Journalists indeed tried to close a gap, but not the one between experts and nonexperts. They tried to close the gap between nonexperts present and nonexperts absent. Instead of informing, they entertained. They tried to capture the atmosphere of the conference, they tried to give us a sense of what it was like to be there, of what it would have been like to be there, of what we were missing out on by not being there. The conference as experience, the conference as spectacle. Instead of cutting through the confusion, journalists were happy to express their inability to do so as the truth about the conference, as what was to be experienced at the conference.
A telling anecdote: Well toward the end of the conference, a journalist blogging for New Matilda, one of the better magazines, found the time to ask a scientist what he was thinking about the 1.5 degree C guardrail, the target advocated by many developing countries. The scientist bluntly said that meeting this target was virtually impossible. The current atmospheric composition, without any further increase in atmospheric CO2, is already bound to lead to a global temperature increase of 1.3 degree C. This answer clearly left the journalist flabbergasted, which he would not have been, had he cared to have a glance at the literature.
The question which I tried to answer tentatively in the article was: How can one assess whether an agreement reached in Copenhagen is a good agreement? What criteria should an agreement meet? I considered two criteria: what I called “adequacy” and “fairness”. Talking about adequacy is fairly straightforward. One mainly has to listen to what scientists have to say. The science constrains the choice of an adequate target (such as the 2 degree C and the 1.5 degree C guardrails) and determines the choice of the means (in form of a CO2 emissions budget and CO2 emissions reductions) necessary to meet the target. Talking about fairness is more difficult, for obvious reasons. It presupposes a some conception of ethics, and ethics is a mess.
In the article, I mostly confined myself to relating the position of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), which advises the German government, as laid out in its excellent special report Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach. The WBGU recommends a principle-based attitude to fairness and identifies three main principles: the principle of equity, the principle of financial capacity, and the principle of mitigation capacity. The basic idea behind a principle-based approach to the distribution of emissions rights is of course that emissions rights should be distributed according to certain principles, but also that divergences from the distribution thus obtained are admissible, but should be justified, notably by invoking further principles. The advantage of a principle-based approach is hence that one starts with simplicity and introduces complexity step by step. Though of course, I do not think that the same issues cannot be approached from many different angles.
Finally, I refer to, resp. recommend, the following literature:
McKinsey & Company, An Australian Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction (February 2008).
PIK et al, RECIPE: The Economics of Decarbonization (2009). http://www.pik-potsdam.de/research/research-domains/sustainable-solutions/research-act-intl-climate-pol/recipe-groupspace/working-papers/public-working-papers-from-the-recipe-project/?searchterm=recipe
WBGU, Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach (July 2009). http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_sn2009_en.pdf
WBGU, The Minimal Compromise in Copenhagen: A Target – But Still No Plan of Action, (20 December 2009). http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_presse_09_05e.html
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What are the hallmarks of a good agreement? (Trans. CS)
In part 1 of this post I suggested that an agreement in Copenhagen can be assessed on at least three general criteria: according to appropriateness, fairness and effectivenss. Whether an agreement is appropriate depends firstly on whether the chosen target and secondly on whether the chosen means are appropriate.
Appropriateness
There is an important asymmetry between overall targets and the means of achieving them. The choice of target is constrained by scientific facts, though it is not completely determined by them. It is and remains a political decision, reflecting a value-judgment (which doesn’t mean that we can’t rationally or critically discuss said value-judgment). Scientists only make pronouncements about the conditions for reaching a given target and what the consequences of the target are, i.e. what leads to the target being reached and where the target itself leads in its turn. The choice of target itself is the business of political decision-makers.
Two targets have been going the round in Copenhagen, both expressed in terms of an upper limit on global temperature increase relative to preindustrial times. The EU and the G8 among others are advocating the adoption of a 2 degree C guardrail, originally recommended by the WBGU (German Advisory Council on Climate Change) in 1995. The Alliance of Small Island States, whose very existence is threatened even in the unfortunately optimistic scenario of a 2 degree C temperature increase, insist on the adoption of a more stringent upper limit of 1.5 degree C. They enjoy the support of many developing countries and indigenous peoples.
Either target will be difficult to meet. To this day, global temperature has already increased by 0.8 degree C relative to preindustrial times. The current atmospheric composition is set to lead to a global temperature increase of 1.3 degree C over the next decades - an increase of 2.4 degree C if the cooling effect of short-lived polluting particles - the so-called global dimming - is discounted.
While science constrains, but does not determine the choice of target, the choice of means (at a general level which doesn’t exclude differing transpositions to less general levels) is completely determined by science relative to a politically determined target. Hence scientists at the WBGU tell us that, IF we are to have a 67% chance of remaining within the 2 degree temperature barrier, we will have to remain within a global CO2 budget of 750Gt for the period 2010 – 2050, with very low emissions or even negative emissions after 2050. In 2050 annual global per capita emissions should average 1t. If you commit yourself to the target but not the means, you either hold a different scientific view (which of course has to be scientifically based if it’s to be genuinely scientific), or you’re being straightforwardly irrational.
In all probability no global CO2 budget will be settled on at Copenhagen. Instead, reference will likely be made to the recommendations of the fourth IPCC report and commitments to national reduction targets. So to assess whether an agreement is appropriate given the picture provided by the WBGU you have to do a few calculations and derive a commitment to a global budget from commitments to national reduction targets. However, deriving a commitment to an exact global budget is impossible because of the way national reduction targets are currently formulated.
National Reduction Targets
At least three kinds of target are in current use: Annex I countries such as the US and the EU (the latter of course acting as a unified bloc) formulate reduction targets in the form of percentage reductions of annual emissions volumes over specified time-periods, in the case of the EU over the periods 1990 – 2020 and 1990 – 2050. Most non-Annex I countries with reduction targets on the table formulate these in the form of percentage reductions of annual emissions volumes relative to a Business As Usual projection within a specified timeframe. Many non-Annex I countries, e.g. China and India, formulate reduction targets in the form of percentage reductions in the CO2 intensity of national economic production, i.e. reductions of emissions volumes divided by GDP, again within a specified timeframe.
The way Annex I countries formulate their reduction targets already makes deriving a precise global CO2 budget impossible. To do so you would need a precise emissions trajectory. Stipulating a lowering of emissions by 30% by 2020 relative to 1990 restricts but doesn’t determine the emissions trajectory within the relevant timeframe. It would be theoretically possible to meet the target by doing nothing until 2019 and then suddenly lowering emissions by 30% in the final year. This would result in an emissions trajectory corresponding over the entire timeframe to emissions volumes far higher than for a scenario involving continuous reductions. In general it’s the case that the earlier reductions are undertaken, the lower the volume of emissions.
Clearly other additional factors make deriving an exact CO2 budget impossible, e.g. the fact that many non-Annex I countries don’t have to put any emissions targets on the table at all - understandably so, in the context of the Kyoto Agreement.
Fairness
Comparisons between the reduction targets of different Annex I countries – which is to say comparisons between reduction targets formulated on the same model – are already quite complicated. Assume we want to compare the targets of the US and the EU. The EU has put a 20 – 30% emissions reduction on the table for the period 1990 – 2020. The US has put a 17% emissions reduction on the table for the period 2005 – 2020. To compare the two targets, the thing to do is to calculate them relative to the same timeframe. Which timeframe do we choose though? If we take 1990 – 2020, we get a reduction target for the US of – 3%. If we take 2005 – 2020, we get a reduction target for the EU of 13 – 24%. This means: if we take 1990 as a base-year, the American target looks very modest indeed, something that the European media gladly points to time and again, as if the American preference for a different base-year involved the USA in a simple sleight-of-hand. They nearly had us fooled! If you take 2005 as a base-year, then the future efforts the US and the EU have indicated they are ready to impose on themselves seem to be roughly in the same ballpark. This still doesn’t mean that the burden of effort is fairly distributed. Shouldn’t the EU be rewarded for past efforts?
It gets even more complicated though. Reduction targets thus specified only relate to national emissions totals, not national per capita emissions. If, on the other hand, you look at per capita emissions over the period 1990 – 2020, then it turns out that the EU is putting forward a reduction of 24 – 33%, the US a reduction of 29%. The two targets are in the same ballpark. If you take per capita emissions over the period 2005 – 2020, then the EU reduction target of 14 – 25% contrasts with a far more ambitious American target of 27%. The game has changed. And the reason for that is clear: population is rising in the US (as it is in Canada and Australia) and is stagnating in the EU.
This, however, doesn’t mean that the US is in better stead ethically or environmentally than the EU. (At most, it means that the EU could take on a little more, maybe also that the Europeans need to get down off their high horse.) What’s important of course is not just percentage reductions of per capita emissions, but above all absolute per capita emissions; on that front the American numbers (20 tonnes per capita per annum) are well above European numbers (9 tonnes p.c p.a). The EU is again in a bit better stead.
The calculations get more complicated again when financial capacity and mitigation capacity are brought into the equation. Per capita GDP in the US is about twice as high as in the EU (since the latter’s eastward expansion) – which might lead you to think the US was capable of achieving greater reductions. (Mind you, you’d have to take into account other economic factors as well such as national indebtedness.) On the other hand, it could be claimed for example that the US (along with Canada and Australia) have fewer opportunities for mitigation in the transport sector because of longer-distance transport needs. See how complex the issue gets.
As a provisional conclusion we can state that the unsystematic way national emissions reduction targets are formulated makes evaluating an agreement according to the criteria of appropriateness and above all fairness a difficult business. Couldn’t we do all this better? Couldn’t we use a very simple algorithm to derive national reduction targets (in the form of national CO2 budgets) from the global budget? This is precisely what the WBGU suggests in a special report. However, before we turn to the details of the proposal, we need to turn quickly to another question.
Ethics and Cynicism
There is an important asymmetry between the criteria of appropriateness and fairness. It is clear that the criterion of appropriateness will play an effective role in the negotiations in Copenhagen. Many nations might have different views about which goal is appropriate, above all whether 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C is an appropriate upper limit. No one though disputes that an agreement needs to be appropriate. Otherwise we plainly wouldn’t need an agreement.
The situation is completely different with the criterion of fairness. If you put rhetoric aside, will considerations of justice play any role in the negotiations? Or are we dealing simply with negotiating parties who stand in different power relations to one another and who each look after their own interests, so that the outcome of the negotiations will in the end mirror power relations? In that case, creating a fair agreement would merely mean that power relations were such that no state and no group of states could completely enforce its own interests in the face of others’ interests. That wouldn’t mean that the criterion of fairness had necessarily played an effective role in the negotiations. Is fairness therefore an effective criterion or a mere epi-criterion? Is it a working part of the negotiating mechanism or is it just a surface phenomenon, beneath which power relations and self-interest do the real work?
The cynic’s position has, as ever, a lot to recommend it, as the course of negotiations to date shows, but in the end it’s simplistic. If considerations of justice hardly play a role in the absence of approximately symmetrical power relations, that doesn’t mean considerations of justice don’t play any role when power relations approach symmetry; nor does it mean that justice is a mere incidental product of symmetrical power relations.
This is something we know about from relationships between human beings. Between two people in a very asymmetrical power relationship there can hardly be genuine recognition or indeed friendship. That doesn’t mean, however, that recognition is nothing more than symmetrical power relations. The latter is rather a condition of the former, a kind of basic pre-condition for the emergence of genuine recognition in the relationship that itself goes beyond mere power relations. (It can be very difficult to be nice to people who go round with a “Please, don’t hit me!” sign round their necks and who never hit back (if they are hit). This doesn’t mean that human beings are nice merely out of fear of retaliation.)
Mind you, it’s hardly saying much to suggest that the criterion of fairness will only play a very subordinate role in the negotiations. National interest and international power relations will stand squarely in the foreground.
Here might be the place to ask – how do things stand with us as individuals? What do we think of all this? Do we really want a fair agreement? It is plainly not the case that nations are selfish associations of selfless individuals, as the stark contrast drawn in the media between politicians and protesters sometimes suggests. How are individual people meant to know in the first place if they want a fair agreement if they don’t know what it means for them personally, for instance how much it’s going to cost them personally? Because common interest and justice are supposedly always more important than self-interest?
Activists interested in questions of strategy find themselves here at a fork in the road: Should they appeal to our sense of justice or work out for us how much, or perhaps how little, satisfying the interests of justice will cost us? I think they should do both; in my view they do too little of the latter and do it too far from the public gaze. Anyone who wants to know how much a fair agreement will cost them can read through McKinsey reports for themselves. A McKinsey report on Australia's mitigation potential comes to the conclusion that emissions reductions of 30% in the period 1990-2020 could be achieved at the cost of 290 AUD per household and per year. Does that sound financially manageable?
Back to the actual problem. Irrespective of the role the criterion of fairness will or should play in negotiations at Copenhagen, we can ask what the criterion of fairness actually demands and what a fair agreement would look like. Which brings us to the proposal of the WBGU.
In Search of a Climate Formula
The idea behind the WBGU approach is (1) to determine a global CO2 budget (as we’ve seen) and (2) to derive national CO2 budgets from the global CO2 budget in a systematic manner using an algorithm, a “climate formula”. The means of deducing the national budgets should, moreover, satisfy some basic principles of justice.
In contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, countries were not subdivided into different categories (Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 countries). All countries were treated equally. A national CO2 budget was calculated for all countries in accordance with one and the same distribution schema. (“Killing Kyoto” – as it has sometimes been called – is not necessarily bad for developing countries, though that depends on what replaces Kyoto. Annex 1 countries are correct to insist that non-Annex 1 countries should take on legally binding targets – emissions targets, not necessarily reduction targets – though that doesn’t imply that the targets of Annex 1 countries needn’t be much more ambitious than their Kyoto targets or those they have put on the table thus far. Very different budgets and hence very different emissions targets result from one and the same distribution scheme.)
The WGBU recommends that three principles of justice be taken into consideration in deriving national budgets from the global budget: the principle of equity, the principle of financial capacity and the principle of mitigation capacity. The principle of equity is primum inter pares. The distribution algorithm follows from the principle of equity alone. The other two principles of justice are only brought to bear subsequently when particular circumstances come into consideration. The global CO2 budget is broken down into national CO2 budgets in the first instance in accordance with the principle of equity. Deviations from this break-down have to be justified in the second instance in accordance with the principle financial capacity and the principle of mitigation capacity.
The principle of equity suggests that each human being has a right to the same per capita volume of emissions. (It doesn’t imply that deviations from this norm aren’t justifiable, but that they require justification.) This, however, still doesn’t deliver up a distribution algorithm, since at least two parameters still have to be set: the time-frame in which the CO2 budget is to apply and a demographic reference year.
The aim is to divide a global CO2 budget for the period 2010 – 2050 among national CO2 budgets. This can happen, though, within the distribution frame of a global CO2 budget for the period 1990 – 2050. Shifting the start-year back to 1990 would mean making countries responsible for historical emissions between 1990 and 2010. On the other hand, if we take 2010 as the start-year, then we bracket historical responsibility.
Likewise, different years come into consideration as demographic reference points. An early reference year, for instance 1990, favours nations with stagnating population levels like the nations of the EU. A late reference year, for instance 2010, gives an advantage to nations with growing populations such as the US and Australia and, above all, many developing countries.
Past and Future Responsibility
The WBGU report investigates two options, one taking historical responsibility into account, with 1990 – 2050 selected as the budget period and 1990 as the demographic reference year; and a purely future-oriented option disregarding historical responsibility, with 2010 - 2050 as the budget period and 2010 as demographic reference-year. The WBGU comes to the conclusion that it would be impossible politically to gain acceptance for the first option “as it would greatly limit the industrialized countries' scope for action” (WBGU p. 25). (The US would have used up its budget for the period 1990 – 2050 in 2001 and would already be CO2-insolvent by now. The EU would be on track to use up its budget in 2014.)
The WBGU recommendation thus moves to exclude historical responsibility in dividing up the global budget, instead treating it separately, for instance by stipulating payments by industrialised nations into adaptation funds or REDD (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) funds. “However, in this option too, account can be taken of historical responsibility via lump-sum compensation payments by the industrialized countries to newly-industrializing and developing countries, e.g. to support adaption to climate change” (WBGU p. 25). (A marginal note: lump-sum compensation measures appear to be the “instrument of choice” for managing historical responsibility. It would be possible to take payments to victims of National Socialism by German government and industry as an example.)
In the case of this option, with historical responsibility set aside, a CO2 budget of 750 Gt for the period 2010 – 2050 is divided up between national CO2 budgets according to the principle of equal per capita emissions. We get a feel for the size of different national budgets by calculating how many years it would take before the respective national budgets ran out if current annual emissions levels were to remain constant.
National Budgets, International Trade
The budget of the USA would be used up in six years. Germany would need ten years to achieve the same feat, Japan eleven, the EU twelve, China 24, Brazil 46, India 88, Burkina Faso 2892 (WGBU p 28). Because the budget covers a period of 40 years, several countries would be in a bit of a fix. Luxembourg, unless I’ve miscalculated, would have used up its C02 budget in a neat four years. (My calculation is based on the following figures: global population in 2010 – 6.75 billion; Luxembourg’s population in 2010 – 500, 000; annual Luxembourgish emissions – 14 million tonnes of CO2.) Australia would be CO2-insolvent in less than five and a half years’ time. (Australia’s population in 2010 – 22,100,000; annual Australian emissions – 460 million tonnes of CO2.)
The budgetary approach is meant to lead to the convergence of per capita emissions of different countries in the long term. (For those in the know: the budgetary approach of the WBGU is one of the numerous species of the genus “contraction and convergence”. Global per capita emissions decrease – “contraction” – as national per capita emissions are brought into line with each other – “convergence”.) Yet many countries – indeed not just Annex I countries, but China as well for instance – will obviously find it difficult to keep on a normal economic footing while remaining within their CO2 budgets, even if they achieve ambitious decreases in emissions. What happens if a country exceeds its budget? It’s quite simple: CO2-insolvent countries have to buy CO2 emissions rights from CO2-solvent countries. Luxembourg will go shopping in Ouagadougou. This means that a system of emissions trading between nations has to be a cornerstone of the institutional framework that an agreement needs to create if it is to fulfil the third general criterion of effectiveness.
Trade in emissions permits between nations would bring about extensive financial transfers between the geographic/economic North and South. But what will the exact destination of the money be? Industrialised countries will surely not consent to transfer enormous sums of money to the “corrupt” governments of developing countries in Africa. The WGBU recommends “a partial earmarking of revenues from inter-country emissions trading. In such a scheme, a substantial proportion of this revenue should be invested in low-emission technologies, especially for energy production from renewable sources” (WGBU p. 35). A part of the finance thus comes with strings attached, thereby preventing emissions rising too much or too rapidly in the relevant developing countries and, the cynic might add, so that a part of the money flows back to industrialised countries, as is commonly the case today with development aid.
A concluding thought of my own: If industrialised countries can’t be brought to support the budgetary approach despite these concessions it would be possible to propose distributing some emissions permits using a grandfathering system and continuously reducing this portion of the overall system, as is the case with the EU’s current emissions trading scheme. This would mean, though, that this portion of the total pool of emissions permits would remain off-limits for developing countries with budget surpluses, since the total global budget couldn’t be enlarged – a modification that would imply a major deviation from the principle of equity.
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