Creative climate change containment

Even if all industrialized countries were to reduce emissions to zero by 2050, without any action by developing countries to reduce absolute emissions, the world will not be able to prevent 2°C of global average warming, a level considered dangerous by many scientists.

That's a pretty powerful statement and one of the reasons why the UNFCCC is convening another set of climate talks this week, this time in Accra, Ghana. It's also the starting point for Carter Bales and Rick Duke's article on "Containing Climate Change" in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

Containing climate change will require reducing the current levels of greenhouse gas emissions not only in the United States and other wealthy countries but also in rapidly developing nations such as China. ... The international community must therefore urgently implement a durable global strategy to address the climate threat.

This is what the article sets out to do. It gets many things right and is definitely worth reading. Need for US leadership at home and internationally? Check. Inadequacy of Clean Development Mechanism and most sectoral approaches? Check. Importance of a global trading system? Check.

It also mentions something close to "Clean Investment Budgets" in all but name. Those are the reason why I'm heading to Ghana myself. How do you convince developing countries to take caps on emissions and join a global trading system?

Use the limited atmospheric room left under a global emissions reduction pathway that prevents  2°C of average warming. It's the snow cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro in the graph on the right. It's decreasing quickly and is extremely valuable. At the moment, there's something like 100 gigatons of CO2 equivalent emissions left under that cap. At $30 per ton, that's 3 trillion dollars.

But that space is disappearing fast. By 2015, it's about half as big. By 2025, it's gone completely.

In the meantime, though, we can use some of this space as a bargaining chip. Bales and Duke seem to agree:

Under this plan, wealthy countries would commit to progressively stricter emissions caps, ensuring an 80 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2050. Developing countries with high emissions, such as China, would receive easy-to-meet caps through 2020, granting them tradable pollution rights up to the emissions levels currently projected for them by the International Energy Agency. After 2020, each heavily industrialized developing country would be required to freeze its cap at its currently projected 2020 emissions level. Once wealthy countries have brought their average per capita emissions down to the level of the major developing countries, countries such as China would commit to progressively stricter caps in line with the commitments of the wealthy countries.

This would give Beijing an immediate incentive to start reducing emissions below current projections, freeing up allowances for sale in the global carbon market. After 2030, however, China would have to assume a declining cap. Skeptics may wonder why China would choose to participate in such a system. The answer, in short, is that China would easily stay below the emissions levels projected for it by the International Energy Agency because it would spend less on abatement efforts than it would receive from selling carbon credits to the rich countries.

The basic logic here is right on, although I would disagree with the actual mechanism and dates. Our analysis shows that 2030 is too late for major emitting developing countries like China to start having declining caps themselves. That needs to occur by around 2020 to avoid the 2°C target.

This two-page summary of Clean Investment Budgets includes more details. Much more on our analysis can be found over at edf.org/AccraClimateTalks.

Comments

[Paul]

My suggested alternative to caps (if they are unachievable), is at least getting developing countries to tax emissions at a low level (or use an equivalent ETS). Even a tax of say $10 or $20 a ton starts to give the incentive for a lot of low-cost cuts. Other advantages:
- by forcing them to pay tax, it moves the issue into the consciousness of 1000's of business owners, perhaps triggering more developments in low-cost ways to cut emissions;
- you introduce the administrative architecture, so that the tax can easily be raised as developing countries get richer or the predictions/actual costs of climate change increase;
- you get developing countries working on the problem right now, not in say 10 years when the emissions cap starts to approach.

The reason why a developing country may be more likely to agree to this over a cap:

- by signing up to caps developing countries are signing blank cheques. They don't know how much achieving them will require increasing energy costs/hurt the economy. By having a set tax the government can more easily do a costs/benefit analysis to see whether it is in their country's interest.

- countries can implement a tax in a revenue neutral way. Ie for each dollar they get in carbon tax they give straight back to the voters in tax breaks or increased welfare. Further, because the tax has the effect of decreasing a negative externality it is probably a more efficient tax then the one it replaces. Governments would be less able to make this revenue-neutral promise with the uncertainty of an emissions target.

[Bob]

Paul makes a lot of sense. I would suggest that any tax collected would be used to improve the energy efficiency of homes in poorer neighborhoods. The money could only be used for geothermal heat pumps, insulation and windows (maximum u value of .25). In this country the economy would get a tremendous boost by this. Additionally, crime rates would go down as would health care expenses (especially if all work is done by local contractors).

[DJ]

My analysis suggests that a sustainable level of CO2-equivalent emissions level is 2 tons per person per year. That's about 10% of what the U.S. produces now, and about half of China's current rate. OTOH, many countries in the world, including India, have yet to hit this level.

While it's essential that we cut worldwide CO2 emissions, if we tell India it must remain at 1.2 tons per person while we continue to emit nearly 20 times that (or even if we cut our emissions in half), what we're really saying is that India's people are condemned to remain in desperate poverty because our wealth entitles us to emit more.

There must be some sense of equity in this process if we are to retain any moral authoity whatsoever.

[joshua corning]

And so the global warmers set out to declare war on China and India over carbon credits.

Good luck with all that.

[odograph]

What a colorful world you live in, Joshua.

[joshua corning]

What a colorful world you live in, Joshua.

Hey Odo remember when the clean air act saved us all?

Now we live in a world where it didn't.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080819160103.htm

[odograph]

That's kind of picking and choosing, isn't it?

Were there not restrictions on small coal burners in places like London that helped start that decline?

I hope you are not implying a purely market decision in the face of so much evidence:

Americans may think smog was invented in Los Angeles. Not so. In fact, a Londoner coined the term "smog" in 1905 to describe the city's insidious combination of natural fog and coal smoke. By then, the phenomenon was part of London history, and dirty, acrid smoke-filled "pea-soupers" were as familiar to Londoners as Big Ben and Westminster Abby. The smog even invaded the world of Shakespeare, whose witches in Macbeth chant, "fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air."

[...]

Not until the 1950s, when a four-day fog in 1952 killed roughly 4,000 Londoners was any real reform passed. Parliament enacted the Clean Air Act in 1956, effectively reducing the burning coal. It was the beginning of serious air-pollution reform in England.

I really remember giving you that same link before.

http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/perspect/london.htm

Do you suppose greenland ice shows the 1956 drop?

[Dano]

The Clean Air Act has resulted in hundreds of $billions in savings in public health expenditures.

I guess that's bad, because it has cost corporations hundreds of $millions.

Horrible.

Best,

D

[joshua corning]

The Clean Air Act has resulted in hundreds of $billions in savings in public health expenditures.

I guess that's bad, because it has cost corporations hundreds of $millions.

How much did we save before the Clean Air Act when we had huge drops in pollution?

Looks to me like the clean air act was unnecessary and only worked at reducing already dropping pollution levels on the margins.

The drop in pollution from 1900 - 1960 seems to be larger then the drops after 1960. Funny how that happened without a clean air act.

Odo, you might actually go back and look what you wrote. This study definitively proves you wrong.

[joshua corning]

Dano and Odo,

I do believe the phrase you are scratching around for is;

"We are all environmental Kuznetsians now."

and so as to not entirely hijack Wagner's thread we can now all agree increasing the standard of living in China and India is better for the environment then trying to curtail their economic growth with a trade war.

[odograph]

I think my reading was OK:

"Conventional wisdom held that toxic heavy metals were higher in the 1960s and ‘70s, the peak of industrial activity in Europe and North America and certainly before implementation of Clean Air Act controls in the early 1970s," said Joe McConnell, lead researcher and director of DRI's Ultra-Trace Chemistry Laboratory.

"But it turns out pollution in southern Greenland was higher 100 years ago when North American and European economies ran on coal, before the advent of cleaner, more efficient coal burning technologies and the switch to oil and gas-based economies," McConnell said.

In fact, the research showed pollutants were two to five times higher at the beginning of the previous century than today. Pollution levels in the early 1900s also represented a 10-fold increase from preindustrial levels.

The "1960s and ‘70s" are apparently after smog controls started being put in place.

The 1956 law I cited is a case in point.

[odograph]

More here:

The following key dates identify some of the major facts relating to urban air pollution in the UK over recent centuries.

1661 British scientists John Evelyn & John Graunt found that polluted air from industry could affect vegetation and people. They suggested that industries be located in the countryside to minimise effects on health.

1852 Robert Angus Smith identifies acid rain in Manchester.

1872 Robert Angus Smith became the first air pollution inspector in Britain.

1875 The Public Health Act. This contained a smoke abatement section; legislation to the present day has been based on this.

[Dano]

Looks to me like the clean air act was unnecessary and only worked at reducing already dropping pollution levels on the margins.

There's only so much time one has in the day to shoot the typical misunderstood and contentless joshua argument in a barrel, but one has 5.1 seconds to Google a graph or fact. And 2.1 seconds for a periodic analysis. Joke.

Joshua Corning: possessor of knowledge anti-matter. Anti-knowledge?

Best,

D

[joshua corning]

The 1956 law I cited is a case in point.

The pollution peak was 50 years before 1956.

What government policy was enacted in 1900 that turned that pollution around?

Here I will answer that for you:

NONE

[joshua corning]

There's only so much time one has in the day to shoot the typical misunderstood and contentless joshua argument in a barrel, but one has 5.1 seconds to Google a graph or fact. And 2.1 seconds for a periodic analysis. Joke.

Joshua Corning: possessor of knowledge anti-matter. Anti-knowledge?

The facts you are lurching for Dano is the drop in pollution dropped more from 1900 -1960 then it did from 1960 - present

[odograph]

Joshua, you are wrong two ways: (1) the news article does not name the peak year, and (2) anti-coal laws are themselves a hundred years old.

[joshua corning]

(2) anti-coal laws are themselves a hundred years old.

Yeah Odo the US and Europe shifted to cleaner coal burners and oil 100 years ago because of a law in London which may or may not have existed.

One more interesting factoid with all this is the Global warmers all say aerosols are the reason why we have not seen the intense warming we should be seeing. This new information tells us that there were more Aerosols in the atmosphere 100 years ago then there are now. Under this presumption that Aerosols cause cooling then the warming of the last 100 years could be due solely on the decline of Aerosols in our atmosphere. I wonder how many IPCC models show declining Aerosol levels in the atmosphere from 1900 to 2000?

Ok I really don't wonder...none of them do.

Another interesting note is how clean the development of China and India has been compared to the development of Europe and the US. China and India which really do not have any air quality standards somehow developed and are developing without the vast amounts of pollution that the US and Europe produced. It is almost as if they leap froged the negative hurtles of development.

[odograph]

"Yeah Odo the US and Europe shifted to cleaner coal burners and oil 100 years ago because of a law in London which may or may not have existed."

Classic. Does it worry you at all when you baldly display such confirmation bias?

There are 1,480 hits on the quoted string "1875 Public Health Act". I'm sure there would be more with a less rigorous string pattern.

[Dano]

The pollution peak was 50 years before 1956. What government policy was enacted in 1900 that turned that pollution around?

Joshua, please provide the evidence behind your claim. I assert that you are making sh*t up*.

Thank you in advance for the evidence.

Best,

D

* Actually, someone else is making sh*t up, and joshua is simply dutifully parroting the malinformation.

[scotty]

Suggest you to provide link to

www.energyenvironmentforum.com

and encourage your readers to use the
Energy Environment Forum !