Still not time to ditch Kyoto, Chris Littlecott

Chris Littlecott — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:56:27 +0000

During his hectic blogging schedule last week, David Steven somehow found time to post an in depth analysis of some of the recent criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol.

He ended his analysis with a review of the ‘time to ditch Kyoto' argument of Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner, particularly their central big idea of putting ‘public investment in energy R&D on a wartime footing'.

David's conclusion was that

Quote:

Now spending that sort of money may well be a reasonable response. It should even buy some compelling new technologies (though how wisely governments would invest it is a moot point).

But getting the Americans to spend $80 billion on basic research? I look forward to seeing Prins and Rayner travel to Washington to lobby for that tax hike.

Until they succeed, and given signs of Kyoto's modest success, I reckon targets of some kind do indeed remain the only game in town.

This is indeed the principle practical criticism of their alternative suggestion, but by no means the only one. And given the deepening attention to the future form of Kyoto that will surely come as the Bali negotiations approach their conclusion; it's a worthwhile exercise to pick apart a little further what Kyoto actually is, and what it isn't.

We can do this by continuing the discussion of the Prins & Rayner commentary in Nature [subscription required], not least because it received serious attention when it was published, and has now been released as a longer paper [pdf]. If you want to get a flavour of the varied reaction it received I recommend a quick read of the coverage and comments on the New Scientist environment blog and the ‘Experts Respond' feature at the Australian science media centre.

As it happens, one of the best reactions to their commentary was also one of the first. Clive Bates starts his analysis on his ‘Bacon Butty' blog recounting that his "otherwise peaceful morning slumber was disturbed by a radio interview announcing that social scientists Steve Rayner and Gwin Prins want to 'ditch the Kyoto Protocol'."

Clive goes on to tease apart the Prins / Rayner policy suggestions (and its packaging) in detail, but early on in his post he provides a succint introduction to Kyoto's political value as a process:

Quote:

Their supposedly radical alternative proposals aren't radical or even alternative. But they would, if taken seriously, dissipate what political commitment already exists. Let's examine what they describe as this 'silver buckshot' approach in more detail...

Overall... I think they just don't quite get what Kyoto does
The authors say that Kyoto is based on the models used for tackling ozone, depletion, acid rain and nuclear arms, and that: in practice, Kyoto depends on the top-down creation of a global market in carbon dioxide by allowing countries to buy and sell their agreed allowances of emissions.

Overall, they have mis-characterised the Kyoto protocol (it isn't a single policy instrument designed to create a global trading system). Furthermore, they've not recognised the critical problem at the heart of climate change - it is an international, intergenerational collective action problem to be faced in conditions of uncertainty, distrust and short-termism. The Kyoto Protocol attempts to create a framework for negotiating a solution given that conceptualisation of the problem. The authors' emphasis on local, bottom and piecemeal approaches overlooks the problems of free-riding and the difficulty of getting anything much done, when people fear that others are not doing anything (ie. the collective action issue). The authors appear to take swipes at the Kyoto Protocol without realising that its function is limited to establishing major commitments between parties and organising co-operation. It does not specify policies, but what must be achieved. The choice of policies and the appropriate jurisdictional scale for action is up to the parties.

Clive's description of the purpose of the Kyoto Protocol was taken on further recently by my colleague Nick Mabey, in an interview he gave to the first of the climate podcasts from Nature's Climate Feedback blog. (Those of you who want to listen can find Nick's input from around 16mins 35secs of the podcast).

Nick Mabey started with some more on the history of what Kyoto sought to achieve:

Quote:

"Most of the people who say we should ditch Kyoto entirely know very little about it, and make very strange statements as if the people who decided on it were stupid and didn't know what it was doing.

Everybody who was at Kyoto, including myself, knew it was a first step, it was setting up the architecture, and we didn't forget to include China and India, we knew we weren't including them in binding emission caps.

If you tried to destroy Kyoto and reinvent it, you'd have to reinvent a lot of exactly the same mechanisms. What we need to do is enhance Kyoto and then build a lot of other pieces around it which will help drive the global transformation. Because while it does what it does well, it's not sufficient for meeting the ambition we're trying to achieve."

This description reaffirms the value of Kyoto as the start of a process, rather than the be-all-and-end-all of mitigation efforts. (Something that is often deliberately ignored and distorted, and is particularly visible in the utterly meaningless statistics so beloved by Bjorn Lomborg et al as to the impact ‘Kyoto' would make on global temperatures over a century).

If we project the original Kyoto purpose forward, the key question for Bali then becomes what should be the next step in the process?

Now there are many different possibilities as to how future global climate efforts could be driven, but not so many which bear a good chance of success.

We've approached this issue within E3G over the last year by thinking through what appear to be the 3 main failure modes of the current efforts to secure a global climate deal.

Firstly: no agreement, pure and simple.

Secondly: an agreement that is insufficiently ambitious, resulting in massive climate impacts on the poorest nations (a question of climate justice), and security and economic impacts on the wealthier nations (a question of self interest).

Thirdly: an agreement that is sufficiently ambitious, but which doesn't have buy in from key actors (whether those be countries or industrial sectors) meaning that implementation doesn't follow.

Unfortunately, the record of Kyoto implementation and the advances in climate science over the last decade suggest that Kyoto in itself has been a mixture of failure modes 2 and 3 - insufficiently ambitious, and without buy in.

So how can we correct for this? How can a future climate agreement be both ambitious and create buy in? What form should it take?

This brings us neatly back to the Prins / Rayner paper and the Climate feedback podcast. Interviewer Olive Hefferman asked Nick Mabey whether the focus of attention should now be on securing a further global agreement (a la Kyoto), or instead on bringing together just the main emitters (as per the Prins / Rayner prescription).

Nick's response puts him very firmly in the first camp - without the deal being global, we simply won't get the right level of ambition:

Quote:

"I think its very dangerous if we just have an agreement between the major emitting powers, because that leaves the victims away from the table, and experience shows that if you don't have the people who suffer in an agreement, then its very unlikely that you will get an agreement that's strong and powerful because all the emitting nations have an interest in raising the barrier and having a weaker agreement.

So, much as people are attracted to the idea of having a small group of powerful countries making the deal, I think it's very dangerous to exclude those people in Africa and the Small Islands who are actually going to be the victims."

OK, so things are getting a little clearer, at least for a non-climate specialist like me: The negotiations that Bali will kick start have value as the process of political agreement. And the agreement needs to be global in scope if it is to be ambitious.

I'll come back to the question of how a global deal can ensure effective buy in another day...

To conclude with a forward look, here's a final podcast comment from Nick Mabey in response to the question "Are you optimistic about Bali's chances?"

Quote:

"I am, because I think the political momentum globally is with an effort to change the climate. So although there'll be tactical mismatches, there'll be political arguments, in the end time is on our side. The new American administration, of whatever party, will join up to an international agreement in 2009. So at Bali we need to keep the momentum going, keep people focussed on the need to do something quickly, and not let ourselves be distracted by short term tactics from those nations who, to be honest, have lost the argument and are just trying to spoil the game now."

open Democracy News Analysis - Still not time to ditch Kyoto, Chris Littlecott - Comments

Still not time to ditch Kyoto, Chris Littlecott