UN Climate Summit: Part 1

Why the Climate Change Summits Have Failed

K. Edward Renner, PhD

Greenhouse gas emissions are the principal cause of climate change.

For the past 1000 years the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere has remained relatively constant at 280 ppm, but starting with the industrial revolution it has been increasing at an accelerating rate to 390 ppm, well above the upper safety limit of 350 ppm.

In December 2009 and 2010 the UN held Climate Change Summits to attempt to set world policy standards for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The United States and China were the principle players as the two top green-house-gas-producing countries. Both Summits ended without a comprehensive agreement.

It is important to understand the reasons for these failures if the Summit this December in Durban in South Africa is to avoid a similar fate.

The United States has proposed that all countries should agree to absolute levels of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. China has proposed that limits be set in terms of a proportion of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These are both self-serving proposals that neither can realistically expect the other to agree with.

Why do these proposals both represent bad faith negotiations?

The US is rapidly losing its industrial base. From 1990 to the present the US lost 3 % of its share of the world Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and it is projected to lose even more by 2020. Because CO₂ emissions closely track GDP, the projected decrease in the US share of world GDP will proportionally reduce its amount of CO₂ emissions.

The position is self-serving because the US goal would largely be achieved without any change in current practices, and from new technologies already or in place or planned. On the other hand, this standard would severely impact China’s fast growing economy. As a world standard, it is an empty offer.

Source: International Energy Agency and Wall Street Journal

In contrast, from 1990 to the present China’s percentage share of the world’s GDP grew from 4% to its present level and is projected to increase to 18% by 2020. China’s position to set limits on the “intensity” of CO₂ emissions as a percentage of GDP does not reduce emissions, but rather the rate at which emissions grow.

China’s proposal is also self-serving because without any change from “business as usual,” China’s projected intensity will naturally decline as a result of its increasingly larger share of the world’s GDP. (A constant excess of 10 units of CO₂ is a smaller ratio of 18 units than it is of 11 units of GDP.)  The remaining intensity reduction is already built into China’s development plan for fixing its own unhealthy quality of air. On the other hand, China’s proposal would seriously impact a US economy that has already achieved a lower level of intensity than China’s projected goal. As a world standard, it too, was an empty offer.

The position of both countries has not changed over the past year. To compound the difficulty, the world economic crisis makes it even more difficult for either country to agree to any policy that will make its economic recovery more difficult.

The challenge will be two-fold, first to find an alternative standard that is equally fair, and second to acknowledge that any immediate pain will be far less than what we will have to bear in the future if an agreement cannot be found.

In both the US and Europe we are already seeing that spending now and delaying payment until the future cannot continue indefinitely. The same holds true for greenhouse gas emissions. But the political capacity to act on that lesson is difficult, even though the necessity is obvious.

The challenge is to define an alternative world standard that is equally fair to both countries.

Professor Renner teaches in the Honors College at the University of South Florida. This material is based on his podcast series at: www.kerenner.com

UN Climate Summit: Part 3

The High Stakes Negotiations of Climate Change

K. Edward Renner, PhD

The goal of the UN Climate Summits is to reach an agreement on a standard for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change. The previous summits have failed because the US and China, as the two major players, have each made proposals that were largely self-serving, but which would severely impact the other.

The failure is not being unable to define a "fair" standard. The environmental sciences have already given us all of the information we need.

The Developed Nations, such as the US, must reduce consumption to significantly smaller amount. The Developing Nations, such as China, cannot continue their rapid economic industrial growth at the cost of destroying the bio-capacity of the planet. As essential partners, the Least Developed Nations -- the lungs of the earth – need to be compensated for the restoration of the damage already done to their bio-capacity.

Toward this end, the UN has established a Green Climate Fund to enable the Least Developed Nations to participate in the global economy as essential partners by restore their bio-capacity. The high emission countries, however, have not yet provided any of the required funding.

Clearly, fairness alone is not sufficient. Any solution must also be politically acceptable. This is the difficult problem.

National governments hold political power by protecting their sovereign national interests against the claims of other nations. For this reason, both the United States and China have made largely self-serving proposals.

For the United States, setting a fair emission standard would require reducing its consumption and transferring those resources to, for example, the United Nations Green Climate Fund. Consumer goods -- such as gasoline -- would become much more expensive. People with low levels of income would require higher pay and better social services in order to survive. This, in turn, would require a significant redistribution of wealth and income.

For China, this would require compromising their drive to become the primary economic power in the world, and ending rural poverty, by transferring these resources to the United Nations Green Climate Fund.

Neither the United States nor China has the political will or capacity to make these choices, even though the failure to make them will result in even more severe outcomes. There is an “ideal” and an “extreme” solution.

The “ideal” solution is for greater public awareness so that, in the United States, elected officials would lose their political power if they did not make such an agreement, rather than lose power for dong so. The exact opposite is our current reality. Given the current worldwide economic crisis political arguments are being made to delay or rescind environmental regulations because they imped our economic recovery. The paradox is that to not do so might cost us our lives, or at best leave our children with a much lower quality of life than we currently have.

The “extreme” solution is to view the collapse of the planet as equivalent to the Armageddon of atomic warfare. All that needs to be agreed upon at Durban is the simple standard “that the quality of life is a production cost.” In practical terms this means there can be no deferred environmental costs to either consumption or growth.

The implementation would be for the United States to start to unilaterally impose import duties on consumer goods equal to their deferred environmental costs if China itself did not redirect an equivalent proportion of its GDP to the UN Green Climate Fund.

The reciprocal implementation would be for China to unilaterally impose a proportional cut off of financial support for our cumulative debt if the United States did not itself reduce its large footprint by redirecting an equivalent proportion of its national excess to the UN Green Development Fund.

The two major polluters can force each other to do what neither would be able to do on their own. This is an economic version of the Cold War as a necessary prelude to avoiding environmental collapse as the new unthinkable.

The extreme solution is not a pretty picture, but it may be what is required in order to create a wake-up call to achieve the public awareness necessary to support the ideal solution. Simply put, we must pay for what we have when we get it -- which is what a green economy is all about.

Clearly, solving the “acceptable,” not the “fair” part of the solution is the difficult, perhaps impossible, task. However the first step is to talk about the issues in plain truthful language. These are the issues we face, either as rational problem-solving now or as a harsh reality later.

If democracy is to work, straight talk is required by responsible people, including above all else elected government officials. Surely, we can risk the public trust if we believe in our own civic process; we have nothing more to lose, and everything to gain.

Professor Renner teaches in the Honors College at the University of South Florida. This maerial is based on his podcast at: www.kerenner.com