Confront Climate Change With Collectives, not Cabals

There’s something seductive about the idea of a few powerful countries taking control of the battle against climate change. Compared to the glacial bureaucracy of the United Nations, it seems efficient; and since only a few countries are responsible for most of the world’s greenhouse gases, it seems fair.

Last month, two British economists writing in Nature suggested just such an approach; they also called for an end to the top-down creation of emissions markets, and recommended taking a federalist, local-experiment approach to dealing with problems. Wired Science covered their critique in Post-Kyoto: Silver Buckshot, not Silver Bullets.

Chella Rajan, a climate change policy expert and co-author of The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe, soon sent criticism of Prins and Raynor’s plans. Wrote Rajan,

Although they are accurate in their assessment that the Kyoto agreement has been a failure, Prins and Rayner have almost exactly the wrong approach for a post-Kyoto regime. By arguing that it is better for a small group of countries to iron out an agreement, they seem to have forgotten the Byrd-Hagel resolution of 1997, which perfectly expresses the grass-roots political sentiment in the U.S., namely, that all countries ought to chip in and make a contribution to address the climate problem.

Moreover, what they are recommending is nothing more than an ad hoc, let’s-wait-for-thousand-flowers-to-bloom approach, which by any reckoning will be too little too late. The only realistic political solution is one based on just principles, including the principle of fair burden-sharing, and which sets clear goals for greenhouse gas reduction. Prins and Rayner are right of course in saying that adaptation should not be left out of the equation, but what they are offering for the whole package is nothing more than homilies: more funding, more R&D and a laissez-faire economy that somehow gets the ball rolling. What we need though is a practical collective strategy to make sure that the ball actually gets to the goal post.

I agreed with Rajan that expecting markets to solve the problem without some sort of governmental pressure was overly optimistic. But why shouldn’t a handful of nations with the largest carbon footprints get together? After all, they’d likely finish negotiations and take action more quickly than a globally representative body. Assuming the participants acted in good faith, would grassroots principle really be more important than expediency? I posed this question, and Rajan wrote back,

About getting a smaller group together to negotiate something quickly, that was precisely the way the last climate treaty (Kyoto) was put together (at the insistence of the Clinton-Gore administration, as a matter of fact), which has turned out to be a bit of a disaster.  I think it’s much easier to communicate a well-developed set of equity principles to all the nations of the world than to engage in horse-trading with a smaller group. Think about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, which was a General Assembly achievement and continues to be the most important international legal document we have today. I think people need to trust the next climate treaty, which means it should be simple and fair (that’s why we’ve been promoting contraction and convergence.)

Image: Ecological footprint-proportionate world map by Worldmapper.

See Also:

• Climate Change, China, and the US: Finding a Way Forward

• Condi’s Latest Doublespeak: Fight Climate Change Like Terror

• Are Environmentalists Stuck in the 20th Century?

• Two Environmentalists Anger Their Brethren

• Post-Kyoto: Silver Buckshot, not Silver Bullets