Linkage Will Prove Essential for Ultimate Success of Paris Agreement
Author
Robert N. Stavins - Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard Kennedy School
Current Issue
September-October 2018
Issue
5
Robert N. Stavins

The hybrid design of the Paris Agreement was key to its successful enactment in 2015, as well as its coming into force a year later. The combination consists of centralized and decentralized elements. The top-down elements include the requirement that countries state their national contributions every five years, a schedule which is binding under international law for those jurisdictions that have ratified the agreement. The key bottom-up element is the set of individual Nationally Determined Contributions (or NDCs), which are not part of the agreement itself but rather are listed in a separate registry. These are not binding under international law, but rather are left to the domestic authority of the respective parties.

It was primarily this dual structure that led to the achievement of one of two necessary conditions for ultimate success of the Paris Agreement, namely adequate scope of participation, which includes countries accounting for 97 percent of global emissions, compared with the 14 percent that are covered by the Kyoto Protocol.

But adequate participation is only one of two necessary conditions; the other is adequate collective ambition. Unfortunately, the fundamentally voluntary nature of the NDCs — which, as I noted above, is precisely what facilitated the exceptionally broad scope of participation — works against adequate ambition to address this global commons phenomenon, which is plagued by the free-rider problem.

This raises the key overall challenge that will face the negotiators in Katowice, Poland, in December at the 24th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: What can they do to encourage countries to increase over time the ambition of their individual contributions? That is where carbon markets and cooperation among jurisdictions potentially come in.

Largely because cooperation among jurisdictions — including through carbon markets — can lower abatement costs, it may be essential for the ultimate success of the agreement. This cooperation might take the form of international linkage, where by linkage I mean connections among policy systems that allow emissions reduction efforts to be redistributed among those systems.

Such linkage is typically framed as between cap-and-trade systems, but regional, national, and subnational policies are and will be highly heterogeneous, including not only cap-and-trade, but offset systems, carbon taxes, performance standards, and technology standards. We already see this sort of heterogeneity within the European Union’s own set of climate change policies, as well as within California’s suite of climate initiatives.

The good news is that linkage among highly heterogeneous policies is eminently feasible, as I have written about previously in this column, drawing on my research with Michael Mehling of MIT and Gib Metcalf of Tufts University. The even better news is that one part of the Paris Agreement provides a potential home for such international cooperation, linkage, and carbon markets — Article 6.

Provision for markets and such cooperation is implicit in Article 6.2, which allows for approaches involving Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes, which can function as an accounting mechanism for trades, exchanges, and other forms of cooperation among countries.

There are important advantages to such cooperation, including financial savings by allowing firms to take advantage of lower-cost abatement opportunities in other jurisdictions, but there are also real concerns about linkage, including distributional impacts within and across linked jurisdictions.

Thinking about the ongoing climate convention negotiations, most types of heterogeneity — of policy instruments, level of political jurisdiction, and nature of NDC targets — do not present insurmountable obstacles to linkage, but some do present real challenges, and indicate the need for specific guidance as the Paris rulebook is written. But if guidance extends much beyond basic accounting rules, then restrictive requirements could actually impede effective cooperation. True to the nature and spirit of the agreement, less can be more!

So, as the negotiations proceed, a combination of common accounting rules and an absence of restrictive conditions can accelerate linkage, allow for broader and deeper climate policy cooperation, facilitate the emergence of a robust global carbon market, and — most important — increase the latitude of the parties to scale up the ambition of their long-term emission reductions.

Whether any or all of this will come to pass, we simply do not know as of now. As usual, only time will tell.

Linkage will prove essential for ultimate success of Paris Agreement.

Trump's Coal Mandate Ignores the Real Threat to National Security
Author
David P. Clarke - Writer and Editor
Writer and Editor
Current Issue
September-October 2018
Issue
5
David P. Clarke

Scientists understand that climate change looms ever more urgently as a cataclysmic threat to both the Earth’s biodiversity and human society. Rejecting the issue, however, the Trump administration isn’t content to merely halt or weaken Obama-era carbon regulatory programs and to withdraw from the global Paris climate agreement. In June we learned that the Department of Energy is weighing a proposal to help prop up failing coal and nuclear power plants that market forces would shut down, a policy DOE suggests is needed to avoid a power-generation shortage that might threaten national security.

But the closure of uneconomical plants “is not a national security issue,” says retired Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, an advisory board member of the Center for Climate & Security, a nonpartisan institute guided by military and security experts. While perhaps once vital to U.S. national security, coal-fired power is no longer essential, and skewing markets to help the fossil-energy sector is generally a bad idea for the U.S. power portfolio and overall economy, McGinn says.

The Defense Department has long recognized climate change as a genuine threat to national security, McGinn adds. In the West, multi-year droughts and resulting possible wildfires hamper the ability of Army and Marine Corps bases to conduct realistic live-fire training. West Coast beach erosion and shifting harbor contours also constitute a threat. At the Hampton Roads military complex in Virginia, sea-level rise as well as the growing frequency and intensity of mid-Atlantic hurricanes are top concerns. Globally, climate change is a threat multiplier for instability, as recognized by the CNA Military Advisory Board in 2007 and again in 2014, when 11 retired generals and admirals concluded climate-related national security risks are “as serious as any challenges we have faced.”

When it comes to national security, DOD civilian and military leaders need the best possible data and objective analyses to understand security environments in which the military will have to operate five to 20 years into the future, McGinn says. For example, when various stresses destabilize societies, para-military groups, drug cartels, terrorist organizations, and others exploit the resulting power vacuum, and a U.S. military engagement could result or resources vital to national security could be threatened.

Regarding the proposal to bail out failing coal and nuclear plants, McGinn notes that an overlooked consequence of DOE’s reliance on the 1950 Defense Production Act’s authority as a basis for supporting the continued operation of uneconomical electricity plants is that billions of dollars would likely be diverted from defense budgets under such a policy, siphoning off more traditional national security funds.

While the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s June 12 hearing made clear that no grid reliability emergency exists, and diverse groups including conservative think tanks, Big Oil, and other energy organizations oppose DOE’s proposal, activists remain concerned that it nevertheless could have traction.

It is troubling that the administration has wrapped its proposal “in the national security flag,” says Gillian Giannetti, staff attorney with the Sustainable FERC Project, a clean-energy coalition, because “certain deferential standards can come with that.” But, even if DOE’s security assertions could make immediately defeating the proposal more difficult, the proposal lacks factual and legal support that ultimately will make it untenable, she adds.

According to Giannetti, dozens of reports have shown that grid outages are the result of distribution system weaknesses and grid elements outside of FERC’s direct authority that could be addressed at state and regional levels. Fuel security is not the reason the lights go out, she says, noting that less than 1 percent of outages were caused by fuel shortages. Real security issues, such as climate change impacts and cyber invasions, could take out distribution systems. But grid resilience and security could be enhanced by encouraging a broader, robust energy system that fully integrates distributed resources, such as wind and solar, with large-scale power generation, Giannetti says. DOE’s proposal would divert finite government resources from the real issues, she concludes, and ultimately consumers and taxpayers would pay for any bailout.

As DOD seeks objective information to understand the climate threat, a recent report by the progressive Center for American Progress, “Burning the Data,” finds that Trump requests would have cut federal climate and energy data and research funding 16.8 percent. Thankfully, appropriators rejected those cuts, though Trump is still trying.

Meanwhile, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in 2017 the U.S. spent $306.2 billion on weather and climate-related disasters.

Almost no security or energy analysts support the president’s generation policy.

Should California Develop the State's Large Petroleum Resources?
Author
Robert N. Stavins - Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard Kennedy School
Current Issue
July-August 2018
Issue
4
Robert N. Stavins

California is among the most aggressive jurisdictions in the world in its pursuit of public policies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. While the Trump administration in Washington is reversing the Obama administration’s climate policy achievements, California and other subnational entities are taking the lead in the development and implementation of meaningful domestic policies to mitigate the impact of human activity on the climate system.

However, California is a producer of crude oil. Is this inconsistent, or even counterproductive? Advocates have criticized Governor Jerry Brown, and proposed a ban on crude oil production within the state in furtherance of California’s climate policies. The thinking goes, crude oil production leads to environmental impacts, so how can it be allowed? The logic is flawed, and the prohibition — if adopted — would impose tremendous costs on the state with little or no environmental benefit.

As California has developed its climate policies, the need to balance the benefits of these policies with their economic and human consequences has always been a challenging issue. Achieving aggressive climate goals will not be cheap, so designing sensible, effective policies is critical. Simply adopting any and all restrictions that might achieve some emission reductions would unnecessarily raise the human cost of limiting GHG emissions.

At its heart, the climate problem arises because of carbon dioxide emissions associated with the use of energy and related services. We heat our homes in the winter and cool them in the summer using electricity and natural gas. We use gasoline to get to work and take vacations. As each country or state — including California — tries to reduce its GHG emissions, the policies and regulations adopted to achieve this end nearly always target the activities that lead to emissions: the generation of electricity, the use of transportation, and the conditioning of our living and working spaces.

The proposed ban on crude oil extraction would flip this on its head, focusing instead on the supply of a fossil fuel. But the simple reality is that the sources of fossil fuel supply are so ubiquitous that crude oil from other regions of the world will replace supplies from California, if California chose not to supply its own on-going needs. Oil and gas used to heat homes and to power vehicles comes not only from California, but from most every region of the globe. Many of these regions have expanding supplies of crude oil due to technological improvements, including the Bakken shale of North Dakota, and vast supplies available with relatively little effort, such as in the Middle East.

Advocates claim that reduction of California crude oil production would reduce global consumption of crude — a claim of questionable validity. But that is not even the right question. There are many things that can be done to reduce GHG emissions, and a sensible, affordable, and sustainable policy will be one that achieves reductions at the lowest cost. Even if restricting California’s oil production might reduce global crude consumption, California would certainly bear all of the economic consequences of this policy, as the state would then rely solely on crude oil imports.

In fact, a restriction on California’s crude production is unlikely to reduce GHG emissions within the state. California’s total GHG emissions are limited by the cap of its GHG cap-and-trade system. The most a restriction on California’s crude production can do is to increase costs, while achieving little or no incremental improvement in the emissions that cause climate change.

Moreover, supply-side restrictions can limit technological progress that can have very positive economic and environmental consequences. The same advocates oppose fracking, but the innovative combination of hydraulic fracturing in shale and horizontal drilling has led both to tremendous economic benefits by expanding supplies of low-cost domestic energy and reducing energy imports, and to environmental benefits by allowing lower-carbon natural gas to displace higher-carbon coal in the generation of electricity across the United States.

By focusing on policies aimed at achieving the appropriate policy goal of reducing GHG emissions — rather than trying to choose winners and losers among technologies and energy sources used to achieve those goals — California can achieve its climate policy goals in ways that are environmentally effective, economically sensible, and ultimately sustainable. In my view, Governor Brown merits compliments rather than criticism for Sacramento’s progressive environmental and energy policies.

Should California develop the state's large petroleum resources?

William O. Douglas's Former Clerk Sitting on Key Climate Change Case
Author
Richard Lazarus - Harvard University
Harvard University
Current Issue
July-August 2018
Issue
4
Richard Lazarus

A path-breaking climate case now pending in federal district court, The People of the State of California v. BP P.L.C., has surprising roots in the environmentalists’ most celebrated Supreme Court justice. William O. Douglas was an uncompromising green. He served on the Court for almost 37 years, longer than any other justice. Yet, to his great unhappiness, failing health compelled Douglas to resign in 1975 just when modern environmental law in the United States was emerging in full force.

Justice Douglas’s former law clerk, Judge William Alsup, is the presiding judge in the BP case, in which San Francisco and Oakland are suing under California public nuisance law the largest producers of fossil fuels. The complaint’s gist is that the defendants, “despite long-knowing that their products posed severe risks to the global climate,” nonetheless “produced fossil fuels while simultaneously engaging in large scale advertising and public relations campaigns to discredit scientific research on global warming.” The complaints seek an “abatement fund” to pay the costs of addressing rising sea levels.

The case before Judge Alsup is one of several such state common law climate cases recently brought by private tort plaintiff firms. The lawsuits are modeled after the successful multimillion-dollar litigation brought by states against the tobacco industry. Like the tobacco litigation, the climate complaints allege that the relevant industry knew and hid from the public scientific studies that demonstrated the harm its product was causing.

The new litigation is deliberately different from the climate nuisance cases rejected by the Supreme Court in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut in 2011. In AEP, a unanimous Court held that the federal Clean Air Act displaced the availability of a federal common law nuisance action for injunctive relief to limit the greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s power plant industry.

First, these latest lawsuits are expressly based on state, not federal common law. They accordingly both avoid AEP’s holding that the federal common law of nuisance has been overridden by the CAA and take effective advantage of the act’s express preservation of state law causes of action.

Second, the defendants are the largest fossil fuel producers and not, as in AEP, the largest emitters. The suits accordingly do not, as in AEP, seek redress on the theory that the defendants themselves emitted unreasonably high levels of greenhouse gases. They instead allege that unduly high levels of greenhouse gas emissions resulted from defendants’ knowing concealment of scientific information that might well have prompted the public to demand, and the government to require, significant emissions reductions decades ago.

It is far too soon to discern whether these ambitious theories of tort liability will be successful. But, in early skirmishes, there has been a noteworthy development.

In February, Alsup granted the defendants’ motion to remove the cases from state court. The plaintiffs had argued removal was inappropriate because their cases relied exclusively on state and not federal law. Alsup held that removal was appropriate because plaintiffs’ complaint, though couched in terms of state nuisance law, must be understood to be based on federal common law. Relying on the Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling in Illinois v. City of Milwaukee, Alsup reasoned that it made no sense to have a lawsuit with such a broad geographic and national sweep be governed by state rather than federal common law.

Yet, the defendants who won their removal motion may regret their victory. The plaintiffs seem to be embracing their defeat. The likely reason for the reversal is that, in granting removal, Judge Alsup indicated that, unlike in AEP, a federal common law of nuisance action against fossil fuel producers might not be displaced by the CAA. Alsup’s suggested distinction is that the current cases base tort liability on concealment of information, which, unlike emissions levels, is not regulated by the federal statute.

Nor did Alsup stop there. He further ordered the parties to provide his court this past March with a five-hour “global warming and climate change tutorial.” A math major in college, Alsup pummeled the scientists and Chevron’s attorneys with specific questions on climate science.

Whether Alsup’s initial embrace of the case will lead to a favorable ruling for plaintiffs remains unclear. A different federal judge in California rejected an identical removal petition filed in another batch of municipal climate nuisance cases. What is clear, though, is that Judge Alsup’s former boss would be pleased. The author of the Supreme Court ruling in Illinois v. City of Milwaukee upon which Alsup relied for his ruling endorsing federal common law of nuisance was Douglas, of course, and Alsup was his law clerk at the time of that 1972 ruling.

William O. Douglas's former clerk sitting on key climate change case.

On Being a Trigger for Peace
Author
Ken Conca - American University
Geoff Dabelko - Ohio University
American University
Ohio University
Current Issue
July-August 2018
Issue
4
On Being a Trigger for Peace

Ken Conca

Environmental change can be a trigger for conflict. It heightens our sense of group difference. It can make us think about hunkering down rather than reaching out. It tempts us to visualize a world of scarcity and of constraint rather than a world of opportunity and transformation. People assume scarcity begets grievances and grievances beget violence. Our work challenges that determinism.

I would never deny the potential for violence around environmental change. According to Ban Ki-Moon, the former secretary general of the United Nations, climate change “not only exacerbates threats to international peace and security, it is a threat to international peace and security. . . . Mega-crises may well become the new normal.” The human rights organization Global Witness has built a database on the assassinations of environmental activists in the last 10 years or more. The number is large.

What we risk losing if these narratives are only about security and conflict is the possibility that we can instead cooperate around them. They can bring people together, even people who may not be comfortable working together. They can lead us down a path of peace.

The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 was the high-water mark for international environmental cooperation. By the late 1990s, when the international community was planning a 10th-anniversary summit meeting in Johannesburg, the bloom was off the rose of international environmental cooperation. The idea of welfare gains and sustainable development was not strong enough to get governments to live up to the commitments they had made in Rio. Many environmental policymakers and activists started casting around for another framework that might give governments that sense of urgency. Environmental security as a concept was born in that quest for agenda setting.

The Cold War was over. It was a time when people who thought about conflict and security were open to new ideas. There was a perception, which today seems quaint, that we would realize a peace dividend, that those massive resources that went into the preparation for war could be redeployed for a more affirmative social purpose.

It was the combination of the quest for urgency and the fluidity in the security space that produced this idea of environmental security. In the run-up to Rio+10, there were governments and activists who wanted environmental security to be the dominant framework for the dialogue and for policy initiatives. In my experience, when the North finds a security incidence in the South, the South would be well advised to duck. They fought too hard to throw off colonialism and have sovereignty over their natural resources to see it be framed simply as someone else’s security agenda.

It also bothered Geoff Dabelko, as the newly minted director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Out of this strategic concern an idea occurred to us. If the environment can be a trigger for conflict, maybe environmental imperatives can be a trigger for peace.

There are three premises to our work.

The first is that because environmental issues ignore human boundaries, they demand cooperation across those boundaries, whether they are between nations, or clans, or identity groups, or neighborhoods, or the people who live upstream and upwind and those who live down. That interdependence can be used to create cooperative incentives, even among actors who are not inclined to cooperate with each other, even among actors in conflict.

The second premise is that the environment can create in people a deeply rooted sense of place. Maybe that can be used to strengthen people’s shared identities, or at least to soften some of the more divisive and conflict-oriented identities that can also take root in specific places.

And third: environmental problems are technically complex, and they challenge us to think forward into an uncertain world. Maybe that uncertainty creates opportunities for learning together. And maybe that learning can be used as a tool to build trust again among parties who might not be inclined to trust.

We never say that environmental cooperation will inevitably lead to peace. Environmental cooperation sometimes only leads to more efficient resource plundering. We instead assess whether particular types of environmental cooperation might be used strategically to make peace by creating cooperative incentives, or by enhancing trust, or by reworking conflict-laden identities.

There is now a large body of evidence that this can in fact be done. There are refugee camps where scarcities of water, or of firewood, or other resources trigger conflict, either within the camp or between the camp and the host community. But there are just as many where we see people developing creative, cooperative solutions. We know that climate change and water scarcity can cause tensions and conflicts between herders and farmers in the world’s dry grassland regions. But we also see creative adaptation under those same stresses. Farmers start to herd, herders start to farm, their children start to intermarry. Grievances are not the only factor. Much depends on our capacity to channel those grievances as productively.

A related observation is that much of what we know is not derived from the work of scholarly research. It is derived from practice.

There is a lot of rich experimentation by communities, by donors, by nongovernmental organizations, by intergovernmental organizations like UN Environment. That raises questions about selection bias. Are people only working in places where it’s easiest? It raises questions about the quality of the data, about long-term effects after the NGOs or the donors go away. It raises questions about community ownership of these processes.

A third observation is that there is not enough attention paid to the institutions that are tasked with implementing these initiatives, such as the UN Security Council. We have to study the institutions that are supposed to deliver on these programs.

Peace is not always the goal. The Palestinians we work with in the West Bank don’t want to talk about peace. They want to talk about justice, they want to talk about dignity. In Flint, Michigan, when the taps started spewing toxic water, those people weren’t interested in peace, either. People who are most directly involved in these conflicts often do not see peace as the principal challenge or the principal problem.

And on the other hand we know that violence can shred any possibility for attaining these other social goals. Peace, even in the most limited sense of forestalling violence, is a very good thing. It’s essential to the realization of other goals. But it’s often not the goal of most of the people who are involved. And we scholars or practitioners who come bearing peace strategies without an emphasis on justice will be looked at skeptically.

Geoff Dabelko

Environmental peacebuilding is often saddled with unrealistic expectations. Some observers ask, Why try environmental peacebuilding if you are not going to solve the whole conflict between India and Pakistan? Where is the evidence environmental peacebuilding works if you are not resolving a conflict? Is it not better to wait to address environmental conditions, goes the argument, until the country is rich, peaceful, and democratic? In this way of thinking, the environment is viewed as a luxury item in post-conflict settings rather than a critical input to saving lives, jump-starting agrarian livelihoods, and spurring economic activity.

Some early practitioners of environmental peacebuilding came from unexpected quarters. Fears of radioactive contamination in the Barents Sea provided an avenue for Russian, Norwegian, and American militaries to interact as the Cold War ended. The resulting Arctic Military Environment Cooperation Program included scientific assessment and safer storage of spent nuclear materials in the Russian Northwest. While radioactivity was a real concern, the collaboration between opposing militaries provided a means to interact regularly on less divisive topics. The program helped U.S. and Norwegian leaders figure out who was in charge of the former Soviet military in the uncertain transition period. Joint scientific assessment and environmental risk management were tools to help build confidence and a post-Cold War peace.

Environmental peacebuilding has faced numerous challenges, and early iterations demonstrated tangible shortcomings. In Johannesburg in 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, only one speaker on a well-attended environment and security panel got questions, many of them hostile. A representative from the Peace Parks Foundation fielded questions about his organization’s peace park efforts in post-Apartheid southern Africa. Signing ceremonies with Nelson Mandela and other heads of state made for good optics, but the beneficiaries of these early transboundary conservation efforts were primarily political elites and large business owners. Local people bore the cost of increased human-wildlife conflict that came with the sudden removal of border fences. They reaped few of the benefits of increased tourism. Fortunately, many early environmental peacebuilders changed their programs, learned lessons, and adapted subsequent efforts inside and outside southern Africa.

The aftermath of the 1990s Yugoslavian civil war was an important place for UN Environment and its post-conflict assessments to make concrete steps toward environmental peacebuilding. Like AMEC, the UN took advantage of the relative lack of controversy around objective scientific assessment in post-conflict settings to tackle the peace and conflict dimensions of the environment and natural resources.

UN Environment identified environmental hotspots and natural resource management steps critical to restarting economies. Their comprehensive reports, done with the permission of host governments, assigned some degree of responsibility for environmental damage and helped formulate a plan forward. The plan was a little more subversive than we realized at the time. UN Environment assessed the role natural resources may have played in starting, extending, and recovering from conflict. It helped formulate a possible foundation for peace through environmental management institutions.

Those field assessments were fairly straightforward steps compared to the politics that surround peace and conflict issues at the United Nations. UN Environment still had many battles about environmental peacebuilding at its headquarters in Nairobi and at UN headquarters in New York. Member governments routinely assert their right to sovereign control of resources as an impediment to engaging in environmental actions designed to prevent conflict in particular. They commonly maintain that environmental issues are not security issues but instead economic ones better suited to be addressed by the economic and environmental bodies at the UN.

Despite these regular objections, those UN-focused efforts have had success. However, I would flag one dilemma raised by this example. I call it “What’s in a name?” What we call environmental peacebuilding really matters to the parties on the ground. Peacebuilding as an enterprise is inherently politically sensitive. The advantage of the environmental sector is often the issues are less so as illustrated by the earlier examples. But labeling an effort as environmental peacebuilding rather than environmental management can make the goal harder to achieve. Parties assume defensive positions and the conflict is renewed rather than reconciled. If making the peacebuilding objectives explicit makes it harder to achieve, how do we do it without that label? When do you use that label explicitly and when is it a critical but unstated goal?

Some have reacted that such a labeling decision can be troubling, since they value transparency and participation among all stakeholders from the outset. It raises challenging tradeoffs for small group negotiations and less transparent approaches versus all-inclusive negotiations in public. In the age of diplomacy by press release and even tweet, this transparency can actually make it harder to achieve success.

Let me share one more case to illustrate the environmental peacebuilding work yet to be done. In this example, practitioners are asking questions of researchers and scholars that we cannot yet answer definitively. I have worked closely with the U.S. Agency for International Development and their Conflict Management and Mitigation team. Many of you have had similar experiences with many other partners in the field. How do we practice, how do we pursue, how do policymakers grapple with environmental peacebuilding within a climate change context?

Twenty-five years ago, climate change was seen as a long-term, diffuse, incremental, and future topic for environment and security scholars and practitioners. The existential threat to small island states, for example, was not yet widely perceived. Steps to address climate change and security were largely separate conversations.

Today, the script has flipped. Since 2007, climate change has become the primary entryway into the environment and security conversation, almost to the exclusion of other important environment and natural resource topics. USAID’s conflict management staff now evaluate the agency’s climate change assistance by asking two questions: Is this climate-related investment going to create new conflict or contribute to existing conflicts? and, How can it be designed to contribute to additional development or peace-supporting solutions? If this investment is in a fragile state, or a conflict-affected state, how can we do environmental peacebuilding with this climate intervention?

Indeed, both scholars and practitioners need to develop better answers to these questions even if one can easily claim climate adaptation and mitigation efforts remain limited within countries and the international community. Our argument should be for finding ways to capture co-benefits and the triple bottom line even as we experiment and develop a research base for better knowing what works. In a financial resource-constrained policy environment, let us collaborate to achieve climate, poverty alleviation, and peacebuilding goals together with coordinated responses.

These are the challenges before us. There has been promising progress. There is lots more to do. TEF

 

AL MOUMIN AWARD WINNERS ❧ A colloquy on how to use environmental cooperation to alleviate, end, and hopefully prevent armed conflict, by two veteran “soldiers” in the field.

Mixing Private Action and Climate Policy
Author
G. Tracy Mehan III - Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Current Issue
May-June 2018
Issue
3

Distinguishing government from governance, identifying the separate yet complementary roles of the private and public spheres, say, in the realm of environmental management, and thinking seriously about the opportunities and barriers of an integrated or collaborative approach to confronting the challenges of the day — none of this would have made any sense to a citizen of the Roman Empire in the time of Augustus.

The classical view did not recognize anything like civil society beyond the Empire itself encompassing both political, social and religious aspects. It was only after centuries of struggle between Church and Empire, state and society, and the emergence of varying degrees of individualism, did the concept of a civil order and institutions (church, family, community, labor unions, corporations), antecedent to and independent of the state, come to pass.

Without civil society, government and governance are essentially the same. With civil society government is simply part of the complex web of governance by which a society orders itself as well as the state. Thus, no longer is governance viewed as a synonym for government.

The late Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, did pioneering research on a plethora of collaborative approaches to resource management — governance if you will — around the world in ways that mitigate the Tragedy of the Commons not imagined by Garrett Hardin, who reduced everything to either regulation or privatization. She demonstrated that user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, in many countries and cultures, are able to establish norms of behavior, sophisticated rules for decisionmaking, and even enforcement mechanisms. Her classic book on the subject is Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Actions (1990).

Given the state of environmental protection today, with many problems dispersed throughout society, the landscape, the air- and watershed, involving numerous small sources or causes of harm, all within the control of private parties, households, farms and institutions, the old top-down, hierarchical model, driven by a federal government much less revered now than in the 1970s, seems inadequate.

Writing in 1997, Daniel Esty and Marian R. Chertow of Yale called for the “next generation” of environmental policies “that are not confrontational but cooperative, less fragmented and more comprehensive, not inflexible but rather capable of being tailored to fit varying circumstances.” See introduction to Thinking Ecologically: The Next Generation of Environmental Policy (1997). They noted the value of keeping pace with the important elements of “institutional realignment that are occurring in society. Notably, the role of government is narrowing, the private sector’s responsibilities are broadening, and nongovernmental organizations, from think tanks to activist groups, are increasingly important policy actors.”

Michael P. Vandenbergh and Jonathan M. Gilligan, respectively, professors of law and engineering at Vanderbilt University, argue strenuously for private action and governance specifically, in the context of climate change and the flagging efforts of governments, especially the United States, to take meaningful action. They are not anti-governmental action. But they believe that time is flying and private action provides a realistic, interim strategy until an effective political consensus develops before catastrophe befalls the world. Their Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change is an imposing work of academic scholarship (e.g., over 200 footnotes in one chapter alone). But their engaging, accessible writing style makes the slog a pleasant one for the diligent reader. It might have been subtitled Making a Virtue of Necessity given the realities of climate politics, global aspirations for economic growth, and the complexity of the science.

In the very first line of their preface, Vandenbergh and Gilligan cite Gallup for the proposition that two thirds of Americans believe that big government is the greatest threat facing the United States. So any systematic regulation to mitigate climate change faces predictable resistance. The authors seem to believe that the Trump administration’s rollback on carbon regulation is a temporary phenomenon, but they astutely observe that the 2009 Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill failed “even though the party that espouses support for climate mitigation controlled the White House and both bodies of Congress — a failure that seems remarkable until it is viewed against the backdrop of two decades with only one major new pollution control statute.”

“Only in the past several years have scholars begun to recognize that a fundamental shift has occurred away from federal legislation as a social response to environmental threats, a shift that became much more apparent with the 2016 elections,” write the authors. They might also have noted the 1997 vote of 95-0 in favor of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution in the U.S. Senate against signing onto the Kyoto Protocol.

Vandenbergh and Gilligan make a sincere, passionate, even eloquent case to both conservative and liberal skeptics, the former skeptical as to climate policy in general and big government in particular, the latter concerned about undermining the case of strong governmental action on climate.

Essentially, these authors see zero chance of the community of nations meeting the goal of stabilizing global temperature at 2 degrees Celsius as called for in the Paris Agreement. “In fact, the Paris Agreement, even if all commitments are fulfilled, will allow an increase in global emissions of roughly 34 to 46 percent in 2025 over 1990 levels.” Even with full implementation of all Paris commitments, the globe is likely to see temperatures of more than 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial ones.

The Vanderbilt professors look to private action to achieve “a significant fraction of the necessary reductions — carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to roughly 1 billion tons out of the 5.5 billion tons per year of reductions necessary over the next decade to close the Paris Gap.” They view this strategy as “buying time for a more comprehensive government response” at some indeterminate point in the future, presumably post-Trump. They do not posit “an all-or-nothing argument that the world must choose between public and private governance. In our view, they are complementary, and we should pursue both.”

The authors cite many instances of effective private action, notably major institutions and corporations such as Walmart, Microsoft, Google, and the like, corporate giants which can lean on their suppliers for emission reductions, practices that could be scaled up nationally and internationally. They take heart in Elinor Ostrom’s concept of “polycentric governance to reduce GHG emissions” which she first applied to the management of water resources and the provision of municipal services. This refers to the use of multiple scales of government and nongovernmental organizations to address collective action problems, such as managing common pool resources.

(Readers of The Environmental Forum may recall Professor Vandenbergh’s article, “The Drivers of Corporate Climate Mitigation,” in the January/February issue, providing a succinct statement of the case for private action in that realm.)

Big fans of Pope Francis and his 2016 encyclical addressing the moral dimension of climate change, the authors view the Catholic Church as not just an influencer on government, but also “a private regulator of its energy suppliers and emissions in and of itself.” Based on their back-of-the-envelope calculations, Catholicism, with its many churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, and missions, would be among the top 50 largest emitters in the world if it were a country. Whether or not such a vast collection of bishoprics, dioceses, religious orders, lay institutions, and the like could ever be subject to such centralized management, notwithstanding its unity of doctrine and practice, it is an interesting thought experiment, as the Germans say.

Vandenbergh and Gilligan aim to ground their optimism on sound reasoning, to wit: “Our view that many households and corporations will respond to private initiatives by reducing emissions does not require unrealistic assumptions about altruism. Instead, the opportunity arises because private initiatives can stimulate efficiency improvements that have not yet been exploited because of market and behavioral failures. Private initiatives also can draw on existing levels of support for climate mitigation in ways that governments cannot. These initiatives also can address solution aversion among moderates and conservatives, bypassing resistance to government climate efforts that arises from concerns about big government. At the international level, private governance initiatives can supplement the slow and cumbersome international negotiations process. Private initiatives also can harness supply chains to transfer pressure for lower-carbon goods and services across international boundaries, circumventing sovereignty and free-trade concerns and increasing support for mitigation in developed and developing countries.”

The “principal barrier” is “conceptual,” i.e., “the need for opinion leaders, corporate and NGO leaders, and philanthropists to grasp the magnitude of the opportunities available to them.”

Beyond Politics is provocative and challenging, well-sourced and full of insights as to motivational approaches to household and institutional behavior. Yet, nowhere in the dozen or so pages of the book’s index will the reader find any references to either adaptation or resilience in the face of climate change. The authors chose to focus exclusively on mitigation. Society, however, may be forced to consider other options given the stark political and economic realities of climate policy.

On private action and climate policy.

Climate Resilience Means Avoiding Sources That Emit Carbon dioxide
Author
Kathleen Barrón - Exelon Corporation
Exelon Corporation
Current Issue
May-June 2018
Issue
3
Kathleen Barrón

One of the most controversial questions being asked in the electricity sector these days is whether we have a power grid that is resilient to the natural and manmade threats that it faces. Answering this question requires policymakers to evaluate the threats and determine whether the work of system planners and market designers will reduce the magnitude and duration of a disturbance in grid operations by spurring operational practices and investments in transmission, distribution, and generation assets.

But what if some of those very assets are among the causes of the disturbance? In other words, what if the resources powering the grid itself are contributing to, and exacerbating, the severe weather events that are interrupting electric service to customers for days or weeks on end?

As the effects of a changing climate have become more apparent, electric utilities have engaged in adaptation strategies to ensure that they are better prepared for severe weather events whose frequency and intensity will increase with climate change. For example, sea-level rise, one of the most readily observable climate impacts, is already having significant effects on the infrastructure of coastal utilities. Rising sea levels endanger power plants and other structures that rely on ocean water for cooling.

Furthermore, utility infrastructure, such as distribution lines to reach coastal residential and commercial locations, is susceptible to both long-term inundation as well as periodic tidal flooding and/or storm surge flooding. In response, many coastal utilities — as well as those with infrastructure on the coastline or within tidal basins — are looking to raise structures above current and projected sea levels.

Climate change is also intensifying weather-related extremes — in the summer creating higher overall and peak temperatures as well as longer and more frequent heat waves. Such events increase the need for electricity, yet extreme heat reduces transformer capacity. Conversely, as we on the East Coast saw again this winter, polar vortices can bring extreme cold, which can also stress the system in unexpected ways.

Finally, and most obviously, high-wind events damage transmission and distribution lines and poles, disrupting service until they can be repaired. State commissions are authorizing funds to harden the distribution network, acknowledging that events are not one-off occurrences, but rather, are an increasingly likely outcome of a changing climate. They are expecting utilities to bring the system back up just as quickly, despite the increasing intensity and frequency of severe weather.

Investing in system improvements is well worth the cost, given that 2017 was the most expensive year on record for severe weather and climate events, according to the World Meteorological Organization. A recent WMO report described how the very active North Atlantic hurricane season, major monsoon floods in the Indian subcontinent, and continuing severe drought in parts of east Africa contributed to this record-setting economic impact. The report estimates that the total disaster losses from weather- and climate-related events in 2017 was $320 billion, the largest annual total on record (after adjustment for inflation).

However, this “react” strategy only goes so far. It makes little sense to focus exclusively on adapting the grid infrastructure to this changing reality — instead, infrastructure investments should be designed to ensure that the system that provides electricity from coast to coast is contributing lower and lower amounts of the pollution that is accelerating and intensifying climate impacts.

A realistic and rational approach to identifying the components of a resilient system should incorporate the potential for this system to mitigate the risk it faces, and be responsive to the fact that generation sources that emit high levels of greenhouse gas pollution are not identical to generation sources that emit little to no climate pollution. In other words, planning a generation system that is resilient must include planning for a system that is both able to withstand interruptions and also does not contribute to interruptions by exacerbating climate change.

There is a real-world example facing the mid-Atlantic power system right now. Four nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio have announced that they will retire in the next three years. Last year, those plants produced 40 terawatt hours of carbon-free power. When they retire, that generation will be replaced almost exclusively by fossil fuel-fired plants, resulting in over 20 million metric tons of additional carbon emissions annually, the equivalent of putting over 4 million cars on the road. Until we factor the emissions impact of our generation sources into our resilience planning, we are destined to stay in this never-ending cycle.

Climate resilience means avoiding sources that emit carbon dioxide.

Extreme in Temperature — and in the Handling and Use of Science
Author
Craig M. Pease - Vermont Law School Environmental Law Center
Vermont Law School Environmental Law Center
Current Issue
May-June 2018
Issue
3
Craig M. Pease

Ours is an age of unprecedented extremes — in the climate system and in politics.

Noah Diffenbaugh and colleagues’ carefully worded and nuanced 2017 PNAS paper “Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events” develops methods to attribute heat waves, droughts, and high rainfall to climate change. Similarly, but perhaps counterintuitively, Judah Cohen and colleagues’ Nature Communications article from this year links recent increased snowfall and decreased winter temperatures in the eastern United States to a warming Arctic. The Earth’s climate is a complex system, and one’s simple intuition of cause and effect is not always correct. There are lots of subtleties.

A broad review of the science linking climate change and extremes in temperature, rainfall, and other weather may be found in the IPCC Special Report of Working Groups I and II. As scientists are wont to do, this technical literature linking increased atmospheric carbon dioxide to climate extremes seems to mostly discuss uncertainties, problems, and alternative analyses and interpretations, sometimes maddeningly so.

Yet, studies that attribute climate extremes to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide are on the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. It is inevitable that there will be uncertainties. Paradoxically, the honest and full disclosure of uncertainties is a great marker for scientific quality. Any study that fails to disclose its material uncertainties and problems is immediately suspect.

Which brings us to Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and a favorite of the oil and gas industry. Last year, he was quoted as saying “Likewise, extreme weather events are often falsely linked to increased carbon emissions. Historical data . . . demonstrate no discernible connections.” That is a baldly baseless assertion and demonstrates a complete failure to delve into the technical literature and present, point-by-point, whatever evidence he might conjure up supporting his position.

Before that, he attacked Katheryn Sullivan, then administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, when his office stated that “NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data.” Here Smith accused agency scientists of falsifying their data, with not a shred of evidence to back up his assertion.

Most recently, Smith introduced the Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act — or HONEST Act. Therein, Smith advocates public release of the data that underlie the scientific papers cited in EPA rulemaking. That bill would “prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from proposing, finalizing, or disseminating a covered action unless all scientific . . . information relied on to support such action is . . . publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent analysis.” Moreover, EPA Administrator Scott Pruit is currently pursuing administrative actions in parallel with Smith’s bill.

The wording of the legislation seems rather bland, and under other political circumstances, it might well be innocuous. The rather ambiguous words in Smith’s bill together with Chevron deference could easily result in the legislation having little practical impact — if the EPA administrator were so inclined. But Pruit is clearly inclined to aggressive action on all fronts to undercut environmental regulations. Pruitt and Smith are using this dustup about public disclosure of scientific data that they themselves created to push their political agenda.

No amount of arguing with these gentlemen about climate science will get anywhere useful. I am struck by the comparison between the scientific papers that they dispute and the supposed facts they offer for policies that would hamstring rulemaking. Climate science papers contain literally page after page after page of carefully constructed nuanced sentences, where the authors lay out the limitations and problems with their own analysis, and where they oh so carefully explain exactly what the data show and do not show.

Despite offers of a “red team/blue team” debate on climate change, I think scientists would often be better off to simply decline offers to engage in public disputes with those who know nothing about the science. Inevitably, such debate will not concern science. And just as inevitably, scientists will lose.

A better solution is to have real scientists leading key congressional committees that oversee science. Yet of the 535 members in the U.S. Congress, only about 5 percent are doctors, dentists, veterinarians, psychologists, engineers, mathematicians, or scientists while about 40 percent are lawyers.

Extremes in temperature — and in the handling and use of science.

Local Governments and Climate Externalities
Author
David Bookbinder - Niskanen Center
Niskanen Center
Current Issue
May-June 2018
Issue
3
Parent Article
Right on Green

By the time it is consumed or used, every good and service in an industrialized economy has generated environmental externalities, meaning environmental costs that are not included in the price. Large or small, hidden or obvious, those environmental costs instead are imposed on third parties who are strangers to the transactions that injure them.

To the Niskanen Center, the government’s proper role in environmental protection is as the corrective mechanism for these systemic market failures. And today we are witnessing something very unusual: in the face of federal inaction, local governments are trying not only to compel polluters to internalize their externalities, but are doing so in a way that may be more economically efficient than anything the feds could come up with.

A single source, such as a coal-fired power plant, can impose a multiplicity of such externalities. Locally, people downwind are exposed to pollutants that directly injure their health, such as particulate matter and mercury. Regionally, it emits large amount of oxides of nitrogen, one of the precursors to ground-level ozone. And globally, coal-fired power plants are the largest source of CO2.

There are two ways to get a pollution source to deal with these unpriced externalities: government intervention or legal liability to the people injured by these emissions. In turn, government intervention takes one of two forms: command-and-control regulation, which directly limits the amount of pollution released, or a pricing system, which reduces pollution by imposing a monetary cost for each unit of the pollutant released.

Governments prefer regulation, which provides more certainty both that emissions will be reduced, and about which sources will be doing so. Industry generally prefers pricing systems, as they are more economically efficient at reducing emissions. Either way, government action eliminates the externality and thus protects its citizens.

In the United States, we have largely opted for government intervention over tort liability, and most of that intervention has come in the form of command-and-control regulation, with only limited use of pricing. That pricing has come in the form of cap-and-trade systems (which are actually regulation-pricing hybrids), such as the federal sulfur dioxide program and California’s CO2 market. And, as government intervention has grown, the practice of imposing tort liability has diminished; in some instances, government intervention has eliminated, or greatly reduced, the pollution; in others, by complying with the terms of the permit limits, the polluter may be shielded from third-party liability.

However, sometimes the government does not ensure internalization of environmental externalities, necessitating resort to torts. Interestingly, liability is essentially a pricing system; the chief economic difference between the tort system and a tax or cap-and-trade system is that the former determines prices by the actual costs of the injury, and the latter imposes costs instead by the amount of emissions. Thus it may be that such liability is the more accurate mechanism for pricing externalities.

And that brings me to a rather unique form of government action, the tort cases filed against the fossil fuel industry by New York City, San Francisco, Oakland, and six smaller California cities and counties. The Niskanen Center approves of these local governments’ efforts to get the fossil fuel industry to internalize the costs of climate change, the biggest externality in history.

The local governments’ narrative is that the defendants produced coal, oil, and natural gas, and that at some point they became aware of the potentially catastrophic consequences. To protect their financial interests, the defendants (at best) remained silent about those consequences or (at worst), actively worked to conceal this information. And now, when defendants can no longer plausibly deny their products’ externalities (or even, as some defendants have done, admit that fossil fuels are the primary cause of global warming), they plan to produce more, and even more carbon-intensive, fossil fuels.

Given this conduct, say the plaintiffs, in choosing between those defendants and the taxpayers, who should pay for the things that these governments must do in order to protect their and their citizens’ property?

In other words, these local governments are attempting both to price the climate externality, and to set the price based on the actual injuries. If successful, as rational economic actors, defendants presumably would then internalize that price going forward. In other words, these lawsuits may result in an internal carbon tax set at the level required to compensate for the actual injuries caused by these fuels, and thus be the most economically efficient pricing mechanism for climate externalities.

Some Historical Context to Today’s Debates on the Climate Agreement
Author
Robert N. Stavins - Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard Kennedy School
Current Issue
May-June 2018
Issue
3
Robert N. Stavins

The European Union, China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Canada, and other countries are negotiating the details for implementation of the Paris Agreement, and are developing domestic policies to achieve their respective Nationally Determined Contributions under the accord. At the same time, the United States — under the leadership of President Donald Trump — has announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as soon as permitted (November 2020), and has taken significant steps to roll back domestic climate change policies. This may be a good time to place this U.S. government behavior into historical context.

Of course, the history of climate change science goes back at least to Svante Arrhenius in the 19th century, but my focus is not on the history of the science, but on the policy history, in particular, the history of discussions within the U.S. government regarding climate change and potential policy responses.

Some might think that the starting point would be the 1988 Congressional hearings — led by Senators Timothy Wirth and Albert Gore — which the New York Times covered in a long article. That was during the last year of the Reagan administration, but the story really begins more than two decades earlier.

On November 5, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson released a report authored by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee. The report included a 23-page discussion of the climatic effects of increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, due to the combustion of fossil fuels, and — interestingly enough — concluded with a proposal for research on a specific approach to responding, namely with what is now called geoengineering.

In his introduction to the report, Johnson emphasized that “we will need increased basic research in a variety of specific areas,” and then went on to state: “We must give highest priority of all to increasing the numbers and quality of the scientists and engineers working on problems related to the control and management of pollution.”

Four years later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan — one of the leading public intellectuals of the 20th century — was working in the Nixon White House, and sent a memorandum to John Ehrlichman, then a key presidential assistant (who subsequently served 18 months in federal prison for his role in the Watergate conspiracy). In the memo, Moynihan referenced the Johnson administration’s report, focused on “the carbon dioxide problem,” described the basic science of the greenhouse effect, highlighted anticipated impacts including sea-level rise, proposed potential policy responses including “stop burning fossil fuels,” and concluded that “this is a subject that the administration ought to get involved with.” We do not know whether Ehrlichman responded.

From today’s perspective in the second year of the Trump administration, it may — or may not — be comforting to recognize that scientific and even policy attention by the White House to climate change goes back more than five decades. Since the Johnson administration, there have surely been ups and downs — through the administrations of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump.

This list of presidential administrations illustrates that the White House swings between parties. It should also remind us that whether a single four-year term or even the maximum of eight years, administrations are relatively short-lived when judged in historical context.

All of which reminds me of a personal story. In November 2016, just days after the U.S. election, I was in Marrakech, Morocco, for the annual U.N. climate negotiations. I was speaking on a panel assembled by the government of China in their pavilion. Those who preceded me voiced their dismay about the election and their very low expectations for the climate change policy that would likely be forthcoming from Donald Trump and his administration-to-be.

Our moderator from the Chinese government then introduced me to speak, and as I listened with headphones to the simultaneous translation, I heard him say, “And now Harvard’s Professor Stavins will bring us some good news from the United States.” I was dumbfounded. What could I possibly say? I walked to the lectern, sipped some water, took a deep breath, and said to the audience, “When you get to be my age, you recognize that four years is not a long time!”

That will have to suffice as an optimistic conclusion to this column.

Some historical context to today’s debates on the climate agreement.

Subscribe to Climate Change