So, in my work life, I’m a climate lawyer. I’m not a big name, I don’t run any important national campaigns, but I studied at the UN during the Rio Negotiations, I concentrated in environmental and international law in law school, I’ve worked for two different climate change think tanks at Pace Law School and Columbia University, and I consider myself an activist. The big thing I’m on now is research for a web-based platform showcasing legal pathways to deep decarbonization, which should launch at some point in the next couple months. So I live in this space pretty deeply.
I’m convinced that the biggest idea that nobody talks about in climate politics is getting to a Real Climate Accord. I’ve written a bit about what that would mean. I made a logo, some model legislation, wrote some outreach, and designed a website to promote the core concept. It’s up there at www.RealClimateAccord.com, my baby. So this post kind of takes that thinking and explains it a little less formally, with a few more asides, to flesh out certain things that don’t make for good political language (this is a 2300 word version of what I tried to reduce to 400 for the site) and cross-pollinate my audiences. Here goes:
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Climate change is a global collective action problem. That is, every country faces strong incentives to pollute even though they know that they and everybody else would be better off if we didn’t. Because everybody knows that nobody else has a private incentive to stop polluting, we might as well keep polluting ourselves. It’s irrational to handicap your own country if nobody else will – if, indeed, the world is going to just get hotter anyways. Make money while the sun shines, burn oil before the seas rise.
Since the first UN conference of the parties, every step of the way we’re trying to solve climate change by doing exactly the sorts of things that should fail in a collective action model. And, okay, the most basic collective action model is admittedly too simple to predict the real world response – but it’s telling that for thirty years, the world has moved roughly on the business-as-usual emissions trajectory forecast back in 1990. The simplest model would say it absolutely should. It absolutely should continue to going forward. This is economics 101 stuff, and for the last generation we’re desperately hoping economics 101 is wrong or underaccounting for something – and yes, there’s a lot of smart debate about the kinds of things you can accomplish in spite of the collective action nature of this problem – Elinor Ostrom rightly says that you shouldn’t expect zero cooperation, lots of sectors of society exhibit small capacities for sacrifice in order to win forms of social capital, and that’s all true – but even she’ll admit that this is a core problem. And I’ll go further to say, the evidence seems pretty overwhelming that social capital isn’t getting the job done at scale. Collective action problems require collective action solutions.
If anything should open our eyes to this truth, surviving the coronavirus pandemic should. A global problem without global coordination creates a mess.
The first prerequisite to a credible global decarbonization plan is that there’s some kind of real, enforceable accord. Within that, you can get into a million political questions around who has a burden to decarbonize and do technology transfer and development funding and apply tariffs and on what schedule and impose what kinds of internal pollution regulations (and whether they should be in the form of taxes or caps or industrial nationalization) – and it’s well beyond the scope of this argument to try and spitball where the sum of a thousand small intra- and international negotiations lead us in that regard. It would be hubris and counterproductive, in fact. Countries need to come together and negotiate and feel heard and fight for whatever degree of concession or independence is important to them. They need to do that if they’re going to accept the outcomes.
But a few things about the core framework are clear as day, and any outcome that lacks an element of that framework is probably going to fail. Countries need to acknowledge that at the start of the negotiation and be guided by that framework until the end.
So my yawp into the void is just to say, and repeat, and repeat that a global climate accord can’t get us to a temperature target unless it is:
- Actually based on that target. That is, sets a scientific global carbon budget linked to a temperature target, with whatever probabilistic certainty we want to accept. This isn’t what we do now. That 1.5C or 2C target they talk about at the UN is just aspirational.
- Actually assigns responsibility for that target. That is, every country comes home with a carbon budget that collectively adds up to the whole – not just “individual nationally determined contributions.”
- Actually monitors whether people abide by their targets. That is, establishes an independent monitoring body to survey global emissions, rather than relying on self-reporting from self-interested parties. Countries lie about their emissions for no good reason already, they certainly would do so more if you gave them hard incentives to.
- Actually creates an enforcement mechanism for people who break their obligations. Obviously, there’s nothing even gesturing in this direction right now. This should create effective incentives to comply – that is, puts every country in the position where they’re better off economically if they make their emissions target than if they don’t. There’s at least two ways you can do this:
- Set a global tariff system that creates free trade pathways for countries abiding by their obligations, and harshly punishes those who don’t. The EU particularly seems close to broaching this to a small degree with talk of border carbon adjustments – the problem being it’s necessarily kind of a small, limited tool right now (I can’t tax you for burning down your forests for shits and giggles if it’s not somehow reflected in exports, I can only tax the implicit carbon footprint of manufacturing a given widget to precisely the extent that my country makes that exact same widget and imposes that same carbon tax internally). Because of the restrictive nature of the kinds of reciprocal tariff penalties that can be applied at the World Trade Organization currently, an exemption may need to be added to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to get enough muscle here that it’s a truly effective incentive. That is, we may need to rewrite international trade rules so that I can say something about you burning down those internal forests. But as daunting as that is, the GATT didn’t come down on two tablets from Mount Sinai, and we can amend it for the biggest challenge to ever face humanity.
- Create a global system of development finance. Developing countries aren’t very incentivized by tariffs scheduled against exports that they don’t produce. So create a global system of development finance that expands what they have at stake – if they meet their targets, they get their full funding. If they don’t, they lose out. This exists already at a pretty modest, voluntary level, and it’s not contingent on emissions goals. For the developed countries providing the funding, of course, you need to then make their funding obligations every bit as binding as their emissions obligations for this to work. (Just an aside, but you could link these mechanisms together and even provide for wealth transfers between rich countries to reward exceptional decarbonization efforts. The more cooperation you get on that, the more the system starts to function like global cap and trade.)
If you do all this, if you have the core elements in place to actually give someone a private incentive to decarbonize, you finally have a workable framework that every other small political battle can be guided under. China can have a big messy internal process to figure out their preferred internal decarbonization path and the US can do the same and third parties can stand in the middle and still feel confident that whether the rest of the world chooses industrial nationalization or R&D-oriented tax credits, in the long-run, countries will meet their emissions targets. They should, because they will finally face a self-interested incentive to do so.
If you don’t do this, then I say it’s really not a surprise if you get another 30 years down the line saying, this is the moment when it finally seems imperative enough to act, and it never is, because the private incentives are never fucking there for anyone to do so. Your country could be literally disappearing and it’s still smarter for you to make a little oil money on the way out than build windfarms underwater.
For 30 years, people have known, at some level, that this is what needs to happen, and they’ve largely kept saying to themselves, nah, countries will never agree to that kind of accord, it’s impossible. But I say this is inevitable. This is absolutely going to happen someday. It may take a crisis, but what countries stand to lose in unchecked climate change is astronomical next to what they stand to lose from ceding a little autonomy to an international accord. Starting from about 2050, the projections for climate change get hairy. Once you’re past that 2C threshold, you start worrying about mass starvation and water security and migration at a scale that collapses governments. You start worrying about world war and pandemics waking up out of the permafrost where they’ve been buried for 10,000 years. You start worrying about the collapse of societies. I bet that before national power fucking disappears, national power will learn to work a little with a limited global accord.
So this is going to happen, but the more we get this idea into people’s heads, the sooner it will. There’ll be a thousand small crises between now and doomsday, and when you’re in a crisis, policy gets built out of whatever ideas are lying around, as they say. We need this idea lying around, everywhere on earth. We need it to spread. We need it to be infectious.
So that’s what this little organization is about, what this piece of political action that I’m engaged in aims for. And if I’m the lonely guy with the sign and the binder full of model legislation on the steps of Parliament yawping into the void, so be it. This is too big and too important of an idea to lack its wild prophets.
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A couple caveats:
Okay, this is actually a fairly flexible prophecy in some ways. If you live in this space, you know there are always potential silver bullets lying around that could solve climate change without, really, any society even having to meaningfully sacrifice. A technological breakthrough is possible at any moment. Right now, the one I’m interested in is negative emissions technologies. If direct air capture got a heap of R&D funding and proceeded to have a decade like solar just had where costs came down 90%, you could solve the climate crisis with a few heroes footing the bill, and it wouldn’t even be that big of a bill. That’s the rosiest scenario.
The darker, still not abysmal scenario is just that we do lots of geoengineering to forestall the apocalypse – by agreement or rogue actors, either way. The idea of spraying aluminum aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect out the sun is comparatively cheap. The idea of doing ocean iron acidification to accelerate carbon capture in the deep oceans is a very plausible idea at a certain scale. These are the sorts of things that rogue billionaires could and probably will do if society starts hitting some hard shocks from climate. This might buy us time (and, yes, pose totally unforeseeable risks of a Snowpiercer scenario or whatnot – but I’ll take the global geoengineering that we consciously choose to do because our best models think it will have beneficial effects over the global geoengineering that we’re doing already, totally by hazard, in spite of our best models saying it’ll have disastrous consequences).
Either way, I come out thinking that global governance of the global atmosphere is probably inevitable, even if it isn’t the first order response to climate or it comes later. Because technological miracles don’t only happen for the good guys. The biggest energy story in North America in the last thirty years wasn’t renewables, it was fracking, which dramatically shifted the energy landscape. From our previous baseline, this was actually for the better since it crowded out coal, but if it were to reoccur in the future, it would probably hurt renewables. This kind of thing can absolutely happen again. Today, they’re excited about the prospects of natural gas drilling in the ocean. Maybe that’s another boom that shocks renewables right back out of the bidding stack. Or maybe there’s a technological breakthrough that makes it incredibly profitable to emit one of the secondary GHGs that we hardly talk about – methane, nitrous oxide, HFCs. Either way, in the long run we have this collective good, our atmosphere, without collective governance of it. That we might find a way out of climate change in the near-term without having to establish that governance system leans a bit hard into optimism, I think, but it’s not impossible. That we will thereafter never backslide, never face a natural shock, never invent another way of polluting that collective good seems truly magical. So even if it’s just to maintain the stability that a technological miracle bestows on us, we’re going to need enforceable ways of caring for our atmosphere in the long-run. The bottom line is that we have a planet that we are now big and dangerous enough to threaten, and there will be other ways and other challenges to it in the future that require our cooperation.