Tag Archives: Kyoto

Border Measures Could Make Climate Policy Better or — More Likely — Worse

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The international press reports, “At Climate Talks, Danger to Free Trade Mounts.”

The Copenhagen negotiations have essentially failed to include, among the many topics covered, one that will be critical in the coming years:   the question of import tariffs or other trade penalties that individual countries apply against the products of other countries that they deem too carbon-intensive.    Such border measures are already in EU and US legislation (the Waxman-Markey bill, not yet passed by the Senate).    Properly designed, they could turn out to be the missing instrument needed to get each country to cut emissions without fear of others taking unfair advantage, via leakage.   More likely, national politics will turn them into protectionist barriers. read more

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Progress on Global Warming Is Not Yet in Evidence in Copenhagen

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I am writing from Copenhagen, the site of the 15th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.     If one were to judge by outward appearances, the prospects look dim for a meaningful global agreement by the end of the week.   

First, most conference participants have been put through an experience that seems designed to convince them that global warming may not be such a bad idea after all:  a registration system that requires waiting in long lines in freezing temperatures.  (Wait times commonly reported this week vary from one hour for China’s negotiator to 8 hours for other participants, such as prominent NGO leaders.  Even 9 or 10 hours.)    
 
Second, there has been little convergence of positions.  The views expressed here cover the same fantastically and unbridgeably wide range as they did at the time of the Kyoto meeting 12 years ago.   At one end of the spectrum, developing countries are still asking for reparations – African delegations boycotted Monday’s meetings;  and demonstrators are still very confused about who they should be trying to persuade and how.   At the other end of the spectrum, the climate change deniers are also represented here.  Recent opinion polls show that the percentage of skeptics among the fickle American public has risen very recently, even though the scientific evidence for anthropogenic warming continues to mount.   (For some reason, many find it easier to deny science than to make any of the less indefensible arguments available to critics: that global warming wouldn’t be all bad, or that cutting emissions enough to prevent it would be too expensive, or that the U.N. is not a competent instrument, or that geo-engineering would be a cheaper approach.)     read more

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An Answer for the Roadblock to an International Climate Change Agreement

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On her visit to India two days ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was publicly rebuffed when she raised the problem of global climate change.    The Indian environment minister declared “we are simply not in the position to take legally binding emissions targets.”

 

No single country can address this problem on its own.  Hence the international negotiations that will take place in Copenhagen in December to try to find a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.   But the international effort has run into a seemingly insurmountable roadblock.     On the one hand, the US Congress is clear: it will not impose quantitative limits on US emissions of greenhouse gases if China, India, and other developing countries don’t impose quantitative limits on theirs.   Indeed, that is why the Senate was unwilling to ratify the Kyoto Protocol ten years ago. The logic seems completely reasonable:  why should US firms bear the economic cost of cutting emissions if carbon-intensive activities would just migrate to countries without caps and global emissions continue their rapid rise?   On the other hand, the leaders of India and China are just as clear:   they are unalterably opposed to cutting emissions until after the United States and other rich countries go first.   And why should they?   The industrialized countries created the problem of global warming, in the process of getting rich;  the poor countries should not be denied their turn at economic development.  As the Indians point out, Americans emit more than ten times as much carbon dioxide per person.       read more

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