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Plan B on climate: national dealsIt is official, at least unofficially, that Copenhagen will go down in history as the global community’s failed effort to save itself from itself. We are set to become – giving new meaning to that well worn phrase – "toast". Beyond recriminations, of which there are already plenty, the real question is whether there is still a chance to forge the first 21st century deal rather than the last 20th century disappointment, writes Simon Zadek.
Let us begin with the facts. Offers currently on the table are only enough to bring emissions down by 9-14% from 1990 levels by 2020, even in the unlikely and optimistic scenario that they will be delivered fully in practice. This is less than half of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is required to keep global temperatures less than 2 °C warmer.
Only the foolhardy now continue to believe that the deal as its currently framed will deliver much less than 3-4 °C. Such a rise would be sufficient to, parochially, turn much of southern Europe into a semi-arid area, and more crucially overturn the livelihoods and exhaust the sources of life-critical water for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
Money, we are told, is the deal breaker, but the argument does not stand up to close scrutiny. Estimates vary, but there is a convergent agreement on incremental cost estimates of about US$80-120 billion per year on average over the period to 2020, or roughly US$1.5 trillion. Delivering this amount would fulfill the pledge by wealthy countries to fund the ‘incremental costs’ of climate change above what is financed through national budgets, international aid and private investment.
This is not a trivial sum (official international development assistance is roughly US$150bn a year). Yet United States Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner estimates that global lost output as a result of the recession could be in the order of US$3-4 trillion in merely one year.
Put differently, the cost of sustaining ourselves as a global community is less than 50% of the US$40bn or so that we spend annually on dog and cat food.
It is true that there would be losers, dirty industries that do not currently pay to clean up their own mess, and nations that are stuck on dirty energy from China to South Africa, or cannot bear to reshape the behaviour of unsustainable citizens, such as the US.
But losers from a strong deal are far outweighed by potential winners (ultimately, all of us) from low carbon growth, and the sums involved in paying off losers, even handsomely, are frankly trivial, if of questionable morality.
Short-term losers, however, are out in force. Sustained public campaigns by lobbyists in the US have reduced the numbers of citizens believing that climate change is our fault and our collective problem from 72% to 57% during 2009, a depressing view in the light of Obama’s inspiring leadership over the same period.
The G77 and China, although correct about the West’s historic responsibility, are wrong in responding to a toxic combination of short-term imperatives and deeply ingrained, largely justifiable distrust in the promises of wealthier nations. Nature’s irreducible and inequitable bottom line is that development efforts will be shattered by our failure to act collectively and ambitiously now.
So we bemoan the fact that our political economy does not allow for ambitious global deals as we have made them in the past. Yet we continue, against all available evidence and inner logic, to bash away with a hammer as if the problem were indeed a nail.
Our challenge is not to invent new ideas, John Maynard Keynes famously quipped, but to let go of old ones. Never a truer word was said about the global climate negotiations.
Our most terrible secret is that a deal in Copenhagen which relies for its success on binding, long-term commitments by sovereign states to reduce emissions dramatically and provide adequate public finance to assist developing countries to address mitigation and adaptation challenges, will fail.
Uttering such taboo words in company, let alone writing them down in public, can be enough to close the doors to philanthropic funding, and solicit unwelcome calls from the likes of Bjorn Lomborg (author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist").
More importantly, what has kept such muttering in the dark to date has been the argument that it erodes our collective ambition and plays into the hands of those economic and political interests who want no deal at all. And this may be true on both counts.
But as I pack my bags for Barcelona to join the last stop of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) negotiations before Copenhagen, the transparent failure of the process makes these cautions seem less relevant, and perhaps even perverse.
While our 20th century deals were deduced from principles into practice, early 21st century’s international deals must be induced from practice and, on rare occasion, subsequently translated into principles and norms. Three reasons drive the need to invert the process in this way.
First, trying to make complex deals between almost 200 nations is clearly a fool’s errand in today’s multipolar, interconnected world, exemplified not only by the climate negotiations but by the degenerated state of the trade negotiations.
Second, binding commitments by sovereign states are, frankly, not worth the paper they are written on. One of many examples of this is the casual discarding of legally binding public deficit and competition and subsidy rules within the world’s most tightly regulated multination arrangement, the European Union.
Third, we see ‘globally deduced’ deals overly focused on top-down mechanics and associated institutional arrangements, which in almost every instance have generated performance failures rooted in bureaucracy, political interference, rent-seeking and straightforward corruption. Look no further for ample evidence of this than the fate of US$5 trillion or so of development assistance that has flowed over the last half a century.
Unilateral action based on national self-interest, supported where possible through international collaboration, is the only slim hope we have of effectively managing climate change. Whether we are effective will depend on the pace, scale and direction in which we can propel such self-interest.
What would it mean in practice to focus on an international deal that has less to do with living up to binding commitments and more to do with catalysing national action? I would highlight three particular components:
A. Low Carbon Growth and Development
B. Fast Start Clubs
C. Global Taxes
Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow demonstrated in unintelligible mathematics that flawed equilibrium solutions could be less effective than well designed, disequilibrium options.
I would be the first to applaud an effective global deal with commitments and targets. But it is a chimera, and a dangerous one at that. My three suggestions are not new, and may not even be the right or most important ones.
Key is not their merits per se, but the underlying arguments about the reshaped contours of 21st century deals where practice will lead and induce norms rather than vice versa. Second-best in theory, but first-best solutions to get us where we need to be.
This report was first published by Open Democracy. For the full report, click here.
