This piece takes the long view in gauging efforts to stem global warming and its impacts using the tools of diplomacy. It is not about the details of the outcome of climate treaty talks that concluded yesterday in Lima, Peru. (Here’s what parties sought; here’s the final sketchy result.)
Below, I’ll explain why I see recent shifts in the process as a good thing, despite — and, in fact, because of — the lack of specifics. I’ll also post some thoughts from a batch of longtime climate-policy analysts on this idea of “soft” climate diplomacy.
But first, a bit about Lima. Those seeking details on winners and losers can start with a helpful post by Mat Hope for Carbon Brief with this great headline: “Good COP, bad COP” (with COP standing for “Conference of the Parties). Brad Plumer at Vox notes the halting, incomplete nature of the outcome in a piece with the sub-heading: “Every single country now plans to tackle emissions. Sort of.”
Coral Davenport’s analysis in The Times today calls it a “name-and-shame” plan. John Upton at Climate Central has an excellent breakdown of the final hours and inevitable compromises.
Here’s my guardedly optimistic view of the shift in climate treaty negotiations since the tumultuous 2009 talks in Copenhagen.
In essence, soft is the new hard.
For several years leading up to Copenhagen, hard emissions targets and timetables were essential. Anything less was a planet-wrecking cop-out. Much of the rhetoric pressing for a new agreement was framed as “sealing the deal” on a new internationally legally-binding restriction on greenhouse gas emissions building on the model represented by the dead-end 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
But it has become clear that efforts to set binding hard targets when dealing with greenhouse gases — which remain deeply linked to economic activity — were counterproductive and probably delayed progress, as a number of analysts had warned (read the Hartwell Paper for one such take).
“Soft” diplomacy (read a relevant book chapter here) is reflected in a new system for pledging national climate actions that emerged in last year’s outcome in Warsaw and was refined a bit in Lima this time around: “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions,” or INDCs in United Nations parlance.
The World Resources Institute has a great explainer on its website, including this section:
INDCs bring together elements of a bottom-up system—in which countries put forward their contributions in the context of their national priorities, circumstances and capabilities—with a top-down system, in which countries collectively aim to reduce global emissions enough to limit average global temperature rise to 2 degrees C, thus averting the worst impacts of climate change. As a result, INDCs can create a constructive feedback loop between national and international decision-making on climate change.
Note the critical words in the phrase, by the way:
Intended — meaning any such actions are a goal, but a non-binding one.
National — meaning each nation chooses its own mix of actions.
To understand why India, despite its fast-growing emissions, has demanded and gotten what its environment minister called “carbon space,” just do a side by side comparison of the United States, where the average person’s activities result in about 17 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, and India, where 400 million people still lack an electric light or clean cooking fuel and where per capita annual emissions are 1.9 tons per person. (And then consider how long the United States has been benefitting from fossil fuels compared to India.)
Here’s a relevant (I’ll let you judge if it was prescient) reflection I wrote after the 2010 round of talks in Cancun, Mexico:
I don’t think all of the diplomacy and policy-making is truly meaningless — “pulling on disconnected levers,” as Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel has described most policies related to energy.
To my mind, the sessions and negotiations, despite the zombie-like quality, do encourage, display and memorialize countries’ efforts to live up to their 1992 pledge to avoid dangerous human interference with the climate system. My impression, although it’s hard to prove, is that this has shifted the world slightly away from that uncomfortable line on graphs labeled “business as usual.”
This kind of process can produce substantial results, as was the case in the United States when the launch of the Toxic Release Inventory, an annual public accounting of companies’ emissions of a host of harmful chemicals, prompted substantial reductions without direct regulation.
Finally, here are some thoughts from others on my point that the kinds of commitments articulated in Lima were far softer than how some early headlines portrayed them — and that this isn’t necessarily bad.
Robert N. Stavins, the Harvard University environmental economist with an invaluable blog, posted a superb piece on this point after returning from Lima. Here’s his key point:
In a 1998 book, edited by Bill Nordhaus (Economics and Policy Issues in Climate Change), Dick Schmalensee wrote about “Greenhouse Policy Architectures and Institutions,” and lamented that the Kyoto Protocol exhibited narrow scope (covering only the Annex I countries) but aggressive ambition for that small set of nations. He presciently noted that this was precisely the opposite of what would be a sensible way forward, namely broad participation, even if the initial ambition is less. Based on the 2011 Durban Platform and the 2014 Lima Call for Climate Action, it now appears that with the 2015 Paris Agreement that approach is finally being adopted.
As I predicted in my previous essay at this blog, in which I previewed the COP-20 talks, the Lima decision will surely disappoint some environmental activists. Indeed, there have already been pronouncements of failure of the Lima/Paris talks from some green groups, primarily because the talks have not and will not lead to an immediate decrease in emissions and will not prevent atmospheric temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which has become an accepted, but essentially unachievable political goal.
As I said in my previous essay, these well-intentioned advocates mistakenly focus on the short-term change in emissions among participating countries (for example, the much-heralded 5.2% cut by the Annex I countries in the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period), when it is the long-term change in global emissions that matters.
They ignore the geographic scope of participation, and do not recognize that — given the stock nature of the problem — what is most important is long-term action. Each agreement is no more than one step to be followed by others. And most important now for ultimate success later is a sound foundation, which is what the Lima decision can provide.
Richard Ottinger, dean emeritus of Pace Law School and a longtime analyst of renewable energy policy, wrote this:
The Lima Accord was a fantastic and essential breakthrough in the climate negotiations. Having sat through previous COP negotiations where the same absolutist negative arguments were repeated by the same parties over and over again like a broken record, it was heartening to see these same parties at last reach a compromise enabling the world to start on the road to achieving the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions essential to avoid the catastrophic consequences predicted by the I.P.C.C. from failure to act. Some criticize the accord for not mandating adequate reductions now sufficient to meet the reductions prescribed by the I.P.C.C. scientists, but it was clear that only a voluntary agreement could succeed. And it was evident from the Kyoto Protocol experience that describing the agreement as “binding” not only was unachievable, but also didn’t mean much.
In my view, the most disturbing shortcoming of the accord is its failure to agree on monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of commitments to be made in Paris. Peer pressure on countries to maximize commitments and assure that commitments are met is essential to progress. The only MRV measure included was a provision providing for reporting of total commitments. Hopefully this can be strengthened in the final Paris accords.
To be sure, enormous challenges lie ahead. Recent IEA reports show that world-wide greenhouse gas emissions still are growing rather than receding and the use of coal still is dramatically rising. Considerable technological progress will have to be made in the next decade to improve and provide economic storage of solar and wind energy, bring on hydrogen fuel cells, develop the means to economically capture and sequester carbon from fossil fuel – and most important of all, to have all the countries of the world deliver on the promise of the Lima accords to make and deliver on significant commitments for greenhouse gas reductions.
As the consequences of climate change become increasingly apparent, I am optimistic that over the coming decades most of the countries of the world will see it in their interest to maximize their efforts. Even today energy efficiency and renewable energy are economically as well as environmentally advantageous in most applications. The cry that climate action will be economically disastrous is clearly fallacious. I trust that sound science and the will to survive will ultimately prevail. The Lima accords are a good and vital beginning.
David G. Victor at the University of California, San Diego, offered this reaction to I note I sent about the limits of the meaning of the word “commitment” in this process:
I think the term “commitment” has taken on an overly legalistic tone in the diplomatic negotiations. And that has allowed folks to pretend that if we just ramp up the ambition of the commitments that we can somehow force reluctant nations to do more than they would otherwise. That logic is the essence of “top down” diplomacy that has largely failed in this area for more than two decades. What I see encouraging in Lima—in reality, the roots are much deeper and trace at least to the spasms that followed Copenhagen—is the shift to more flexible bottom-up systems of pledges that are, in the Sartre sense, commitments. They are milestones in a process by which countries decarbonize their economies in ways that align with national interests. but they aren’t really commitments in the formal legal sense. If you try to force this process too vigorously outside national interests then it will either fail (Copenhagen) or breed its own backlash.
This shift to a new system — decentralized, bottom up, multi-speed, polycentric, or whatever you want to call it — is a reflection of reality. Of the fact that power in the international system is diffused and some of the most pivotal countries in the process are the ones that are most wary of overly legalistic commitments (China, U.S., India among others). It is a reflection that big integrated top-down systems will collapse of their own weight and complexity and thus smaller groups (clubs) must lead they way. that is more or less the message in my Global Warming Gridlock book and I am encouraged to see it playing out. It is also the message from a paper that Bob Keohane and I wrote a few years ago in POP called “The Regime Complex for Climate Change.” And lots of others are plowing these fields, as well.
One implication of this new reality is that we should be looking at different models for negotiating big package agreements. For years I have thought that trade rounds were the right model. (In 1991, I wrote a piece in Nature calling for a General Agreement on Climate Change that was in part naïve and in part on the right track). I see the “alliance” or the “umbrella” that will come out of Paris as a big tent under which lots of smaller trade-like clubs and plurilateral agreements will be stitched together. If so, we should be paying a lot more attention to the post-Paris period—to the kinds of structures and systems that will be needed to stitch together the different plurilateral agreements and efforts into something more coherent.
Another implication is that this process is a long game and that it is no longer useful to orient the efforts around goals that might have been feasible 1 to 1.5 decades ago but are fantasy today. That was part of the logic behind the piece that Charlie Kennel and I wrote in Nature back in October. Beating up on the process for not delivering on 2 degrees is unhelpful—it is like beating up on gravity because things fall to the floor.
A third implication is that if if this new process is better reflective of national interest then we should pay much more attention to national interest—to what drives countries to act. Some of that is shifting with new norms and awareness around climate change and climate impacts. Much of it, however, comes from how countries see climate intersecting with other things they care much more about, like local air pollution and energy security. That was part of the logic for why so many folks have been keen to make a big push on soot and other SLCPs [short-lived climate pollutants] —the piece that Charlie Kennel, Ram Ramanathan and I had in Foreign Affairs a couple years ago lays out the POLITICAL logic for action in that area as well as the new science showing that SLCPs are more important than previously thought.
Politically, a short-lived gas with proximate impacts on things that even reluctant governments care about (e.g., crop damage) inspires a lot more action than a globally mixed gas that has uncertain and seemingly distant impacts diffused globally. Of course, one must work SLCPs and long lived gases in tandem. But the political opportunity with SLCPs is that it can demonstrate, afresh, that the diplomatic process is actually doing things that are relevant. As that relevance and credibility rises then more firms and other key players will start to take all of that more seriously. this was the “bicycle theory” in trade negotiations—you negotiate to keep moving so that the bicycle stays upright—and is valid here as well.
A fourth implication is that as the key stakeholders come to accept this new reality I think we will find a lot of good will. Sure, this won’t deliver 2 degrees. But it will turn the corner after decades of talking but not acting. We have a paper coming out on Monday in PNAS that reports some new behavioral economics research showing that this good will extends, as well, to how top policy makers think about including fairness when they make complex bargains. Fairness is a key element of climate diplomacy and a perennial stumbling block. These new results make me more optimistic that even on that front practical deals are possible. But practical means realistic.
