From Lima to Paris

                                                Comments due by Nov 20, 2015

 Needless to say, there’s been a big and promising shift in tone and some substance in global warming diplomacy of late — led by the paired pledges of China and the United States to intensify efforts to curtail heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions. Other countries, including gas-rich Malaysia, have promised to act on climate.

No one should presume things will be easy in Lima, Peru, where negotiators are gathering through next week to shape a global climate agreement that could be finalized in Paris a year from now. There’s strong — and to a large extent justified — resistance to new carbon commitments in India, for example, where hundreds of millions of people lack access to any modern energy sources, let alone clean ones. And there will be intensifying demands for billions to flow from industrialized countries that spent decades building wealth burning fossil fuels to poor, vulnerable ones. Given continuing economic troubles in many developed countries, those demands will be hard to meet.

Still, there are plenty of signs that there’s room for a global accord to emerge, with every faction — from the poorest to the richest — finding a comfort zone thanks to the 24-year-old clause in the original climate treaty laying out nations’ “common but differentiated responsibilities” (here’s a great explainer from McGill’s Center for International Sustainable Development Law).

As long ago as 1991, there were calls to pursue “soft,” not internationally binding, steps toward a global climate treaty. Read these notes from a fascinating 1991 Harvard meeting on Negotiating a Global Climate Agreement to get the idea. (There are some excerpts below. I first wrote about that meeting in 2010.)

Talks are progressing now because this shift is in fact occurring.

John Upton has an informative piece on Climate Central that lays out the logic of non-binding success and also why some parties, particularly Europe, still resist:

As negotiators gather in Peru for a critical round of climate talks, U.S. delegates are straining to explain what they call a “counterintuitive” reality: For next year’s global climate agreement to be effective, commitments made under it must not be legally binding.

Such an outcome would disappoint many, including the European Union’s negotiating team, which says it will be pushing for binding commitments during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in Lima this week and next. America’s negotiators are pushing for voluntary commitments.

The success of the next climate agreement, which is due to be finalized during talks in Paris one year from now, may hinge on American negotiators winning in this latest spat in a long-simmering quarrel with their European counterparts.

It’s a pretty good bet that Europe will — excuse the term — soften, given the momentum built by the year-long process that produced the American announcement with China and particularly because failure in the heart of Europe is unimaginable.

The new emphasis on a soft approach is quite a contrast to the tone in the run-up to the tumultuous Copenhagen talks in 2009, when inflated “seal the deal” expectations — partially driven by the election of President Obama — led to the idea there could be new international, legally-binding gas limits like those tried in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — which has proved a dead-end document.

Yvo de Boer, who held the chair in the climate talks through Copenhagen and now runs the Global Green Growth Institute, made the point this way in an interview with Bloomberg’s The Grid back in June:

Q: Is it still realistic for climate negotiators to want an “international, legally binding” treaty? Was it ever realistic if the U.S. always opposed one?

A: If a country enters into a legally-binding commitment and they back away from it, what do you do? Arrest the prime minister? “Nationally legally-binding” is much stronger. I think we’ve moved beyond Kyoto-style agreements. Hopefully in Paris we will see countries make ambitious pledges to limit or reduce emissions. [Read the rest.]

Debates will (and should) continue over how much of what’s being pledged is simply enshrining energy and pollution trends (both in the United States and countries like China) that are already being driven by other factors (cheap shale gas and growing energy efficiency here, smog concerns in China, etc.).

And much of what is being pledged, despite Yvo de Boer’s hope for legally-binding actions at the national level, is still much more like putty than steel, as Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School noted (in the context of United States law) on his Lawfare blog earlier this year. 

But momentum matters, as does the rising trust among parties as they split from a faction-against-faction approach (remember theGroup of 77 plus China bloc?) to finding common threads, one on one.

The summary of that 1991 meeting on climate agreements, written by Henry Lee, who’s still at Harvard, have some relevant sections, including this one:

Perhaps the real problem is not agreeing on a treaty, but building nations’ confidence in other nations’ capacity and willingness to cut emissions. We are skeptical about whether Brazil will do it, and they are skeptical about us. And as in the recent U.S.-Japan decisions over Structural Impediments to trade, if we both can do it, we will both be better off.

Overcoming this blockage will either take an adjustment of our notion of sovereignty where implementation is concerned, or a focus on unilateral action. U.S. unilateral action could set an example for the world, and help to structure the international process so as to increase confidence. If the U.S., for example, significantly increased transportation fuel prices, then this action would both increase our influence in pushing for good international deals, and exempt us from charges of obstruction when we refuse to sign a bad one.

There is a lot of latent cooperativeness, looking for a structure in which to express itself. This is what international legal measures, soft or hard, should do — give an enabling structure to this latent willingness to help.

Obama has moved far more on power plants and auto efficiency than fuel prices (which are headed down of course), which simply shows that expectations and options evolve over time. But his administration’s domestic power plant rules and simultaneous interaction with China reflect how this dynamic can work.

There’s much more at the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, including this new paper: “A Pre-Lima Scorecard for Evaluating which Countries are Doing Their Fair Share in Pledged Carbon Cuts.”

Update, Dec. 6, 8:45 a.m. | Professor Lee at Harvard sent this illuminating note after I’d posted:

The real architects of the soft strategy were Abe Chayes [bio] and Tom Schelling [Nobelist in Economics] and it is fascinating that it has taken 23 years for the world to finally catch up. Although Chayes’s thumbprint is all over the Rio treaty of 1992.  Howard Raiffa convened a bi-weekly seminar at the Business School in which both Tom and Abe participated, and it was out of these discussions that the soft strategy emerged.

While I firmly believe it to be the only workable strategy that can result in meaningful progress, skeptics ask –will this strategy be enough to make a measurable difference in slowing the build up of greenhouse gas concentrations? Given the domestic hurdles facing Obama, the inability to raise significant funds for the Green Climate Fund and China’s long farewell to its growth in carbon emissions,  we may still be another decade away from seeing this issue turn around.  This is not to say that the Xi-Obama agreement or a successful Paris protocol will not be significant, but the question is –will it be enough.

I replied this way (email shorthand cleaned up):

The “Will it be enough?” question leads to “What is enough?” I’ve always liked John Holdren’s notion that there’s a sliding mix of “mitigation, adaptation and suffering.” No hard lines going forward. And the learn-and-adjust aspect of humanity’s complex response will keep tweaking the two knobs as necessary.

It will be far from perfect, or rational. But we’ll keep moving on. The human way.

Update, Dec. 6, 11:45 a.m. | Robert Stavins, another Harvard economist focused on climate policy, sent the following observation:

You mention something that is very important to keep in mind, but frequently ignored in press and other commentary on the ongoing international climate negotiations, namely: “No hard lines going forward.”

There is not some distinct bend in the marginal damage function or marginal cost function at 450 ppm [a carbon dioxide concentration of 450 parts per million]. In other words, it’s fair to say that stabilizing at 350 ppm means less damages, and stabilizing at 550 ppm means more damages (things get more complicated when bringing in marginal costs, and searching for the most dynamically efficient path forward), but there is really not something magical about 450 ppm.

The 450 ppm target is a political goal (which is important), but is not linked in some rigorous way with the science and economics. It has also become fundamentally infeasible, as the this year’s IPCC AR5 WG3 and SYR reports have illustrated quite clearly.

Unfortunately, pointing this out has become politically incorrect and controversial.

I was also remiss in not including a link to his excellent blog post explaining the significance of the Lima meeting and why recent steps are important. Here is a snippet:

There will be — indeed, already have been — pronouncements of failure of the Lima/Paris talks from some green groups, primarily because the talks 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. 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.