 |
||
|
||
|
Perspectives
The International Challenge of Climate Change:
Thinking
Beyond Kyoto It has now been ten years since the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change entered into force, and this anniversary marks an appropriate time for reflection on progress toward addressing the global challenge of climate change. Governments around the world signalled their readiness to take climate change seriously through implementation of the Framework Convention via the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement of historic proportions. However, Kyoto is also an intrinsically problematic mechanism for bringing about the kinds of changes in the global energy system that will be required to stabilize anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations over the course of the next century, and for protecting vulnerable human and natural populations from climate change impacts. As various commentators have observed, the current architecture for an international climate policy regime was based on that achieved for the protection of the stratospheric ozone level. But, despite some obvious superficial parallels, the scientific, technical, and political structures of the ozone and climate problems are quite different. As a consequence the world has committed itself to a framework for climate policy that, in many respects, may be quite unsuited to the problem.
No one suggests that the global emissions reductions envisaged in the Kyoto targets will come anywhere close to limiting emissions at levels that would stabilize anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. The short-term targets give the appearance of serious action, but gloss over the absence of any viable plans for compliance at these levels, let alone those that would come into force with the inevitable tightening of targets. It has been pointed out that, even if all the current Kyoto commitments were met, it would require some 30 repeat performances to reach this goal. At the current rate of 7-10 years for each phase, we would achieve the goal of atmospheric stabilization in 200-300 years! Clearly this is not an acceptable strategy. We are told that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” and that targets in future reduction periods will have to be ramped up (always assuming that the first step has in any case taken us in the direction that we wish to go). However, there has been no serious analysis of the political viability of the kind of radical correction to targets and timetables that would be required for emissions trading to deliver the goods in a more timely fashion. The recent UK experience of negative reaction to policy-driven increases in petrol prices is not encouraging.
Unfortunately, support for Kyoto has become a litmus test for determining those who take the threat of climate change seriously. But, between Kyoto’s supporters and those who scoff at the dangers of leaving greenhouse gas emissions unchecked, there has been a tiny minority of commentators and analysts convinced of the urgency of the problem while remaining profoundly sceptical of the proposed solution. Their voices have largely gone unheard. Climate change policy has become a victim of the sunk costs fallacy. We are told that Kyoto is “the only game in town”. However, it is plausible to argue that implementing Kyoto has distracted attention and effort from real opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect society against climate impacts. While it may not be politically practical or desirable to abandon the Kyoto path altogether, it certainly seems prudent to open up other approaches to achieving global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Policy makers should explore the possibility that international competition could prove to be as important as cooperation in progress towards lowering global carbon emissions.
The debate about climate change is no longer about whether it is a real scientific issue, but about how society should respond. All available strategies should be considered. While cooperation is undoubtedly required at some levels of climate policy, others may be more effectively advanced though competition. Consider the following scenario. Regardless of Kyoto, the EU as a whole decides to take advantage of the historic opportunity to modernise its energy sector while the US continues along its present path of relying heavily on coal and oil. Initially Europe may experience some loss of competitiveness vis-à-vis the US. However, after a while the modernized EU economy would be likely to outstrip the performance of the aging infrastructure of the US (much as the West German economy did relative to the UK during the post World War II recovery). This would provoke the US to modernise its own energy sector to recover its competitive position with respect to Europe. The result could be a much more rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions than would be achieved by endless rounds of tortured negotiations to set targets that will always be the lowest common denominator.
Such a scenario does not depend on the imposition of emissions caps or even explicit emissions targets; rather, it takes advantage of the economic efficiencies that would be achieved through greater energy efficiency. Rather than a restrictive approach towards emissions, it approaches the policy goal indirectly through a positive policy to encourage energy modernization. One thing that social scientists have very hard evidence for is that the framing of policies fundamentally shapes the choices that people make. A positive approach towards energy modernization is likely to be politically much more attractive (particularly in the US) than one that is framed as a negative policy towards greenhouse gases. It also asks less from people in terms of behavioural change.
Regardless of the level of commitment to the Kyoto mechanisms, it is imperative that the G8 countries reverse a decade of precipitous decline in public and private sector investment in energy R&D. Achieving a significant reversal of this trend would be the most significant single action by which affluent nations could demonstrate international leadership and make an indisputable contribution to any workable strategy to address climate change.
Since the mid-1980s, the world has enjoyed cheap and abundant fossil energy supplies. Technological advances, discoveries of new petroleum resources, improved energy productivity, and the creation of futures markets, have alleviated fears that the world’s energy future would necessarily be characterized by scarcity and high prices. The widespread perception that energy has become a matter of less urgency, relative to other social priorities, has led to shrinking government budgets for R&D, which have dropped by over 40% worldwide since 1980. The decline has been particularly dramatic in Germany, the UK, and the USA, with the largest hit being taken by the renewables sector. At the same time, an ideological shift towards deregulation of the energy sector in many industrialized countries has placed additional pressures on private R&D investments. The introduction of competitive forces has led to shrinking private sector R&D budgets while remaining private sector resources gravitate more often to lower risk, market-oriented projects than to riskier projects with more distant payoffs.
This disinvestment in R&D could hardly be happening at a less-opportune time for the pursuit of climate change goals. Much of the electrical generating capacity in the industrialized world is nearing the end of its useful life and will need to be replaced in the next three decades. Europe alone will need to replace over 200,000 Megawatts of capacity by 2020. Without significant new investment in energy R&D, the technologies upon which any emissions reduction strategy depends simply will not be available at a competitive cost at the time when they could make a significant difference. It is not that the technologies are missing altogether, but that many of them lack the investment needed to take them to the production levels that would make them economically competitive. Such an investment could, in principle, accelerate the move away from fossil fuels more rapidly than targets and timetables.
It is also worth noting that over 60% of all energy R&D undertaken around the world during the past forty years has been spent on developing nuclear power. This might be part of the solution, at least as an interim stop-gap technology, provided that the nuclear waste issue could be resolved. To achieve public acceptance, this would probably require the establishment of secure, monitorable and retrievable waste storage, the capacity of which would be strictly limited to accommodate only the waste of any licensed new facilities.
Another stop-gap technology is carbon sequestration, which could be used to buy time for an effective transition away from intensive use of fossil carbon for energy. The investments in this sector have been meagre, but the insurance value of such investments could be quite substantial.
A mere 6% of the world’s energy R&D budget has been used to support renewable energy. Since only 10 countries carry out 98% of the world’s energy research, a concerted programme of new investment in renewable energy is plausible. In principle, this could be achieved without any need for international - let alone global - treaties, as the government policies that are needed mainly consist of domestic programmes to induce firms to invest in renewable energy.
Some limited forms of international agreement would probably be necessary to help transfer advanced, low-emitting technologies to less industrialized countries so that they can avoid following the carbon intensive development path. However, these arrangements would be far less problematic than full implementation of the Kyoto architecture. Rapid dissemination of advanced technologies is essential. One approach might be to emphasize the world class R&D capabilities of China and, increasingly, India, so that they could be partners in this process.
Policymakers in all countries must recognize that the triggers and motivations for climate policy are inevitably values based and cannot be provided by science.
The political scientist, David Victor cogently argues that caps on emissions only make sense “if the objective of international efforts to slow global warming is to avert a catastrophe that would be triggered by a certain accumulation of emissions in the atmosphere.” This is exactly the rationale envisaged by the architects of the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. Emissions would be capped below the trigger point and trading would then provide the most cost-efficient means of staying below the threshold. However, the problem is how to establish a shared understanding of what that threshold should be.
To date, the goals of climate policy have, somewhat arbitrarily, focused on preventing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from rising above 450 to 650ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent or alternatively above levels that would force a global average temperature increase of 2 degrees C. However, there is no strong scientific basis for choosing these particular thresholds. Science cannot, even in principle, provide policy makers with any credible, consistent targets upon which permit allocations, or other policy thresholds, can be based. We don’t even really know what the actual consequences of carbon stabilization at a given level would be for climate behaviour.
During the summer, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced his intention to call a scientific conference to determine what level of climate change would be “catastrophic”. Yet science cannot decide what counts as a “catastrophe”. What would be the metric? Today a child dies every eight seconds from waterborne disease. Every 15 seconds an African dies from malaria. If these do not represent already catastrophic levels of mortality among the very kinds of populations that will be most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, it is hard to envisage what levels would be required to provoke action. Similar points could be raised about the current rate of loss of vulnerable species in marginal ecosystems. We also know that people in rich countries are willing to live with very high levels of risk (such as earthquakes in California and Japan or hurricanes in the eastern USA), which by any measure must be a much more immediate hazard than climate change risk.
In the end, climate policy comes down to a question of values – not science. Mobilizing public values rather than scientific consensus is the key to successful climate action. This may be a good reason to focus more attention on adaptation policies that are more directly linked in the public imagination to the consequences of climate change than is the issue of emissions.
Policymakers should place a stronger initial emphasis on adaptation strategies to protect vulnerable human and natural communities as well as mobilise support for mitigation policies Adaptation measures avoid climate impacts by changing human behaviours, such as land use, and by taking actions to protect valued resources, communities, and landscapes. Adaptation encompasses a wide range of options that can reduce vulnerability of marginal human and natural populations to the consequences of atmospheric disturbance. Many (although admittedly not all) adaptation measures also offer increased resilience in the face of climatic variability (such as droughts and storms), which makes them potentially attractive policies even in the absence of long-term secular changes in climate.From the point of view of public policy implementation, adaptation actually may have some advantages over policies directed at mitigation. Adaptation may be more immediately relevant to stakeholders than emissions mitigation as it directly addresses people, objects, and landscapes that are known to them and valued by them in their daily lives. Thus adaptation policies may provide opportunities for a wide variety of people to become directly engaged with the climate issue. Also, the basic regulatory and legal concepts and frameworks already exist (e.g., governance of land use) and are broadly accepted; they just need to be adapted. This is not to minimize the political challenge, but the point is that we are not starting from scratch. This is in marked contrast with the challenge of mobilizing public support and action to cut emissions. Emissions are too abstract and too easily seen as someone else’s problem to be a good starting point from which to mobilize support for climate policies. However, once people have mobilized around concrete adaptation goals they may be more likely to recognize the limits of adaptation and move to support for more effective emissions reductions measures than seem plausible at present.
Another advantage of increasing the focus on impacts and adaptation is that action on these issues does not require any kind of global consensus. Indeed, as impacts and the potential for adaptation vary widely on a regional basis, it seems quite likely that that such an emphasis would favour regional responses. There would almost certainly be many and varied opportunities for the articulation of climate policies with other policies designed to improve public health and protect populations from natural disasters.
The current overwhelming focus on Kyoto offers only one potential climate policy path and, at present, there is no viable alternative or fallback. But Kyoto need not be, and should not be, “the only game in town”. To put all of our eggs into the Kyoto basket is a somewhat brittle strategy. The present imperative must be to open up new avenues for climate policy. A significant reversal of the last three decades of disinvestment in energy R&D and a much increased focus on adaptation strategies will be required to address climate impacts that even a fully implemented Kyoto Protocol will not confront..
Steve Rayner is a James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization and Director of the James Martin Institute at the University of Oxford. He is a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, a Lead Author on Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and also serves as Director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Science and Society Research Programme. He can be contacted at: Steve.Rayner@said-business-school.oxford.ac.uk.
This Perspectives piece was distilled from a longer memorandum to the Environmental Audit Committee of the House of Commons, titled “The international challenge of Climate Change: UK leadership in the G8 and EU.“ The original memo addresses general strategic questions about what the UK climate change priorities should be during its presidency of the EU and G8, as well as some of the issues facing the global emissions trading system envisaged in the architecture of the Kyoto Protocol and briefly reviews alternatives to such a system.
The views expressed here are those of the author. |
|
