Remaking the Global Climate Framework

Originally published by The Stanford Daily

Two months ago, hundreds of world leaders and tens of thousands of activists gathered in Copenhagen to craft a new global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. Green groups put on a spectacle – yes, Greenpeace even docked two of its famous boats nearby to “help in pushing the delegates” – and some observers declared it a make or break event in global climate history.

Today, there is strikingly little to show for the whole affair, momentum has slowed to a crawl and hardly anyone is discussing the aftermath. For good reason: the Copenhagen Accord is basically a voluntary agreement with obscure objectives, and its impact will be negligible. Michael Cutajar, the former chairman of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiation group, said that “Beyond the lack of clarity in its drafting, its main weakness is the lack of ambition and identifying responsibilities… Who should do what, and when, in order to limit warming to two degrees?”

What went wrong at Copenhagen? As I recently argued on BBC World View, the outcome was primarily the result of a flawed UNFCCC process and policy framework. The first and most obvious problem was imagining that 192 countries – some of which represent thousands of times more people than others – could produce a meaningful climate mitigation treaty. The UNFCCC process is kind of like the U.S. Senate (today one of the most dysfunctional national legislative bodies in the world) but at least four times as complicated.

There is growing consensus that global climate mitigation policy should be moved into a setting like the G-20 or Major Economies Forum on Energy & Climate (the members of which effectively constitute a super-majority of the world). David Victor, a former Stanford professor and leading international energy expert, recently put it this way: “With a deal this complicated and difficult, the fewer countries you need to reach an agreement, the better the chances are.”

The second overarching problem was the policy framework. For nearly two decades, the dominant national and global policy approach to climate change mitigation has depended on establishing strong, “legally binding” caps on carbon dioxide pollution, particularly through cap and trade and other measures aimed at making fossil fuels more expensive.

Today, the writing is on the wall: the Kyoto Protocol failed to achieve significant emissions reductions, even with a “legally-binding” agreement. As President Obama himself noted in his post-Copenhagen press conference, “Kyoto was legally binding and everybody still fell short anyway.” Copenhagen failed to produce a binding treaty, even with great pressure and expectations. If the world continues down this road -- an approach some experts have dubbed "magical climate thinking" -- negotiations will again fail to produce a meaningful outcome.

The time has come to remake the global climate policy framework to focus on global energy technology policy. Instead of debating emissions targets and timetables like accountants, we need the largest emitters to think like engineers and concentrate on identifying specific technical hurdles and mobilizing the resources to solve them. Most importantly, policymakers need to focus on the goal of “making clean energy cheap,” or as Google puts it, “renewable energy cheaper than coal.”

How much money will each major emitter put on the table to invest in development, deployment and infrastructure of low-carbon technology? What hurdles will those policies confront, and what is each country’s low-carbon technological roadmap? How will the policies be structured, and how can nations productively collaborate and compete on technological development? These are the kind of critical questions that should be negotiated.

Some advocates claim that if the U.S. Senate passes climate legislation similar to the American Clean Energy & Security Act (ACESA), the UNFCCC will achieve a breakthrough. But little evidence suggests that China, India and other countries will respond by implementing strong binding targets, or that signatories will even uphold their emissions targets. ACESA is weak technology policy at best, given that its clean energy investments represent only a small fraction of expert consensus, and not exactly the kind of example we want to set for the world.

The irony is that while the U.S. and Europe continue playing the accountants game of targets and timetables, Asian governments are the ones beginning to move forward with serious technology policies, investing massive amounts in clean-tech development and deployment – while the U.S. falls behind. This is motivated not by climate mitigation nor international law, of course, but economic competitiveness. We should leverage these efforts to motivate the policies we need in the U.S. and abroad, and to develop a new approach.

Ultimately, technology policy is the single most important lever the world has for overcoming this challenge. Our civilization possesses enormous capacities for invention and innovation – now we must develop a global climate policy framework that finally puts them to good use.

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NYTimes Gets "Lessons from Kyoto" Right

A new info-graphic from the New York Times, released today as UN climate talks begin in Copenhagen, looks at the "Lessons from Kyoto," the global treaty that's ongoing fate will be the focus of UN climate negotiations beginning today in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The graphic gets the lessons pretty much dead-on, including how little actual progress any nations have made towards meeting their Kyoto “obligations.” As the Times notes, "The legacy of the Kyoto Protocol is mixed." Of the 36 wealthy nations who agreed under the 1997 treaty to cut their emissions by an average of 5% below historic 1990 levels, just 18 are on track to meet their targets, almost all of them in Europe.

As the graphic illustrates, the bulk of these "successful" nations are former members of the Soviet bloc, and almost all saw deep economic declines after the fall of the Soviet Union, which conveniently occurred after the 1990 emissions baseline year used in the Kyoto treaty. Deindustrializing Eastern bloc nations, including East Germany, saw big cuts in their emissions and made compliance with the Kyoto protocol easy. Better yet, for these nations, exceeding their Kyoto "obligations" left them with excess credits under the treaty framework that they could sell to other nations struggling to cut their own emissions.

As the Times notes, 19 other nations subject to the Kyoto treaty are not on track to meet their emissions targets. Most have seen emissions grow with little hope of complying with Kyoto due to surges in economic growth and activity, including Canada (where emissions shot up through development of the Alberta tar sands for heavy oil extraction), Spain and Portugal (who's economies boomed over the last decade) and even green-minded Ireland and New Zealand (who's growing economies drove emissions up roughly 20% above 1990 levels).

The United States, meanwhile, never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, yet saw emissions grow at a slower rate than many Kyoto countries, including each of those mentioned above.

Emissions have soared in rapidly developing China and India. Major developing nations were not subject to any requirements to cut emissions or drive clean development under the Kyoto treaty framework.

Essentially, as the Times info-graphic clearly illustrates, the "Lessons from Kyoto" are clear: economic trajectories, and little else, determined emissions outcomes under the targets and timetables focused Kyoto Protocol.

Without a proactive and massive shared global effort to sever economic growth from emissions by accelerating clean technology innovation and deployment, the Copenhagen summit now underway shouldn't be expected to produce a dramatically different outcome than it's Kyoto predecessor, despite likely "participation" from the U.S. and big developing nations like China this time around.

Check out the full, interactive info-graphic at the New York Times here. All graphics in this post from NYTimes. Originally posted at the Breakthrough Institute

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