Transcription
[Music] welcome to the political economy of the environment. This episode is about international climate negotiations and about the international dimensions of climate policy more generally.
I'd like to dedicate this episode to my granddaughter Robin Alice Sinclair, who was born this morning. And if, down the road, somehow she happens to see this video, I want her to know that I really wish and hope that her life experiences and her planet will be as rich and as beautiful as those that I've enjoyed.
Climate change is what economists call a negative externality, a byproduct of our economic activities that's not priced on a global scale. And so, remedial action to address climate change is a global public good. These involve market failures that have to be corrected by governance in one form or another. And in the case of climate change, because it's global, that governance has to be at an international scale. And that poses an international free-rider problem, because each country hesitates to act unless others act as well. And if each behaves that way, nobody does anything about the problem. Hence the need for international negotiations.
The benefits from the use of fossil fuels are concentrated, of course, in the countries that have burned the most fossil fuels over time. And this map of the world at night, this photograph of the world at night from NASA, gives you a pretty good rough approximation of where those benefits have been concentrated: in the advanced industrialized countries, where at night there are a lot of lights on, and so many that you can see from outer space. So you look at that and you see Europe, Japan, the United States, brightly lit up. And you see Africa hardly lit up at all. And that reflects the fact that we burn a lot of fossil fuels in Europe, Japan, and the United States, and in Africa, not so much.
If you look at who's currently burning the most fossil fuels, China has surpassed the United States as the number-one emitter in the world. If you look at that in per capita terms, however, China's emissions still are substantially below those in the United States, because China has more people than the United States. So, in that respect, the U.S. still is a bigger contributor to the problem.
If you look at cumulative emissions over time since the middle of the 19th century, since the Industrial Revolution got going, you find that the biggest emitter of all was the USA. And those emissions over time, of course, are what has led to the build-up of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. The EU 28, the 28 countries of the European Union, come in number two. China comes in number three. Russia, number four. And then a few other countries, each of whom have some percentage of the total. And then you've got the rest of the world in that gray area, countries of many, many countries that have hardly contributed anything to the problem, and therefore hardly benefited from the use of fossil fuels.
If you look at the costs of climate destabilization, although they'll be borne by future generations worldwide, some people are gonna be more vulnerable than others. And in general, those most vulnerable are going to be the poorest people in the world, the people who live closer to the margin of survival. Why? Imagine a scenario in which there's a shock to the world economy due to climate change or anything else that lowers total global GDP by 25%. And that impact is distributed equally over everybody, in the sense that everybody's income goes down by 25%. Well, for me or for you viewing this video, a 25% hit to our income would be a really unpleasant thing, but chances are we'd survive. But for people who are living right at the margin of survival, for the billion people around the world who live on an income of $2 a day or less, a 25% reduction could spell the difference between being able to eat and not being able to eat, between survival and death. And so the people who are the poorest people in the world are the most vulnerable people in the world because they're so close to the margins of survival already.
Second reason why the poor are more vulnerable is that they are less able to invest, as individuals, as communities, as nations, in insurance against adverse events coming with climate destabilization. Poor people are less able to air-condition their homes in the face of heat waves. They're less able to move to safer places in the event of sea level rise or increasing threats of storm surges. Their communities, their governments are less able to invest in sea walls to protect them against storm surges, etc. So that inability to insure against adverse events means that these folks are more vulnerable.
And finally, the people who live in the highest risk regions happen to include a lot of poor people. Many of the climate models suggest some of the worst drought effects associated with climate change will be in sub-Saharan African countries that are home to some of the poorest people in the world. And that the impacts of sea level rise and increased hurricane intensity and the storm surges that result from that combination are going to be felt most acutely in coastal Asia, which includes again some of the poorest people in the world. And so for all these reasons, the impacts of climate change won't be distributed equally among everybody. Some will be hit harder than others. And in general, as we alas find so often in the case of environmental harms, those who bear most of the costs are different from those who've reaped the benefits of the activity which created the problem.
In that context, there are three sorts of policies to address the problem of climate change at this international level. One set of policies involved what in climate negotiations speak is called mitigation. That means actions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and reduce the emissions of other greenhouse gases like methane. And those kinds of policies include things like putting a price on carbon emissions, rather than making it free to dump carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, make it costly. You can do that by putting caps on emissions or putting taxes on emissions. A second policy instrument is regulations, regulations like renewable portfolio standards for electricity generation or low-carbon fuel standards for automobiles. And a third policy instrument is public investment, investments in things like mass transit, so that people aren't as dependent on fossil fuel intensive modes of transportation.
A second set of policies involve adaptation. In climate speak, that means adaptation to changes that happen in the Earth's climate as a result of emissions which weren't mitigated in the past or are being mitigated now. In other words, changes that we can't prevent or aren't preventing. And the third arena, which has begun to be discussed now as we realize that we are in real danger of destabilizing the Earth's climate in a very serious fashion in the current century, are policies to try to bring about what are sometimes called negative emissions, that's taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the ground. And I'll have a few words to say about each of these, focusing on mitigation, because that's been the main thing at stake in international climate negotiations.
Those negotiations take place under the umbrella of something called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, the international treaty that established the framework for inter negotiations to address the problem amongst the governments of the world. And the Framework Convention was ratified back in 1992 by the United States, and has been ratified by pretty much every country in the world. And among other things, it makes a distinction between countries, or in the negotiations that follow, at least the distinction was made between what are called Annex 1 and Annex 2 countries. Annex 1 being the industrialized countries, and Annex 2 being the developing countries. And I'll come back to that in a moment.
The signatories to the UNFCCC agreed that all countries should take steps to address climate change according to, and these are the key phrases, "common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities." What did that mean? It meant that the countries of the world all have an obligation to try to address this problem, but that their obligations, though held in common, are differentiated by their responsibilities for having created the problem. In other words, those countries that have pumped most of the CO2 in the atmosphere have the greatest responsibility to deal with the problem. And "respective capabilities" means that some countries are better able to address this challenge than others because they're richer and more capable of financing the investments, the research and development, the innovation that will be needed to move forward in a clean energy transition. In other words, this language in the Framework Convention treaty that the United States and other countries are parties to, that has the force of international law, embodies the principles that the obligation is on the richest countries in the world to take the lead in addressing the problem that they created, and that they're better positioned to solve.
In other words, it's set up to avoid this scenario shown in this cartoon, where the rich countries tell the poor countries, "Hey, you can't emit any more carbon because you need to protect us from the greenhouse effect." It's the countries of the world that have to together, and it's not those who have contributed least to the problem that should be called upon to do most to address it.
Under the terms of the Framework Convention, every year since 1992, there's been an annual conference called the Conference of the Parties, where the governments of the world, the representatives of their governments, get together to try to implement the goals set out in the Framework Convention. And the landmark agreements reached by those negotiations include the Kyoto Protocol, reached in 1997 when the Conference of the Parties took place in Japan, in which the signatories agreed that the Annex 1 countries, the advanced industrialized countries, would meet binding emissions targets that would reduce their emissions by a substantial percentage, I mean reasonably substantial, 7%, 6% compared to 1990 levels by the year 2012. And the Annex 2 countries didn't have binding emissions reductions targets. They would do the best they could. But the idea was that the principles of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities meant that it was the advanced industrialized countries that should move most aggressively to reduce their emissions.
That treaty, ultimately, though the U.S. helped to negotiate it, the U.S. did not sign it, did not ratify it, and it expired in 2012. And it took a while to come up with a replacement for it because countries were deadlocked in negotiation over who should cut their emissions, how much, and how binding those targets should be. And the outcome in the end was the Paris Agreement in 2015, when the Conference of the Parties met in Paris, where, in the absence of being able to resolve the question about how emissions rights should be allocated amongst the countries of the world, instead the solution was, for the time being at least, just to have each country voluntarily say what it would do to reduce its own emissions. And these individual country contributions are called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs. Each country put forward plans for how and how much it would reduce emissions. They agreed to the overall goal of holding the increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels to well below two degrees Celsius. And some of the smaller countries, the island countries in particular, wanted to have a limit of 1.5 degrees, so the effort would be to reach that limit.
But, and this is a big but, there are no enforcement provisions in the agreement, no penalties for those countries that don't meet their stated intentions. And moreover, if you add up all those intentions together, they wouldn't be adequate to achieve the kind of trajectory of emissions reductions that we would need to fulfill that goal of holding mean temperature increase in the 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius range.
Given these shortcomings of international negotiations on carbon mitigation so far, it's important to think about no-regrets policies: policies that countries could undertake on their own that would make sense from their own standpoint regardless of what other countries do. Because by cutting their use of fossil fuels, they could achieve better air quality, better public health, what are called air quality benefits for their own population. They could, by putting a price on carbon and returning the money to the people as equal dividends to every woman, man, and child, they could improve the economic well-being, the income, the money in the pocket of the majority of the people. And because job creation, the employment benefits of moving forward with the clean energy economy would push forward green growth as a way to improve people's economic well-being. For all these reasons, there's scope for countries to undertake ambitious policies to reduce their use of fossil fuels regardless of what happens in the international negotiations. And I think an important thing is to try to lift up those no-regrets policies, the benefits that come from them, as a way to try to keep moving forward even as the international negotiation process cranks along.
Turning for a moment to adaptation, there's some big questions there too. And the two biggest questions are the costs: who will pay for adaptation, for building walls to protect against sea level rise, for example, or cooling centers for people to survive heat waves? And where will the benefits go? Who and what will be protected? The add up, the allocation of adaptation resources, both within and among countries, is going to be a really big issue. Are we going to protect expensive urban infrastructure, or are we going to protect poor people who are exposed to hurricane and sea-level rise and the storm surges that come from the combination of the two? Are we going to protect Manhattan or Mumbai, or are we going to protect poor coastal communities? Those are issues that really have yet to be clearly addressed in the discussions of adaptation.
The right to a clean and safe environment would suggest that we ought to protect the most vulnerable people in the world. On the other hand, the so-called efficiency criterion that mainstream neoclassical economists recommend as a basis for resource allocation would suggest we ought to protect the most valuable assets and the most valuable people. And given that the money available for adaptation is going to be limited, how those resources get allocated will turn out to be a really important question.
Finally, let me say a word about negative emissions. Insofar as we can come up with ways to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it back under the ground, for example, through the use of biochar, which takes biomass and turns it into charcoal and buries it under the ground, where it improves soil fertility and sequesters carbon, a phenomenon that could be described as coal mining in reverse. We can actually go beyond mitigation in the sense of reducing our emissions and start, over the 21st century, if we move aggressively enough, to reduce the global climate destabilization that we now know is otherwise in the cards.
Life on Earth has survived major climate changes over its history, and life on Earth will survive in the face of climate destabilization. The question really is not finding a new planet to move to. We're not going to find a new planet, and there's no planet that's better than the planet we've evolved on. The question is, how much suffering will we inflict on future generations by failing to move quickly to phase out the use of fossil fuels and complete the clean energy transition? And the answer to that is up to all of you. Thanks very much.