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.
