Too hot, too cold, and just right are not created equal

In International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society (which is more reasonable than I think its title implies), Oran Young (1994) writes:

It is worth emphasizing the extent to which most scientists and many policy-makers have joined forces in an effort to focus attention on climate change as a common problem and the avoid becoming bogged down in battles regarding putative winners and losers. The work of the IPCC during 1989 and 1990 certainly helped set this tone, and the negotiators operating within the INC have carried on, for the most part, in the same vein. This spirit of cooperation does not guarantee that progress will be made on a climate regime without running afoul of distributive concerns triggered by a growing preoccupation with the identification of probable winners and lowers in the wake of global warming. So far, however, in this case uncertainty has served to soften the problems associated with distributive bargaining. (43)

This is nice, but there are two problems here that make this largely irrelevant. One is that it's only true in a very bounded way: yes, there hasn't been as much discussion of winners and losers at the country vs. country level. But there has been a whole lot of discussion of winners and losers at the industry level, and that discussion has had serious political ramifications.

But that makes sense. We'd expect to see discussion of winners and losers at the industry rather than the national level, because that's where the winners/losers divide will mostly matter. The second problem with the argument above is that the winner/loser debate just isn't very important at the country-vs.-country level, because it's highly one-sided. All the players who matter will be losers from the climate change; with the possible exception of Russia, there's no one important who will be a winner.

There's a simple reason for this. We can think of the world as divided into three Goldilocks zones: right now, some places are too hot, some places are too cold, and some places are just right. Only one of these three zones will win from climate change: the too-cold zone, which will edge closer to just-right. The too-hot zone will become even hotter, and the just-right zone will become less right.

But almost all of the states that really matter in an emissions treaty (to review, that's the states with a significant share of current or future emissions: the US, Europe, China, Japan, India, Russia, maaaaybe Brazil and Indonesia) are clustered in the zone that's currently more or less just right. That's because life is more tenable and economic development is easier in the just-right zone, so that's where the money and population is currently clustered. There are no winners here because no one benefits from making the just-right zone less right (again, the possible exception is Russia, because it, alone among the key temperate-zone players, is a major oil exporter and has a fair chunk of land in the too-cold zone.)