ClimatePolicy

In December 2009, the parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change will meet in Copenhagen. Their aim will be to conclude an agreement that will succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which terminates in 2012. Given the abysmal failure of Kyoto one may be permitted to ask, Will Copenhagen succeed any better? The answer depends on expectations of what can be achieved in this short amount of time; the answer depends on how “success” is defined.

It is easier to define failure. Most climate watchers would define failure to mean lack of an agreement by states to “commit” to limiting their emissions dramatically. I would define failure to mean repeating the mistakes made in Kyoto in 1997. The worst outcome would be for the United States to “commit” to meet quantitative targets and timetables of emission reduction without being sure that these obligations will be approved by Congress.

It is most unlikely that the United States will make this mistake again. The most plausible way forward would be for the US to adopt domestic legislation for reducing emissions, and then to agree to fulfill these commitments subsequently in a treaty. Domestic legislation requires 60 votes in the Senate (to avoid a filibuster), plus passage by the House. Treaty ratification requires 67 votes. The difference—just seven votes—is huge in political terms.

The chances that Congress will approve climate change legislation before Copenhagen are poor. The US timetable is simply out of synch with the negotiation timetable. Can an international agreement be reached without US support? Probably not. The US wants to avoid negotiating a treaty that it will never ratify, but other countries want to avoid participating in a treaty that lacks US support.

It is more realistic to aim to negotiate a skeleton agreement in time for Copenhagen, to save face, with the details being finished later—a Copenhagen bis agreement (bis is Latin for “a second time”). Though many people emphasize the need to act quickly, it is much more important that the US develop an institution that will work, a foundation for making incremental improvements over time.

Indeed, there is a feedback between domestic negotiations in Washington, and the negotiations in Copenhagen and beyond. What the US agrees to do domestically will depend on what the rest of the world can be expected to do.

Congress will be especially concerned about China. China is an even bigger emitter today than the US. If US action is to have much effect, China must act, too. But so too must many other countries, including industrialized economies like the European Union and Japan and other large, fast-growing developing economies like India and Brazil. This is why the Obama administration is organizing a meeting of the major economies to be held later this month in Washington. The countries invited include the ones just mentioned plus Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.

The participation of these countries is also important for another reason. If the US were to act unilaterally, “competitive advantage” in trade-sensitive sectors may shift to these other countries. This would harm US industry. It would also undermine the environmental effectiveness of the domestic action.

How should a new treaty be designed? The focus has been on the negotiation of a new set of economy-wide targets and timetables. The European Union unilaterally set the goal of reducing emissions 20 percent from the 1990 level by 2020, but pledged to reduce emissions by 30 percent provided the United States and other industrialized countries agreed to the same target. President Obama has favored a 15 percent reduction in emissions from the 2005 level by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050. How do these numbers compare? The Obama target would only return emissions to the 1990 level by 2020. This is less than Kyoto required, and a lot less than Europe is proposing. However, the setting of targets and timetables is a shell game. For example, the EU target applies not to the original 15 EU countries that negotiated Kyoto but to its current membership of 27 states, including the economies in transition whose emissions are substantially below the 1990 level today. Targets suffer a “comparability” problem.

Targets and timetables are also difficult to enforce. We know this because Kyoto established economy-wide targets and timetables and has been ineffective. This is the mistake we must not repeat.

The Montreal Protocol has shown us how we could do better. That agreement, which aims to protect the ozone layer, was adjusted in late 2007. The adjustment requires substantial cuts in HCFCs, an ozone-destroying chemical. Coincidentally, the manufacture of HCFCs produces HFCs as a byproduct, and HFCs are a greenhouse gas controlled under the Kyoto Protocol. This latest adjustment thus mitigates climate change even as it protects the ozone layer. Indeed, it is estimated to achieve as much as the Kyoto Protocol ever aimed to achieve. And we can be confident that it will be enforced because Montreal is enforced by trade restrictions, whereas Kyoto lacked an enforcement mechanism.

Montreal has several important features that are not shared by Kyoto. First, it not only limits production (like Kyoto); it also limits consumption (defined as production plus imports minus exports). Second, it not only requires industrialized countries to limit their emissions (like Kyoto), it requires developing countries to reduce their emissions, too. Third, while Kyoto’s limits apply for just five years, Montreal’s cuts are permanent. Fourth, under Montreal, industrialized countries finance compliance by developing countries.

This arrangement is a more effective way of reducing HFC emissions and the emissions of other “industrial gases” controlled under the Kyoto Protocol. Separate agreements should be negotiated for these gases.

Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, cannot be controlled in this same way. The approach favored so far is to negotiate national caps on carbon dioxide emissions. The problem here is that no country will want to reduce its emissions substantially using a national cap, for this will leave its trade-sensitive sectors, like aluminum, steel, and cement, exposed to “unfair” competition.

An alternative approach is to address these sectors at the global, rather than at the national, level. New technical standards should be negotiated, creating a new “level playing field.” These can then be implemented in the same way as the Montreal restrictions.

Carving out the trade-sensitive sectors will reduce opposition to limiting the emissions in the rest of the economy. These emissions can be reduced by relying on domestic enforcement.

Ultimately, effective policy for addressing climate change must bring about a transformation in technology. R&D should not “pick winners” but reveal possibilities. Some technologies, however, are begging to be investigated. An example is “carbon capture and storage”—a technology that removes carbon dioxide from large, coal-fired plants. So far, there is not a single large-scale demonstration plant operating anywhere in the world. A great many are needed so that we can learn how this technology works, and how we can make it work efficiently and safely. An agreement of this kind would require only the participation of the major economies, and can be easily negotiated on Copenhagen’s timetable.

My recommendation for the US would be to negotiate a skeleton agreement in time for Copenhagen, and follow up with supporting agreements focusing on individual gases, sectors, and R&D efforts. Success in Copenhagen should not be defined by setting goals that lack domestic support and that cannot be enforced but by laying a foundation for making incremental improvements over time.

Reprinted with permission from YaleGlobal Online (www.yaleglobal.yale.edu). Copyright © 2009, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Yale University.

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Science and the Carbon Market

With the change of U.S. administrations, there is renewed discussion of climate change policy. Ideas at the forefront are environmental pollutant markets and tax-based controls. The market-based approach, called cap and trade, is posed in opposition with the tax-based approaches. This polarization is not a useful or correct way to advance policy.

The advocacy of a cap and trade market follows from the success of the sulfur market, which controls acid rain. The amount of pollutant that can be tolerated is informed by scientific investigation. This leads to a “cap” on the amount.

The emissions of the pollutant are considered in concert with abatement of the emissions. A coal power plant, for example, is allowed a certain amount of sulfur emission. The polluter is given the flexibility to decide whether to cut emissions or deploy abatement techniques. If the polluters exceed their allowance, they are faced with penalties.

The “trade” of the cap and trade is as follows. If a polluter produces less than their allowance, they are given credit for their success. This credit is given valuation which can be traded to others to reduce their pollution. The cost of credits is compared with the penalty for exceeding the allowance, the cost of abatement, or the cost for reducing emissions. A basic principle of the market is that with flexibility and choices at marginal cost, the market will achieve pollutant control at least cost.

Scientists frame the pollutant problem in much the same way. Scientists use conservation laws like the well known conservation of energy. Conservation laws state that the change in amount of a substance, for example carbon dioxide, is equal to its production take away the loss. At any particular place on the planet, one also has to consider the transport of the substance in the atmosphere. Transport carries carbon dioxide from urban production regions to, for example, oceanic loss regions – from sources to sinks. Both the scientist and the market trader add up budgets. One directly represents carbon dioxide production and loss, and the other directly represents cost that is a measure of carbon dioxide production and loss.

The carbon dioxide of concern to the environmental market is a portion of both the natural and industrial carbon dioxide scrutinized by the scientist. Emission is analogous to production and abatement to loss. Market trades and atmospheric transport communicate between sources and sinks. Scientific investigation is challenged with distinguishing natural and industrial contributions to the budget.

The success of a market relies on liquidity of transactions, which requires availability of choices of emission controls and abatements. The control of the amount of pollution requires that the emission controls and abatement choices represent, quantifiably and verifiably, mass of pollutant. In the sulfur market, there are technology-based choices for abatement and a number of choices of fuel that have higher and lower sulfur content. Similar choices do not exist for carbon dioxide; therefore, the fundamental elements of the carbon dioxide market do not exist.

In the case of carbon dioxide abatement, current market strategies rely on removal by natural loss processes. These sinks of carbon dioxide may be terrestrial or oceanic. The terrestrial sink is associated primarily with the trees. The oceanic sink includes both dissolving carbon dioxide into the water and consumption of carbon dioxide by phytoplankton. With regard to the market, there are questions of ownership and valuation of these natural sinks. From a science-based perspective, the ability of the land and ocean to remove carbon dioxide is not adequately known. The behavior of these sinks as atmospheric carbon dioxide increases is unknown. Furthermore, the impact that excess carbon dioxide will have on ecosystems and the chemical characteristics of the ocean, i.e., ocean acidification, is large.

On the emission side, the cost of alternative sources of energy is high relative to the cost of energy provided by fossil fuels. Also sources of low-carbon dioxide energy are not adequate to replace the energy from fossil fuel combustion.

The development of a carbon dioxide market therefore requires research and development to provide technology to address both emissions and abatement. Cost-competitive alternative fuels and sinks that do not rely on natural ecosystems must be available. Then a balance between emissions and abatement that is represented by the cost of credits can be realized.

The development of technology requires directed, sustained government investment. This is best achieved by a tax (or fee) system that generates the needed flow of money. At the same time the tax should assign valuation to carbon dioxide emissions and encourage efficiency. Increased efficiency is the best near-term strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Rather than taxes and technology being posed as choices in competition with a carbon dioxide market, they are part of an interrelated group that leads to a market. When considered together they provide a set of tools to address both near-term and long-term climate policy needs.

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Science, Belief and the Volcano:

In January 2008 there was an article in the National Geographic called the The Gods Must Be Restless. The author, Andrew Marshall, describes Mbah Marijan, who has the job of satisfying the ogre that inhabits the volcano Merapi in Indonesia. The volcano is about to explode, the government has ordered an evacuation and Marijan is not convinced. Quoting the article:

“The alerts are merely guesses by men at far remove from the spirit of the volcano. The lava dome collapse? ‘That’s what the experts say,’ he (Marijan) says, smiling. ‘But an idiot like me can’t see any change from yesterday.’ ”

This past year one of the most interesting books I read was called The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great America Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan. The Dust Bowl was a period in the 1930s in the U.S. when people in the Panhandle of Texas were shoveling away morning dust drifts to get out of their house. They were dying of dust pneumonia and eating tumbleweed and road kill. There was drought. The drought, however, came on top of years of agricultural policy that plowed under the prairie to grow wheat. People had spread all over semi-arid grasslands under the promise that nurturing the Earth would be rewarded with sustaining water – and that rain followed the rails. The rhetoric and the discourse of the mid to late 1930s included the belief that people and their plows, the actions of individuals where too minuscule to cause the scope and the wrath of darkening, suffocating, house-covering dust storms. It was radical science to replant the grassland.

Science is the evidence-based generation of knowledge. Knowledge is not certainty. Science defines a process of observation and testing. Science provides a method for checking; it requires that results be confirmed by independent investigators; it requires anonymous reviews by, often, competitors. This process both confirms results and finds errors. We strive to converge to a coherent body of knowledge.

Like Marijan the ogre master, scientists, the practitioners of science, are a human mixture of their experiences, their beliefs, their religions, their wants, their needs, and their selves. The practitioner of science, however, has a commitment to questioning, testing, and review. This is a humbling experience. Copernicus concludes that we, the people of the Earth, are not the center of the universe, surrounded by objects traveling in divine, perfect circular orbits. Darwin places humans within the nature of all of the beasts of the world. Freud ties our behavior to deep, harsh self-motivation. Einstein shows that our frame of reference, our very point of view, determines our perception of even the definable physics of our universe. (See Outgrowing Self-Deception by Gardner Murphy.)

Humans do have the ability to observe, explore, accumulate, preserve, and pass on a collected body of knowledge. From the beginning, there were those who felt that evidence-based knowledge uncovered by investigation by humans could be a threat - a threat to what we believe or, perhaps, what we want. Evidence raises the potential encumbrances of responsibility. There are those for whom the evidence-based approach to climate change is irrelevant. There are those who accept the evidence, and entwine that evidence into beliefs that are far more important to them, personally, than the tangible impact on the physical and biological world. It is natural for there to be people skeptical of the body of knowledge that the climate has changed and will continue to change because of things that we do. There is little value in an evidence-based argument to convince this skeptical community otherwise; positions are much more deeply rooted than a compendium of observations of the natural world.

Marijan is a man of influence; undoubtedly successful, with an evolved body of knowledge. The government official in Indonesia is, therefore, faced with two bodies of knowledge, Marijan’s and that from observations of the volcano, Merapi. This is always the case, and it should not be the basis of inaction. Those with the belief in the science-based body of knowledge are encumbered with the responsibility of acting based on this knowledge. Problems must be addressed. This moves away from the simplicity of scientific investigation to the complexities of leadership.

Once again quoting the article The Gods Must Be Restless:

“Two days later, the lava dome collapses. Traffic grinds to a halt in downtown Yogyakarta as motorists gape at the scorching avalanche of rocks rushing down Merapi’s western flank – away from Marijan’s village. Thanks to the timely evacuation , nobody is hurt.”

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Figure 1: Building in Comanche National Grasslands, August 2008. The National Grasslands came from replanting efforts to stabilize the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl. ( National Grasslands Primer)

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Opinions and Anecdotal Evidence:

Here at the beginning of the Obama administration there is a shift in mindset unlike any I have ever seen. During my years in the U.S. government, the science agencies didn’t get significant attention until a year or more into the new administration. This year we see science getting attention from the beginning, and, for example, there was a nominee for NOAA administrator announced prior to the inauguration. (Jane Lubchenco from Wikipedia, Professor Jane Lubchenco, More on Obama science appointees). Along with this new emphasis on science there are people and groups trying to position themselves. This includes those who fight against the government taking action to mitigate and adapt to climate change. (more …)

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Herman Daly delivered a fantastic keynote address to AMS’s workshop on Federal Climate Policy. The text is reproduced here in full.

Climate Policy: from “know how” to “do now”

Herman E. Daly

The recent increase in attention to global warming is very welcome. Most of the attention seems to be given to complex climate models and their predictions. That too is welcome. However, it is useful to back up a bit and remember an observation by physicist John Wheeler, “We make the world by the questions we ask”. What are the questions asked by the climate models, and what kind of world are they making, and what other questions might we ask that would make other worlds? Could we ask other questions that would make a more tractable world for policy? (more …)

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In my first post on this topic, I explored how optimism and pessimism can influence policy preferences for dealing with climate change. I mentioned two key issues relating to policy choices: 1) society’s sensitivity to earth system disturbance, and 2) our potential to mitigate. Each can be viewed with optimism or pessimism, which leads to four possible perspectives: the true optimists, true pessimists, earth system optimists (who are mitigation pessimists), and mitigation optimists (who are earth system pessimists).

Today I’ll focus on the evidence that can support or diminish the standing of each of the four perspectives. (more …)

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Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist probably influences your views on how society should deal with climate change. Today I hope to open a running discussion that explores how our outlook affects our climate policy preferences.

I see two key areas where our views on climate policy may be influenced by whether we’re optimists or pessimists. (more …)

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As a scientist who works on policy, my mantra is, “public policy advances the interests of society most effectively when it is grounded in the best available knowledge.” It is, in my view, a logical philosophy for someone trained in science and committed to the advancement of science in society. Science provides us with an understanding of the universe and can thereby underpin rational and informed decision-making. Without a rational basis, our choices are left to rely on superstition, guesses, or narrow interests—key ingredients to outcomes that are sub-optimal.

Yet colleagues from both the science and policy communities often seem to challenge this view, at least implicitly, when confronted with the most contentious and challenging issues facing society. Most recently, several have questioned my efforts to develop a workshop series on Federal climate policy—and thereby contribute to a more fully informed policy discussion—because the series will include some contentious topics (e.g., carbon fees and geo-engineering) that, if implemented rashly, could pose dangers to society. (more …)

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This blog is an essay / analysis that follows from comments on both this blog and my blog on Wunderground.com .

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The predictions of climate change provide us knowledge of the future. These predictions are not like those from a crystal ball; they are not magic. Neither are the predictions speculation nor are they opinion. The predictions are based on scientific investigation of the physics of the Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice. The predictions include the role of chemistry and biology. There are uncertainties in the predictions, but the core of the predictions, that the Earth will warm, that sea level will rise, and that the weather will change are of little doubt.

The predictions are grounded, ultimately, in observations. The quest to explain the behavior of the observations and their relation to each other leads to the development of scientific hypotheses that are formed into theory. These hypotheses and theories are testable; they change with time; they are not speculation nor are they opinion. The theory can be expressed as mathematical expressions, and the mathematical expressions are solved to provide predictions. The collection of mathematical expressions which represent the theory are called models. (more …)

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On my (more dynamic) Wunderground.com blog I have been writing a series about how we make the attribution of climate change to humans. Recently, the comments on that blog have moved to the discussion of the Copenhagen Consensus and how the climate change problem stacks up against other great problems we face. Here is the TimesOnline on the Copenhagen Consensus. Here is the primary link to the Copenhagen Consensus. There is an interesting list of priorities developed by the Copenhagen Business School. The Consensus Project is headed by Bjorn Lomborg, who has become a controversial figure in the community. The project aims to look at the great problems of the world taken together and in the face of both monetary resources and capabilities. Then it is determined which are the most urgent to address. In general, full-on attack of the climate change problem does not come out on the top of the list. (It seems that some of the readers of my Wunderground.com blog use this to dismiss the importance or correctness of climate change science.) (more …)

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