experiment. Almost all players ratchet down.
I’ve read papers on a dozen or so of these experiments. I’ve worked with a top behavioral economist on this at his lab in Cologn, Germany, and I recently conducted the experiment several more times online using Amazon Turk workers.
Why don’t the post’s authors know this? The same reason the UN activists and negotiators don’t. They are not social scientists. They don’t read any of the scientific literature on how people do and don’t cooperate. They just know a little about energy tech and about climate science.
But the real problem is: How to get people to cooperate. And they never, ever read about that. I watched all the videos of the Paris conference. There was not a single mention of the science of cooperation or any results or theory of cooperation. They just make stuff up.
Read our full op-ed here.
https://news.trust.org/item/20180829094229-b1g4u/
Get the book here (free pdf paid for by Energy Economics Institute at the University of Cologne)
A collection of papers including 3 by Nobel economists. Just read my preface.
https://carbon-price.com/
The authors seem to be missing the real point here. In distinguishing between "the art of the possible" and the "activist agenda," they accurately enough finger the proverbial rock and hard place of the climate dilemma. Unfortunately, their position reduces to, "Lets get stuck on the rock rather than the hard place." I think this is a dangerous formulation at a very fraught time.
There's no either/or rationale that solves this dilemma. The immediate emission reductions that are loudly insisted on by... less critical-thinkers are totally warranted, and in fact necessary to avert a cascade breakdown of the modern world. They're also impossible to deliver -- no society, democratic or otherwise, will voluntarily subject itself to what's coming for Europe this winter. Let alone year-after-year for the next 20 years. That's an abject lesson in cures not being worse than the disease.
For going on 10 years I've read cheerful headlines about the imminent prospects for the solar revolution and the wind utopia. We're now witnessing how much those belied the complexity of the green energy transition. Anyone with half a brain could tell solar and wind were not ready to make up 30%, let alone 80-100% of grid scale power generation. Yet on the eve of the most head-spinning energy shocks in modern history you still have feckless EU bureaucrats effectively saying, "Wind, baby, wind."
And yet, we're out of time. It turns out linear projections of GDP loss on 80 year time horizons didn't do justice to how messy ecological shocks would be in the near term. Who would have guessed a hurricane making landfall in Louisiana could have a death toll in NYC? The cost of disaster management is going to quickly become the consuming focus of developed societies everywhere. To say nothing of the fact warming is set to -accelerate- for at least the next 10 years, but realistically beyond. It's more or less correct to say, "Climate change is here, and it's here in a big way."
Green activists, having spent a generation denying a role for nuclear energy in this fight, have stripped us of any possible absolution except one, and it's one nobody is talking about -- solar geo-engineering. We don't have the bandwidth to do what we need to do today and we don't have the time to do it tomorrow. The only play we have left is to give ourselves more time. But it is pure fantasy to think anything like that would come out of a UN summit. Maybe that makes it as impractical as shutting down all the coal plants tomorrow and, being similarly unlikely, not a good solution after all.
But someone should take up the cause of distinguishing between tangible obstacles (energy shocks with too much energy transition, mounting ecological catastrophe with too little) and psychological ones ("it feels wrong"). Geoengineering entails significant but manageable risk and carries the baggage of "man was not made to meddle" optics. Anyone who gets hung up on those compared to the real and mounting costs of the alternatives should be lit up by anyone who understands how truly dire this moment is. Not for nothing, either. Geoengineering is the only thing that could pause warming immediately, and spare us a host of impending shocks that will scale disproportionately in cost.
Or maybe we could just watch the forces of entropy take back the billions of lives humanity has managed to nourish into being over the past century.