What have I been doing with myself...

...for the past few days?

I have been editing a paper for submission. Important work that yields very few interesting things to post about. That said, I can say that I have edited that damn paper to within an inch of its life. It used to feel a bit  awkward and rickety. Now it feels tight. It's a bit odd to me that I have reached a point in my life where I can refer to a 30-page piece of writing as "tight".

In other news, the work I've been doing for the last semester is looking highly likely to be published in at least two forms, one of them a book, and someone very important in the field said some very nice things about it - which is all I can say about that online.

News Roundup, 7.22.11

General News and Politics
Julia Gillard's popularity slumps amid carbon tax plans (July 18, Telegraph)
Australia unveiled a carbon tax (through 2015) and cap-and-trade (after 2015) scheme last week. Public reaction in Australia doesn't look positive so far.

Hidden carbon emissions from trade offsets impact of reforestation ( July 19, eurasiareview.com)
Is carbon leakage a problem for reforestation schemes as well?

China announces plan to reduce carbon emissions (July 22, ABC.net.au)
Specifically, a pilot carbon trading program.

Markets and Investing

Groupon for solar: how one startup plans to create an army of cleantech lobbyists (July 19, BNET)

New business model plus model for aggregating diffuse/emerging interest groups?

Mandatory energy efficiency measures for international shipping adopted at London meeting (July 20th, ICTSD.org)

These are adopted through the UN International Maritime Organization as amendments to the existing Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships. Side note: it's relatively easy for nations to control ship pollution effectively, as long as they can do it through regulations on how the ships are equipped, because ships, though they may be built anywhere by anyone, have to dock at foreign ports; and they can be refused access if they don't comply with that country's standards. So it's not a strict public goods/incentive to defect problem like most of climate change is. As long as a few key players support it, it'll happen.

China emerges as early-stage investor, not just manufacturer, of cleantech (July 21, renewableenergyworld.com)
US has been and still is the dominant cleantech venture capital player ($4.9 billion in cleantech according to this report), but China is rising (in second place with $479 million). US companies are finding more and more advantages in allying with Chinese companies because funding and markets are both available in China.

India to seek bids for solar projects (July 21, Wall Street Journal)

Plans for an initial 300 MW solar project, and 22 GW of capacity by 2022. How much is this in a proportionate sense? Not much. According to Wikipedia, India estimates it will have 800 to 950 GW of demand by 2030 (though that doesn't necessarily mean all of that demand will be met. I've read differing estimates of current installed capacity, but those have been between 130 and 165 GW, which tells you what kind of power generation capacity gap the big developing countries are facing.) Still, India hasn't done a lot yet in terms of installing renewables, so anything's progress.

Technology and Innovation
One player drops out of low-emissions coal race (July 16, Jacksonville Journal-Courier)
American Electric Co. had been planning a carbon sequestration project, but put it on hold. They "fully anticipated rules in place from legislators requiring carbon dioxide reduction... But with no requirement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it was 'all but impossible' to get a state regulator to approve cost recovery mechanisms for the company." ("Cost recovery mechanisms" mean rate hikes dedicated to paying for the technology.)

Lufthansa flights take off using biofuel mix in engines (July 15, Los Angeles Times)
First passenger airline to use biofuel for scheduled daily flight operations: four daily flights between Hamburg and Frankfurt.

Fun, Interesting, or Weird
Pirates stifling climate research, scientists say (July 15, CNN)
Pirates have overrun much of the Indian Ocean, and are making it difficult for scientists to collect data on climate change, such as weather, ocean heat content, and ocean currents.

Causation

It occurs to me that in political science, you can often (almost always?) break down attempts to explain why something happened into two categories:

1) Permissive conditions: why was it able to happen?
2) Catalyst: why did it happen when it did, and not some other time?

I think there are a non-trivial number of fights that happen in political science because two researchers don't realize that they have two different explanations which, because they fall on opposite sides of that fence, are not actually incompatible.

Treaty success states

Today I found myself considering a list of states that might exist when you have an apparently successful treaty (that is, a treaty that has been signed and ratified by a minimum necessary number of participants). It's probably not a comprehensive list, but here's what I have:

1. The treaty is meaningless: it doesn't really ask states to do anything meaningful.
2. The treaty is meaningless: it asks states to do something, but does not obligate them (and they do not fear punishment if they fail, and therefore intend to defect or to do only as much as they would have done in absence of a treaty).
3. The treaty is epiphenomenal: it asks states to do something meaningful, but what they are asked to do is something they would have done anyway, in absence of a treaty.
4. The treaty is coercive: it has been forced on unwilling participants by a more powerful enthusiastic signatory or group of signatories who stand to benefit from the treaty and have threatened retaliation if the less powerful participants do not sign on.
5. The treaty creates a club good that is only accessible to signatories; therefore unenthusiastic countries have signed on even though they might have preferred not to, because they want or need access to the club good.
6. The treaty provides a simple benefit to all states because signing is clearly better for each than not signing; either the treaty does not entail costs (some kinds of treaties don't, especially things like standards-setting) or costs are outweighed by benefits.

I think of each of these as "escape hatches" to get from "no treaty" to "successful treaty." One might say that treaty negotiations (formal and informal) consist of circling around and around, trying to find an effective escape hatch that enough people will follow you through. Obviously some of them are preferable to others, from either a practical or a moral standpoint. Most parties generally prefer not to go through (1) or (2), but will take these as face-saving options if they can't get something better.

Defining bargaining, defining environmental

A couple of random thoughts from reading and thinking today:

1) Fearon (1998) notes in passing that the classic definition of a bargaining problem is "a situation where there are multiple self-enforcing agreements or outcomes that two or more parties would all prefer to no agreement, but the parties disagree in their ranking of the mutually preferable agreements." (Fearon 1998:274, but based on Nash 1950 and Schelling 1960) I think you can make a strong argument that by this definition the current climate talks, at least as currently constituted, do not constitute a bargaining problem! Does that mean the definition is wrong?

2) The reason why I'm trying to define "environmental treaty" is that there is literature about "environmental treaties;" they have been, at least some of the time, treated as a separate class of treaties. If you want to look at a group of treaties as a separate class, it has to be because you think there's something unique about them that can be captured in a definition, and which matters for your understanding of the group of treaties.

I have something of a suspicion, however, that the reason why scholars want to think of environmental treaties as a group is because they want to answer the question of "how do we help idealistic environmentalists get governments to protect environmental public goods in the face of opposition from economic or security interests?" In other words, helping the good guys win and making treaties in which governments "do the right thing" even in the face of costs. That implies that they think of environmental treaties are treaties in which what is happening is that governments are agreeing to "do the right thing" even in the face of costs.

The problem is that I'm not sure such a treaty has ever been signed (land mines? maybe? although that's not really environmental). That wouldn't be a problem if it were widely acknowledged that that were so - there's nothing wrong with trying to figure out how to make governments behave in novel, better ways. But it is a problem if you think that past successful "environmental treaties" are cases in which governments were convinced to "do the right (costly) thing", and that we can therefore figure out how to replicate that effect by studying what worked in those treaties. I think there are some very good arguments that past successful environmental treaties haven't been cases of nations "doing the right thing" in spite of costs, but rather of nations realizing that the material costs of not doing the right thing outweighed the costs of doing the right thing, which happened to lead to them "doing the right thing." I think this leads to some of the pathologies seen in environmental treaty-making.

Anyway, I don't think I'm being very clear here, but I guess the point is that I'm suspicious of "environmental" as a category of treaties. Many of them share certain common problems, like how to support public goods provision, but I think it would be more rigorous to think about it based on those more clear distinctions, rather than to start from the assumption of an "environmental" category and then try to define what that is - because the question is, why are you doing that? and is it revealing a basic assumption/bias or making us think fuzzily?

The shadow of the future

The shadow of the future cuts both ways, says James Fearon (1998). The shadow of the future is a basic game theory concept; essentially it expresses the idea that we behave differently when we expect to interact with someone repeatedly over time (and hence expect to be able to punish and be punished for misbehavior). The classic take on this (which Fearon describes) is that the shadow of the future is good for cooperation; it allows players to escape prisoners' dilemma situations by using conditional retaliation strategies. This should mean they can sustain cooperation in certain situations where repeated interaction is expected even if they couldn't have in a one-off situation. The implication is that international negotiations should try to set up situations of repeated interactions.

Fearon suggests, however, that the shadow of the future could also be bad for successful negotiation, if it leads nations to bargain harder (such that they might not find space for agreement or might take a long time to do so) because they know they'll be locked into the results of the negotiation for a long time, over repeated interactions.

So the shadow of the future is good for negotiation - except when it's bad. Fearon is glad to have cleared that up for you, policy-makers!

(I mock because I love. Fearon is a big name and he's pretty cool. And he's right! The shadow of the future does cut both ways. International relations are complicated; film at 11. Sadly, this particular conclusion doesn't happen to help advance my work; I was wondering if it would get into other issues of repeated interaction that I'm interested in, but thus far it doesn't seem to.)

More looking at treaty signing data

I tried filtering out the treaties that the ENTRI database considered environmental but I don't - either because they don't meet my definition of environmental or because they have subsets that do meet my definition but aren't the primary point of the treaty. That basically took me from this:

to this:

Obviously, there are fewer treaties. Germany (representing Europe) is still ahead of the US, even going back historically (although the gap is narrower in the 60s and 80s). Now that I've actually looked at all the treaties one by one, I have some thoughts on this - I think it IS at least partly because European countries had reason to sign a number of local environmental agreements that weren't open to others, particularly in earlier decades. By the 1990s, however, Europe is just flat-out signing more, as far as I can tell.

The other thing I notice is that, filtering out the treaties that don't look to me like "true" environmental treaties, there's no longer a clear peak in the 1970s, except in China. Both the US and Germany sign more environmental treaties in the 1990s.

Ambition...

Also, here's the name of one of the treaties in the data set:

"Protocol to amend Paragraph 2 of Article X of the International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas"

If I'm really lucky, I might someday get do be instrumental in the creation of something just like that!

Defining "environmental treaty"

The ENTRI environmental treaty database that I mentioned the other day casts a wide net. It has a bunch of things in it that probably pertain to environmental issues, but for with that either wasn't the primary concern (like tariff and trade agreements) or are "environmental" only within what I consider a fairly generous definition (like the convention creating the World Health Organization).

I'm trying to filter out treaties that I don't think are primarily environmental treaties, but that required coming up with my own definition of an environmental treaty. Here's my first-draft stab at that:

Environmental treaties are treaties with the primary purpose of providing for management or conservation intended to prevent, reverse, or compensate for the destruction or degradation of natural public goods.

News roundup, 7.8.11

Politics and General News
Europe and US in legal clash over airline emissions (Reuters, July 1)
The US is joining China in protesting EU airline emissions rules. And they're taking it to court: U.S.-E.U. showdown over airline emissions begins today (New York Times, July 5).

Talks continue, emissions rise (Washington Post, graphic linked in July 3 article
Fun graphic on emissions by country over time. Stumbles by not including the EU as a single entity, though it does as a result give a fantastic picture of exactly how much bigger the US and China are as emitters than any other individual country.

Sulphur from Chinese power stations 'masking' climate change (Guardian, July 4)
An effect which will be reduced if and when they begin cleaning up their stations - which they need to do for local pollution reasons anyway (see also Study says sulfur from China's coal-burning caused slight pause in global warming, Associated Press, July 4).

China urges developing countries to lead in adopting verifiable carbon cut goals (Xinhua, July 5)
Europe suggests having binding emissions cut goals would be nice; China agrees and suggests the developed countries ought take care of that. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Conservative MEPs defeat new climate change targets (The Independent, July 6)
Europe fails to raise its 2020 target from a 20 to a 30 percent cut relative to 1990.

Markets and Investment
German cleantech addresses water scarcity (prnewswire.co.uk, July 1)
Water is expected to be the next big crisis; it's connected to climate change both because water management involves energy usage and because climate change will likely cause major, disruptive shifts in water availability.

Carbon credits could run out of steam (The National, July 3)
Carbon prices are way down, not quite for the reason I expected: "plans by the EC... to sell an extra 300 million carbon credits on the market to raise funds for green energy projects threatens to further saturate the market and push prices down." I assume there's also a general issue of uncertainty over the future value of these credits given the currently low expectations for international agreements.

The hunt for green in the green economy (Worcester Business Journal, July 4)
Article on the challenges in making cleantech pay; has some interesting anecdotes.

Second-quarter cleantech investment drops 33%, but biofuels make a comeback (blogs.forbes.com, July 6)
Apparently driven by niche market applications in petrochemical replacements that have nothing to do with biofuels per se.

Iran builds new gas pipeline (Financial Times, July 6)
To Pakistan. Iran is one of the biggest holders of natural gas reserves, but these have been largely unexploited due to the fact that natural gas users, if supplied by pipeline, become very dependent on their suppliers, and Iran is, well, Iran. Not sure what to think of this. I suspect that yoking two extremist, unstable states together in a strategically dependent relationship might not be a good thing, but that's just general intuition.

Environmental treaties

I abandoned the UN database. I haven't been able to make it give me useful results. How awesome!

Instead, I spent yesterday playing with data from ENTRI (Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators, an online database of environmental treaties). This was the first thing I came up with, environmental treaties signed by country, per decade:

Think of this as four categories:

Europe (in greens)
Japan
US
Developing countries (in blues)

This had one or two things I didn't expect. For instance, I would have expected that Japan might behave most similarly to the European countries - at least in the last couple of decades. But actually, Japan seems closest to Brazil - sometimes outperforming China and India, but not by as much as, say, the US, much less Europe.

Europe seems to sign a lot more environmental treaties than anybody else. At first glance, that bears out my expectations. But first, a quick look at the actual treaties suggests that that might be at least partly because of a couple of big batches of agreements that were signed just by Europeans (I think they might be intra-EU things). That might make them, in a sense, the EU version of EPA rulings. It's certainly not clear that we would expect the EU to be signing more environmental treaties than the US all the way back to the 1950s, given that my understanding is that the US was actually something of a leader in environmentalism in the 1970s.

Speaking of which: the 1970s appear to be when environmental treaty-making peaked. Although I don't know if that might change if I filter out extraneous stuff like intra-EU agreements.

These are not your tax dollars at work

The UN has a database of treaties. You can find it here:

http://treaties.un.org/pages/UNTSOnline.aspx?id=1

I've been playing with it. I'd tell you something interesting that I've learned from it, but thus far I haven't learned anything except that the UN tends to have very un-user-friendly database interfaces, and also, I haven't yet been able to get it to spit out anything that makes sense.