» Who Cares about Copenhagen?
I’ve been catching up on Copenhagen postmortems. Despite our worst fears, no one is blaming Canada. Instead it’s either the US, China, Denmark, Africa or Tuvalu’s fault. (I’m kidding about Tuvalu.) What I haven’t seen much discussion of is what exactly people expected Copenhagen to accomplish.
As far as I can tell, the countries were to negotiate an acceptable rise in temperature. From that, climate models would spit out a global emission cap. The classes of countries would then negotiate how to divide that emissions cap between developed and developing countries.
The executive director of “an intergovernmental organisation of developing countries” wrote this nice piece pointing out that it’s only fair to look at nations’ total emissions throughout history. Since wealth is linked very closely with energy consumption, the poor must increase their share of global emissions to close the income gap. If every country capped their emissions at anything close to today’s levels, the poor will stay poor.
There was a side project, which I believe was basically successful, to get developed countries to link foreign aid to emissions reductions. It’s always hard to be sure whether these foreign aid promises are new money or just reallocation of existing funds, but it’s an interesting policy tool. It alleviates some of the problem with capping a developing country’s development.
Even if they could negotiate emissions targets like Kyoto, everyone would just go home to ratify the cap and achieve it their own way. But, as Canada conveniently demonstrated, Kyoto contained no enforcable penalties, so I don’t see how repeating it could be seen as a victory.
I wonder, when was this global cap & trade system supposed to get negotiated? Surely it will be so complicated that it will take decades.
Why can’t the huge markets of the US and the EU just implement a carbon tax and apply tarrifs to force the rest of the world in line? Why does there need to be any international negotiation at all? What’s the point of being a superpower and the world’s policeman if you can’t unilaterally save the planet?
Jared,
Thanks for linking to our site.
I had a very similar reaction to Copenhagen. We need to move beyond the Kyoto
“allocation” framework. See “Report from Copenhagen: Forget carbon targets, just set a price” at http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2009/12/19/report-from-copenhagen-forget-carbon-targets-just-set-a-price/.
- James
James Handley
11 Jan 10 at 6:31 pm
Classic fault: correlation is not causation. We’re not necessarily richer because we consumed more energy. We might have consumed more energy simply because we’re richer. It strikes me as reasonable that both might be contributing factors, actually.
Why can’t the poor countries grow energy-efficient economies?
Jack
12 Jan 10 at 10:17 pm
Same with the emission credits themselves: is that a new tree you’ve planted, or…?
Jack
12 Jan 10 at 10:21 pm
@Jack: Economists have determined it’s causation: the wealth elasticity of demand for energy isn’t quite 1, but it’s close.
The article I linked to argues that rich countries have a sufficient technology base to continue growing without consuming more energy, but that’s an unreasonable thing to ask of poor countries (without foreign aid in the form of energy-efficient technology).
According to James’ nice report on Klimaforum, the position taken by activists is that the rich countries have a “carbon debt” based on the energy they expended to reach their current level of development. They have an obligation to not only stop producing carbon, but give back some of that wealth.
Jared
12 Jan 10 at 10:38 pm
[...] easy to set compared to a taxation rate. That’s because international agreements are always negotiated in terms of emissions amounts. We’ll just assume that the negotiators are using climate models to determine what amounts to [...]
How Much Carbon Tax? « MentalPolyphonics
22 Jan 10 at 8:13 am