Acronyms

The world of international climate negotiations is a wonderland of UN-style acronyms. My favorite is LULUCF, which stands for land use, land use change, and forestry. It's a clunky catch-all for the aspect of carbon emissions and carbon emissions mitigation that has to do, basically, with forests and other greenery - removing them (releasing emissions) or installing them (providing a carbon sink) or otherwise changing them.

News Roundup 11.25.11

General News & Politics
Emerging economies should chip into climate fund: U.S. (Reuters, Nov. 18)
Todd Stern, lead US negotiator, suggests the proposed $100B climate fund should have contributions from some developing countries as well as the developed countries. Norway and Bangladesh have called on countries like Brazil and China to contribute.

Climate change funding "at risk" (China Daily, Nov. 23)
Judging by the quotes in this article, China's attitude going into the upcoming UNFCCC meeting is 1) push for continued funding from the developed countries, 2) push for a reupped commitment on Kyoto (though can they possibly be optimistic about that?), 3) insist on "common but differentiated responsibilities" (which is code for "no explicit targets for developing nations"), and 4) emphasize that they'll be continuing to meet internal targets (presumably as an alternative to external commitments). China is worried that the promised $100B in funding won't be coming on line with the ongoing crisis (China urges progress on financing for $100 billion climate change fund, Washington Post, Nov. 21)

Oregon steps back from Western Climate Initiative (Sustainable Business Oregon, Nov. 23)
Oregon was the last US state other than CA to be involved, with four Canadian provinces, in the WCI's effort to establish a regional carbon cap-and-trade program. Article says the states formerly involved (Oregon, Washington, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah) are focusing on North America 2050, "an organization that is still being formed". Don't know much about NA2050; a rather vague info sheet is here, but it seems to basically be a collection of working groups.

US refuses to back climate fund blueprint (Financial Times, Nov. 24)
"The US, which has never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, has said it wants more work on issues such as private sector involvement in the Green Climate Fund and which countries would contribute. Saudi Arabia wants compensation for oil-producing countries for revenues lost as a result of climate change actions."

China to probe US clean energy subsidies (Financial Times, Nov. 25)
"Trade tensions have been rising between the US and China ever since the office of the US Trade Representative initiated an investigation into Chinese wind subsidies last year." China's considering filing a case with the WTO.

Looking ahead to COP-17: Deferred deal may save COP-17 (Mail & Guardian Online, Nov. 25) Suggests there's a potential consensus around a "deferred agreement" focusing on a mandate for a new emissions control deal starting in 2020 rather than 2012 (when Kyoto ends). Since the Chinese don't appear to be on board (China wants the Kyoto Protocol, with its "differentiated responsibilities" extended) and there's no mention of the US, I'd say this is just a European attempt to find a positive spin. This rather pessimistic analysis (IPS, Nov. 24) is probably closer to the mark. Important note, however: even if Kyoto expires and isn't renewed, some things that exist under the overarching UNFCCC framework - which I believe includes the Clean Development Mechanism, the promised $100B in green development funding for developing nations (if they can fund it), and the funding for forest preservation - will still exist.) A report from WRI (WRI, Nov. 23) suggests focusing on MRV (measuring, reporting, and verification) as the important issue in COP-17; that was one of the areas the US focused on in Cancun and made some progress there.

Climategate II: the scientists fight back (Telegraph, Nov. 25)
Another hacked-emails-leaked-by-climate-change-skeptics event happened. The world seems uninterested.

Markets
China's Feed-in Tariff Policy Stimulates 14 GW Photovoltaic Project Pipeline (Solarbuzz.com, Oct. 10)
China released a photovoltaic feed-in tariff in July.

On the ground with clean power in India (GigaOm.com, Nov. 18)

A roundup of cleanpower stuff in India: solar companies, new subsidies, new CEO for GE India (Banmali Agrawala), smart grid (pilot ideas), solar power missing completion deadlines.

Tata Capital, IFC set up joint venture for climate change business (The Economic Times, Nov. 19)
Tata and a World Bank group company are setting up a cleantech financing and advisory joint venture.

Saudi Arabia halts $100bn oil expansion programme (Financial Times, Nov. 21)
Saudi Arabia is halting at the 12m barrel per day mark. Although this article doesn't say so - and SA offers a variety of other reasons - I've seen some commentators suggest that this in combination with Saudi remarks represents a tacit admission that they can't make the 15m bpd goal they've previously talked about. The IEA estimates that Iraq will be the biggest contributor to global oil supply growth between 2010 and 2035.

EU carbon permits drop to record low as European debt crisis trims demand (Bloomberg, Nov. 23)
"'The combination of multiple supply side fears and simply not enough demand from utilities means prices have little support,' Chatterton [analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance] said... Falling prices together with an oversupply of carbon permits in Europe may reduce the incentive for companies to cut emissions. As factories slow operations there is less need to buy extra permits to comply with the system's rules. Surplus permits can be held over for use in the third phase of the market... Carbon allowances may drop as low as 3 euros because of weaker demand and 'staggering' supply..."

Tech
Bipartisan Tax Credit Would Open Market for Energy Storage (PR Newswire, Nov. 10)
Sens. Wyden (OR), Collins (ME), and Bingaman (NM) introduced a bill for a tax credit for energy storage technologies of all types.

Datacenters: Friend or Foe? (TriplePundit, Nov. 19)
Interesting numbers (from a McKinsey report, available here) on datacenters and energy consumption/carbon emissions. "If datacenters were a country, they would produce the equivalent of 60 percent of the emissions generated by Argentina."

Climate Science
Climate change effect on release of CO2 from peat far greater than assumed (EurekAlert.org, Nov. 20)
Yet another feedback effect.

Introductions are the best part...

What's up with academics putting all this interesting stuff into their introductions and then not following up? Sprinz and Vashtoranta (1994) introduce their paper on domestic interests in international environmental negotiation by doing a bunch of talking about various possible applications of domestic interests. Some of this is cool and close to my thinking. For instance, they write, "...a country may promote regulations that would benefit it by increasing international demand for its pollution abatement technology and its substitute compounds" and "If the environment of a country is affected by domestic emissions, it is expected to favor international harmonization of environmental policies in order to avoid disadvantages in international competitiveness." (78-79)

But in the end, they boil all this down to a two-by-two that cross-references costs (expected expense of abatement, high or low) and vulnerability (expected impact of environmental degradation, high or low), and postulates country interest based on that. Boring.

What makes polluting firms clean up their act?

I was kind of psyched about Arora & Cason 1996, which does what it says on the tin: the title is "Why Do Firms Volunteer to Exceed Environmental Regulations?"

This paper looks at what types of firms choose to enroll in the EPA's 33/50 program, a voluntary program that assists firms in making cutbacks to toxic releases. The program provides assistance for firms that sign up to attempt to meet its goals of reducing releases of certain pollutants. The program goals are more stringent than what actually regulation requires, so the firms are in some sense agreeing to go above and beyond. So it seems like an interesting question: what types of firms make that decision; in other words, what makes companies choose to be good?

Sadly, academia is a land of disappointment. The answer doesn't reveal any miraculous strategies for getting polluting firms to voluntarily clean up their act.

First off, a major nitpick: reading the article, it turns out that some of the toxic substances covered in the program are ozone depleting substances that are subject to caps by the (at the time) new Montreal Protocol restrictions. Thus, while firms that worked cleaning their act up with regard to these substances were indeed technically exceeding what regulation at the time required them to do, they were facing impending caps on these releases, making those actions less voluntarily motivated than they look. I couldn't find a clear statement in the article of how much of the target population that was true of.

Beyond that, they reasons don't end up being all that interesting. Firms that spend more on advertising were more likely to enroll; that makes sense, since firms that spend on advertising are (essentially by definition) sensitive about their public image. Bigger firms were more likely to enroll; that makes sense, since bigger firms have more resources and more public exposure. Firms that emit more pollution (in absolute terms AND per employee) are more likely to enroll; that makes sense, since they're the ones who need help figuring out how to clean up their act. Firms that don't emit much pollution have no reason to sign up for a reduction program. (Theoretically, if the program had some big payoff but required action the firms really didn't want to take, we might see firms sorting the other way - big polluters steer clear so they don't have to spend, while small polluters enroll to cash in on the payoff without having to do much. But the program doesn't really have such a payoff; all you get from it as far as I can tell is stuff like training and workshops. So there isn't much incentive to try to game the system - those that sign up seem to be those that actually need and want the program.)

Oh well, negative findings are important too. Anyway, the takeaway is that the EPA's 33/50 program doesn't seem to teach us anything particularly exciting about eliciting firm cooperation on pollution clean-up. Regulation and public pressure are the things that do the trick.

The oil weapon

I went to a talk recently that put an interesting spin on the oil weapon concept. In the 1970s the Arab states attempted to use the "oil weapon" to punish the US and... the Netherlands, I think? anyway, one or more of the European countries, to try to get them to change their Israel policy.

What we mainly learned from this is that the oil weapon in its classical sense is not very useful. The oil embargo of the 1970s DID cause a lot of economic pain generally, but it was a very blunt instrument. It punished the whole world without inflicting a particularly large share of punishment on the targets, it didn't really succeed in altering US policy much, and it was pretty much as inconvenient for the Arab states as it was for everyone else. Eventually, Saudi Arabia decided to play nice with the US and unilaterally boost production, ending the attempt and beginning a long and beautiful friendship.

What the talk focused on, though, was Iran and how all this affected Iran's relationship to the Arab states. Iran had previously been the US's big partner in the region, but it had been an increasingly recalcitrant one, repeatedly demanding and getting US "permission" to raise oil prices without US opposition. On the strength of high oil prices, Iran ran up a bunch of debt to fund domestic stuff. When the Saudis unilaterally raised production, bringing oil prices down, Iran couldn't pay off those debts, and this helped destabilize the state, ending an era and permanently shifting the balance of power in the area in Saudi Arabia's favor as well as rearranging the alliance structure with the US. In other words, the "oil weapon" worked quite well against Iran. And there seems to be no reason that can't generalize - the states that are always going to be most vulnerable to manipulation of the oil markets aren't consumer states, but rather, producer states that rely on oil wealth but don't control enough of it to set the market rates. Something similar might happen with gas if LNG becomes ubiquitous enough to make natural gas a similar market to oil, rather than a pipeline-based distribution system. (and since Iran has huge LNG resources, that might hold the promise of a second era of fossil fuel power for them).

China's rare earth industry

As I've mentioned before, one of my threads of interest is how shifts in the world's energy economy might cause shifts in the importance of various resources and who holds them. One major area is that of rare and exotic minerals, which are used in things like CFLs and batteries.

Along those lines, this article on China's rare-earth mining industry, how they cornered the world market (it's not because they're the only place that has rare-earth resources), and what our alternatives are is really interesting, really worth reading, and pretty short.

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.)

Strategic use of courts

Today, a quick side note that isn't particularly relevant to my research but which came up in reading (Gehring 2010, in Deadlocks in Multilateral Negotiations, which I've mentioned before) and which I thought was interesting: one way to get out of a deadlock is to litigate your way out of it. There are enough court or court-like forums out there that one strategy, if you are in deadlock with a negotiating partner or partners, is to strategically bring a case to one of these courts that deals with the issue at hand, and then use the result as a basis for building an agreement. I think this is particularly common in Europe (which has a particularly important history of codifying court case results into regional law), but it happens in other contexts too.

I think this is neat because it isn't obvious why it should work. Of course, it sets a precedent, and there may be a certain level of effect based on the idea that once an alternate, court-based mechanism for dispute resolution has been used, countries ought to expect it to be used again and therefore might as well codify the results. Still, it seems to me that at least part of the effect is basically psychological, and you can imagine a variety of ways that could be true. For instance, there's a lot of general evidence that negotiations tend to coalesce around arbitrary points of convergence once those arbitrary points are mutually known to everyone, so a court ruling could serve that purpose (some have argued this is basically what happened with the early history of the EU). Alternately, a court ruling could change people's estimations of the credibility of their opponents' positions: if I thought you were bluffing before, and I could get you to back down if I negotiated hard enough, a court ruling in your favor on a specific issue might suggest that you weren't bluffing (and even if you had been, that you might not be now).

Explanations for deadlock: beliefs about the issue area?

Martin Daunton writes:

The contrast between success at Bretton Woods in 1944 and relative failure in the trade negotiations between 1945 and 1948 has implications for the hypotheses explored in this book. Historically, trade was more prone to deadlock than exchange rates, for trade was often more highly politicised than international monetary issues which were usually seen  as technical matters best left to central bankers, and only understood by economic experts. Monetary issues rarely became a matter of partisan politics that determined elections or party identity. ("From Bretton Woods to Havana," in Deadlocks in Multilateral Negotiations, Amrita Narlikar, ed.; pg. 49)

On the one hand, I'm not an expert in this area. On the other hand, I find this explanation unsatisfying. Daunton is basically saying, well, we just think about monetary issues as a distant, "technical" issue, while we think about trade as immediate and open to political interaction. I'm not sure I believe this; and even if I did believe it, it would just push the question back a step. If we think of the two issue areas differently, why do we do that? So there are two possible trains of thought here.

1) If I do believe the offered explanation, what accounts for the different ways of thinking about the two issues? After all, in practice both have important effects on the national/global economy, so there's no a priori reason to think people should be personally interested in one but not the other; and I'm unconvinced that the one issue area is objectively all that much more complicated or "technical" than the other. One possibility is that it has to do with the mechanism for the effects caused by policy in each area. The effects of monetary policy are, I think, pervasive but non-specific and indirect from the perspective of specific industries. The effects of trade policy, on the other hand, while also pervasive are often very industry-specific and very direct. There's more payment to getting involved politically in trade policy, because you have a shot at very materially changing your own playing field if you succeed, and it's cheaper to do so because the issue area can be hived off into many separate fields. Getting policy-makers to pass a rule that only affects your industry has to be easier than swinging them on an issue of national-level policy.

2) If I don't believe the offered explanation, what might be a better explanation? Earlier in the chapter, Daunton refers to, regarding monetary policy, "...the emergence of a broad degree of consensus between technical experts; and the formulation of a plan by two countries - Britain and the United States - whose financial clout meant that it could largely secure its wishes within the broad consensus on policy." So basically... there was no deadlock because all the key players wanted roughly the same thing in monetary policy (not as clearly the case in trade policy). The fact that monetary policy was designed to prevent a recurrence of a catastrophe that everyone had already gotten a chance to experience, while trade policy negotiations were more an attempt to secure hoped-for gains even if it caused some short-term adjustment pains for domestic interests relative to existing policy, probably helped. To me, this seems a more intuitively satisfying explanation. I think the power of "everyone agreed on this" vs. "key players disagreed on this" to make the difference between success and failure in negotiation tends to be undervalued in negotiations literature!

News Roundup, 8.26.11

General News and Politics

U.S. emissions up 3.9 percent in 2010 (UPI, August 19)

That's the largest single-year rise since 1988, driven by economic rebound.

US cap-and-trade scheme set for key battle (Financial Times, August 21)

Opponents of the northeastern RGGI multi-state cap-and-trade a gearing up to try to push participant states out of it. Ironic since, as noted below, the scheme is actually running into problems because it's NOT coming anywhere close to constraining actual emissions. But it's seen as a test case by both sides. Meanwhile, Gov. Christie just vetoed a bill that would have kept New Jersey in the scheme.

China might stop UN CO2 credit supply in 2015, Barclays says (Bloomberg, August 25)

That is, they may withdraw from the Clean Development Mechanism, the UNFCCC/Kyoto Protocol mechanism that funnels money to developing countries in exchange for the right to claim "credits" toward emissions reductions targets. Not quite sure what to make of this, given that the CDM is basically a way to funnel money into developing countries. Barclays speculates that "China might be expecting to keep its emissions reductions for itself to meet its own greenhouse gas targets, rather than export them". Unclear whether that means there's a likelihood of China taking on international commitments in the future. China is also starting pilot emissions trading programs domestically, so this may have to do with isolating or supporting those?

Inhofe calls out Romney on climate (Washington Times, August 25)

Inhofe endorses Rick Perry instead.

Eight views on climate change: a guide to the Republican candidates (iWatch, August 26)
What it says on the tin. Highlights: Bachman thinks climate change is "manufactured" and wants to shut down the EPA; Perry has been a little less clear but appears to have a similar positions; Romney mostly admits climate change is real but is officially unsure how much of it is man-made and doesn't want to do anything about it.

Markets and Industry
Xcel CEO: climate change science is 'pretty solid' (RealAspen, August 22)
This is interesting because Xcel happens to have been shaped significantly by regulatory action. The article notes that Xcel is the number one utility in the nation for wind - but this is in no small part because it's a dominant utility in two states - Minnesota and Colorado - that have successful histories of instituting renewable portfolio standards. Xcel fought the regulations, but its interests have been shaped by them.

Business leaders call on state to protect market certainty, press ahead on AB32 (Sacramento Bee, August 23)
Green policy has become entrenched enough that it has a constituency within business in California.

Northeast climate change emissions market threatened (AOL Energy, August 23)
The limping economy combined with increased use of natural gas has carbon emissions down, which is actually bad for emissions-trading schemes; with current emissions well below caps, prices and trading are both depressed, and allowances are going begging even at the legal minimum price.

Are we entering cleantech's Dark Ages? (GreenBiz (blog), August 24)
Gives a run-down of the subsidy and investment-supporting programs that are likely to be cut as a result of the discretionary spending cuts in the recent budget deal.

Smart Grid has trouble attracting smart money (GLOBES, August 24)
Israel has put together a multi-country Smart Grid Consortium, but VC hasn't responded warmly yet; investment in smart grid in general is pretty cool at the moment.

VCs may be hot for cleantech, but markets stay lukewarm (The Globe and Mail, August 25)
The important point of this article is this: "From late 2006 to May of 2008, a U.S. cleantech EFT was up over 40 per cent while the NASDAQ was essentially flat. ... Since 2008, the EFT has declined slightly while the NASDAQ has been up over 15 per cent."

Science, Technology and Innovation
Climate change linked to wars? (IOLscitech, August 25)
People have sort of assumed this for a while, but a study published in Nature uses the natural warming/cooling oscillation of El Nino/La Nina to study the effects of El Nino's warming and drying on countries' stability. They find that El Nino years are twice as likely (6% rather than 3%) to have civil war break out in affected countries (countries not affected by El Nino tend to stay around a 2% chance).

U.S.' first large-scale geologic C.C.S. facility breaks ground (EcoSeed, August 25)
Carbon capture and storage project in Decatur, Illinois.

Public opinion surveys

From today's reading, regarding survey data:

"...although Republican voters approved of [the] Kyoto [Protocol] by 54 per cent in 2001 and by 83 per cent in 2003..."

Wow, really? 54 and 83%? That seems counter-intuitively high for Republican voters. How interesting!

"...they also agreed that the United States was right not to accept Kyoto by 64 per cent in 2001 and 49 per cent in 2002 (only 37 per cent thought the decision was wrong in 2002)."
(Vezirgiannidou, 2010. "Entering the Zone of Agreement: the United States in Climate Change Negotiations", in Narlikar (ed.), Deadlocks in Multilateral Negotiations: Causes and Solutions, p. 173)

Ah, never underestimate the power of survey data to make you think you know more than you do if you don't read the whole thing or think carefully about what different constructions respondents might put on the questions than you do. For instance, apparently there's a whole segment of the US population that approves of the Kyoto Protocol... for other countries. Which is in fact totally rational, if you think about it.

Playing with economic numbers

Today's big project was looking at data for energy inputs by industry versus GDP by industry. It took me a while to find appropriate data and start putting it together, and it's still frustrating, because it's almost, but not quite as detailed as I want. For instance, "Mining" breaks down to "oil and gas" and "Mining other than oil and gas", but what I really want is oil, gas, and coal. I haven't found a data source that lets me pull coal out of the "other" category.

Oh well. I did come up with the amount of a money spent on energy inputs per dollar of value created, by industry. The top three industries in terms of amount spent on energy inputs per dollar created are all transportation: water transportation, air transportation, and truck transportation. I guess that makes sense; energy is the main input for those industries. After that it's a grab bag: metals manufacturing, paper products, farms, "non-metallic mineral products" (basically cement is what drives that), wood products, "government enterprises" (??), food/beverage/tobacco, and a few others.

Gains from climate negotiations (and their problems)

One of the problems with climate negotiations is that there are potential benefits at stake, but none of them are the right kind at the right scale. Without benefits to negotiate over, you are not playing a positive-sum game; you're playing a zero-sum game (worse, it might even be a negative-sum game, depending on how you frame it). Psychologically, humans would often rather take stupid risks than incur a certain loss, so zero-sum or negative-sum negotiations are poison. To my mind, the potential benefits on the table with climate change subdivide into three categories, and none of them have the right configuration to drive significant compromise:

1) Large, certain, public goods. The gains of averting climate change are large and relatively certain: while we can't estimate their precise size very well, there is wide agreement that they are real, and many believe that they would be significant if they could be achieved. However, they are also public goods, meaning they cannot be divided up as private incentives, and they are vulnerable to free-riding. These won't drive compromise, at least not until the losses that are the alternative to a deal start to become tangible and large. That would probably be too late. The problem with this class of gains is the type of good: the fact that it's public.

2) Small, certain, private goods. Some gains that could result from a global deal are better-suited to negotiation in that they are private goods. These are gains such as access to carbon markets or the fruits of research, and receipt of negotiated side payments for actions - that is, things like sums paid to developing countries through the Clean Development Mechanism to help them defray the costs of low-carbon projects. These are also certain and predictable: countries can negotiate them with confidence because they are under the control of the parties involved. However, they are just too small in practice. The sums involved in these types of gains are overwhelmed by the likely costs of climate mitigation action, at least in the near future. Therefore, they won't drive compromise either. The problem with this class of gains is size.

3) Large, private, and uncertain goods. This category consists of the types of stuff people mean when they talk about "green growth". The emerging consensus is that the industrial and economic growth in green business could be large. And those gains would or could be private. But they are highly uncertain: no one really knows what the green economy will look like or precisely where the money and enduring jobs will be. These types of gains can't drive compromise because people don't know how much they should compromise for them or what types of compromises they should and shouldn't make. They don't know enough about the future of green business to negotiate over the rules for it. The problem with this class of gains is uncertainty.

Failure

Treaty failure has two definitions:
1) Parties to negotiation fail to sign any treaty.
2) Parties to negotiation sign a treaty in some manner that is suboptimal: for instance, a treaty is signed, but only after a negotiation process that costs more than the treaty gains; or, a treaty is signed, but its terms are such that the parties to negotiation collectively do not realized the desired gain from cooperation.

The first category, failure to sign, has two subcategories:
1a) A potential treaty existed, but participants to negotiation failed to find it for some reason.
1b) No potential treaty existed, at least at the time of negotiation, because parties' interests did not overlap.

I'm interested in case 1b. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's actually rather hard to find literature about 1b - or at least, I'm finding it so thus far. I suppose that could be either good or bad, depending on your perspective.

Ways to avoid deadlock: soft law

Okay, the last few weeks have been a cornucopia of distractions from actual dissertation progress, but let's get back on the horse.

My interest right now is in deadlock - situations where treaties can't be reached because parties to the negotiations simply have differing interests or desires - because I think I'm working toward a dissertation that's about how to overcome deadlock.

One general category of strategies essentially involves watering down the agreement to avoid controversy. Armin Schafer (2006) discusses one example of this: soft law, which is to say, agreements that aren't binding, don't delegate any authority (other than authority to monitor), and don't entail sanctions if nations don't follow through. Schafer is specifically discussing multilateral surveillance, in which countries don't agree to binding policy, but do agree to let each other (or a supranational third party) monitor what they do in the relevant policy space. This monitoring leads to regular rounds of evaluation and recommendations (again, non-binding). It basically gives parties an opportunity exercise recurrent pressure and persuasion on each other in the pursuit of convergence or movement toward a desired common policy, without putting countries in a position of having to agree up front to anything they don't want to do.

This interested me in the context of climate change because it's a tactic that largely hasn't been tried (arguably, the Kyoto Protocol's structure, in which developing countries are encouraged to do all they can and set non-binding or aspirational internal goals, is a step in this direction, but to date it hasn't been matched with any mandated monitoring by external parties - though recently such monitoring has been a subject of negotiation, so perhaps this is coming). But I think it suffers from two problems.

First, I think to work, the parties involved need some level of general friendliness and common overarching goals (even if they disagree on best practices or specific objectives); and I believe they need to have a mutual sense of subscribing to the same general terms of debate and accepted policy space (for instance, countries in the EU do, I think, have a general sense of there being an accepted spectrum of reasonable policy options based on a very general agreed-upon view of how economics work - even if individual countries may fall further toward liberalization or socialism on the spectrum). I don't think either of these conditions hold between the developed and developing nations in the climate issue area.

Second, as Schafer himself notes, "international organisations do not introduce multilateral surveillance because of its proven effectiveness but rather when no substantial agreement is obtainable." (207) In other words, we don't necessarily know that this will work; so if, as I suggest, conditions aren't well-structured to make this strategy viable, it's not really clear that this type of agreement is better than no agreement at all (except insofar as it serves as a face-saver to the parties involved).

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.

Off topic

The last week has been kind of a snooze-fest from a research perspective. I've actually done some useful stuff, but it all falls into a couple of categories:

1) Too close to my core thinking for the thesis; don't want to post online.
2) More review of Copenhagen 2009 news; continues to confirm stuff I've already said; not interesting from a posting perspective.

Other than that, mostly on the side I'm doing reading for my next TA gig. So have some quotes:

Most favorite political philosopher quote from Week 2 readings:
Bertrand Russell: "Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships of philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships." (Power: A New Social Analysis)

Least favorite political philosopher quote from Week 2 readings:
Emile Durkheim: "...woman can endure life in isolation more easily than man. When a widow is seen to endure her condition much better than a widower and desires marriage less passionately, one is led to consider this ease in dispensing with the family a mark of superiority; it is said that woman's affective faculties, being very intense, are easily employed outside the domestic circle, while her devotion is indispensable to man to help him endure life. Actually, if this is her privilege it is because her sensibility is rudimentary rather than highly developed. As she lives outside of community existence more than man, she is less penetrated* by it; society is less necessary to her because she is less impregnated* with sociability. She has few needs in this direction and and satisfies them easily. With a few devotional practices and some animals to care for, the old unmarried woman's life is full. If she remains faithfully attached to religious traditions and thus finds ready protection against suicide, it is because these very simple social forms satisfy all her needs. Man, on the contrary, is hard beset in this respect. As his thought and activity develop, they increasingly overflow these antiquated forms. But then he needs others. Because he is a more complex social being, he can maintain his equilibrium only be finding more points of support outside himself, and it is because his moral balance depends on a larger number of conditions that it is more easily disturbed." (Suicide)


* Ooh, clever, Durkheim.

Drama from the 2009 negotiations

This account of what went wrong in 2009 in the Copenhagen climate negotiations - especially behind the scenes - is really worth reading; it quotes at the end the entirety of Yvo de Boer's rather unhappy "how did this happen" email (de Boer was the head of UNFCCC during the 2009 negotiations).

The short story is that the Danish government got overly ambitious in its attempts to manage (and pre-manage) the outcome, and this, at the very least, helped negotiations break down.

It's a really interesting story, though in some ways a complicating factor for me. My belief is that Copenhagen was never likely to be VERY successful (and assessments of the buzz going into the round, I think, suggests this is true) and hence this drama, though unhelpful, may not have made ALL that much difference; but how to prove it?

News Roundup, 6.17.11

Not as much going on this week, overall...


General News
Gore lauds Romney on climate position (The Hill, June 15)
This is seen as a death blow to Romney's nomination chances by Rush Limbaugh (The Hill's link refers to it as a "death hug").

The biggest single source of general news this week has been on-going negotiations in Australia over a carbon tax. I frankly haven't been following this, so about all I can say about it is that it seems to be complex; I've heard it would be one of the most serious carbon control plans out there at the national level if passed; and I have no idea what the likely outcome is. Have a few links for flavor:
Carbon tax rift emerges between Labor, Greens (ABC News, June 17)
Govt ad campaign rocks carbon boat (Sydney Morning Herald, June 16)
Australia power industry fears "even worse" carbon plan (Reuters, June 16)

Meanwhile, S. Korea's CO2 trade bill receives bipartisan backing (Reuters Africa, June 15)
South Korea moving ahead with a carbon emissions trading bill, after opposition from industry was pacified with increased free carbon allowances and softer penalties for non-compliance.

Markets: Emergence, Sizing, Shifts, etc.
Carbon management market could near $6 bln in six years: research (RTT News, June 10)
This is the market for carbon management software and services, basically.

Green Policy Centers
Clean technology emerges as driver of B.C. economy (The Vancouver Sun, June 15)
Vancouver rises...

Clean-tech industry losing momentum (Boulder Country Business Report, June 15)
...Boulder sinks?

The China paradox, circa 2009

Doing a run through the news narrative for the 2009 COP-15 meeting of the climate change negotiations really makes it starkly clear why they failed, I think.

China is at the heart of it. On the one hand, China was making really absurd demands for huge emissions cuts from the developed countries. On the other hand, you have quite a lot of buzz in the year prior to the negotiating round about how hard China is working on cutting energy use and emissions. Take this FT article, for instance:

China will be in the forefront of combating climate change by 2020 if it meets government targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the International Energy Agency suggest. ... "If China reaches its targets... its emissions [growth] will have declined so much by 2020 that it will be the country that has achieved the largest emissions reductions. ... China's strong showing in curbing emissions will make negotiations on a global agreement on climate change easier (emphasis mine). (Financial Times, Sept. 21, 2009)

The two things are contradictory. "China is taking emissions seriously and that will make negotiating easier" vs. "China is making huge, plainly impossible negotiating demands." People had to square that contradiction mentally, and unfortunately, they ended up paying more attention to the optimistic side of the contradiction than to the pessimistic side.

That mistake, I think, comes back to a fundamental misread of what was going on in China domestically. Yes, China was making huge efforts to cut the energy (and hence emissions) intensity of its population and industry. But it wasn't doing that because it was seeing the light on emissions. As I've said before, it was doing that because in order to maintain stability it must continue providing increasing economic growth and improving living standards to its populace. That means huge increases in the additional power needed, which are simply physically hard to meet purely by increasing supply. So China is also pushing hard on the demand side, trying to reduce energy needed per person and per unit GDP.

It was also exacerbated by the fact that around the same time, the US was starting to look like more and more of an obstacle. People have limited cognitive scope, and with one obstacle apparently growing, there was a cognitive pressure to be optimistic about China in a "the REAL problem is the US; China's fine!" sort of way, I think.

To the west, China looked like it might be getting serious about emissions. It wasn't.

Issue linkage in the Law of the Sea

Haas (1980) writes, when considering the difference between regime construction around money and around the Law of the Sea (LOS) that

The LOS negotiations... constituted a case of 'premature' issue-packaging. The package was the result of a negotiating strategy adopted by the weak - first in UNCTAD and later in all international economic forums. ... Ocean-related resources constitute a very heterogeneous group of concerns, united only by the fact that they are situated on or under the water. 

[Ernst Haas, "Why Collaborate?: Issue Linkage and International Regimes," World Politics, v. 2, n.3 (Apr. 1980)]

This is actually wrong - I mean, really wrong. It's true that LOS issues - which included everything from deep-sea mining rights to fishing rights to rights of passage to pollution - seem very heterogeneous at first glance. But they're all inextricably interlocked because they were all seen as having bearing on the issue of expanding territoriality. There was an increasing trend toward nations with coastlines claiming ever-expanding sections of the adjacent seas, and ever-expanding rights over it. A lot of the LOS negotiations were driven by the desire by some states to get this trend under control and set stable limits on it.

This is precisely why some of the early compromise plans - which tried compromising on allowing partial or specific rights over expanded coastal ocean areas but stopped short of giving territorial control over them - didn't satisfy people. Partial or specific rights were seen as stepping-stones to real or de facto territorial claims. ("Why, Mr. President, I just have to have my war fleet patrol these seas and hassle your nation's ships! It's to protect my seabed mining rights! You wouldn't want me to allow manganese poaching, would you?") Therefore, you couldn't satisfy states that were worried about territorial claims creep without negotiating all these things together and settling them as a package.

Haas seems to be suggesting that when issues were added, they were added not because they were a natural part of the bundle of issues but because states decided to add them strategically, to get leverage on something. That's not so - there were issues added, but largely, I think, because they were previously unrecognized issues that fit naturally into the existing bundle but which states only became aware of part-way through.

This is not to say there was nothing strategic going on - there was. But what was going on was the recognition and intentional exploitation of useful pre-existing reciprocalities in desires within sets of issues that did naturally go together - not the random addition of "stuff that has to do with the sea" in order to change the playing field.

News roundup 6.10.11

Researchers say climate change may be cooling California (Sacramento Bee, June 4)
I've been wondering about this ever since I moved back here. This is not the weather that I remember from my childhood.

Chinese airline group 'totally opposes' EU's emission plan (Bloomberg, June 5)
The EU wants to bring aviation into a cap and trade plan? Cap and trade works best where there are known solutions to emissions that caps can provide incentives to implement. My impression is that's not the case with airlines, so in this case I have some sympathy for the airlines - one can't help wondering if some other solution might be better in this case.

However, EU offers solution to China in row over aviation CO2 (Reuters, June 5)
Probably not one that will make China very happy, though: its airlines will be allowed an exemption if it can prove it's taking comparable steps to reduce aviation emissions at home.

German cabinet decides on nuclear exodus by 2022 (Reuters Africa, June 6)
Not a surprise.

And, LNG demand rises as nuclear power is shunned (The Telegraph, June 6)
The shift away from nuclear is expected to increase demand for natural gas, tightening that market and driving prices up. That's probably a good thing for renewable energy, which has a tougher slog the cheaper natural gas is.

Thus, unsurprisingly, Chubu expects CO2 emissions to jump due to nuke plant shutdown (Reuters, June 8)
LNG power has a higher carbon content than nuclear power. (Similarly, Germany's nuclear energy blunder, The Washington Post, June 1; Berlin bets big on renewable energy, Financial Times.com, June 8)

Speaking of which, Golden age of gas may be a call too soon (Financial Times, June 7)
Interesting review of how the global natural gas market works. Bottom line: a lot of gas pricing is still tied up in long-term contracts that index the price of gas to the price of oil. However, the current trend is toward gas-to-gas pricing, in which gas is priced against its own spot market rather than oil (this is the current favored mechanism in the US). The latter makes for a better, more globalized market.

World Bank eyes a network of carbon markets in a make-or-break decade (Bloomberg, June 6)
Developing countries as incubators for a bunch of different carbon-pricing or other market experiments?

Romney draws early fire from conservatives over views on climate change (The Washington Post, June 8)
Romney takes the position that climate change is real and man-made; predictable results on the right.

Canada confirms it will reject new Kyoto Protocol (Reuters, June 8)
Canada, Japan, and Russia have all confirmed they won't support extending Kyoto through a second commitment period after 2012.

Technology breakthrough news for the week
New battery design could give electric vehicles a jolt (MITnews, June 6)
Slurry batteries could allow "gas-station" style refueling for batteries.

US solar power nears competing on price (Financial Times.com, June 8)
Importance self-evident.

And now for something completely different

I got an email a few days back that was totally unrelated to climate change. In college I got on this mailing list that aggregates and distributes reports of outbreaks of diseases of interest. Though I don't do bio anymore, lately I stay on it because the mailing list's editors often include little tidbits of background and explanation about the news blurbs they post, so it's an on-going practical education in which diseases epidemiologists care about (including the less famous ones), how they relate to population behavior, what the differential diagnoses are, how they're controlled, and so on.

This digest had an article about dog displacement in India. Dog displacement refers to capturing feral dogs in an area where they're causing problems (biting people, spreading rabies, etc.) and transporting them some ways away from the population center where, supposedly, they'll be less of a problem (or somebody else's problem).

From the perspective of rabies control, this is a problem in two ways. First, displaced dogs may have rabies, since rabies can take quite a while to show symptoms. So dog displacement can spread rabies around an area much more quickly and uncontrollably than natural churn would. Second, areas cleaned of dogs don't stay that way for long. New dogs move in. These new dogs may have rabies (even if your old population didn't), and because they're new to the area, they'll be more on edge and less familiar with the local people - more prone to fighting and biting. So from a rabies control perspective, it's much better to create a local feral population of dogs that have all been vaccinated against rabies. The article quotes Dr. Lisa Warden, managing director of ABC India: "A stable population of vaccinated dogs is one of the best defenses against rabies in rabies-endemic locations as they keep new, possibly unvaccinated, potentially rabid dogs out of their areas."

This reminded me of Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague, a book whose text is somewhat less scaremongering than its title would suggest. It's a series of analyses of the emergence and spread of several different diseases, and the basic message is, new disease emerge (and controlled, stable flows of old diseases blow up into epidemics) when some shift in the ecosystem occurs - a population moves or begins to behave differently, and this offers a new niche or transmission mechanism for the disease. You then have epidemics, until the population figures out what's going on and adopt new behaviors that control it.

So back to climate change. The standard line on climate change and disease is that as temperatures rise, tropical diseases will migrate further and further from the equator because their tropical hosts - like the mosquitoes that carry malaria, which could become a disease of the American south.

But what's more interesting to me to think about is how shifts in behavior, migrations of populations, and so on may destabilize ecosystems, resulting in new niches and transmission methods for diseases. What new diseases might emerge as animal populations shift in response to climate? What old diseases will blow up in when they find new niches? How will human behaviors change and what unexpected effects will that have on the opportunities open to microorganisms? When I was chatting about this with a friend who was interested in the same subject, one thing we thought of was this: when it comes to the emissions impact of meat sources, beef is the worst (because cows are ruminants). Chickens and pigs are better. But chickens and pigs living in close proximity to humans provides more opportunity for the passing back and forth of various strains of influenza. If climate change control efforts caused a large-scale shift away from cows toward pigs and chickens as meat sources in the US, would it affect the epidemiology of influenza in the US?

Numbers and scale

Lately I've been trying to get a better sense of overall scale so that I can fit numbers into it when I hear them. I'm trying to put together sets of numbers for reference. These may be of interest to others.


Emissions
(Source: EPA, http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/globalghg.html; IPCC 2007, http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/figure-spm-3.html)

• Total global GHG emissions: ~around 30 Gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2/yr) (current); ~49 Gigatons of CO2 equivalents (GtCO2e/yr) (2004)
• Global GHG emissions in 1990, the Kyoto Protocol's index year: ~22 GtCO2/yr; ~39 GtCO2e/yr
• US emissions: ~7 GtCO2/yr
• Average US power plant's yearly greenhouse gas emissions: ~1 million metric tons of CO2 equivalents

(Note the difference between CO2 and CO2 equivalents.)

Other Greenhouse Gases:
Some other greenhouse gases, with global warming potential as a multiple of carbon dioxide (source: EPA, http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05002.htm; IPCC 2007, http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/figure-spm-3.html):

• CO2 - 1
• Methane (CH4) - 21
• Nitrous oxide (N2O) - 310
• Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC)-134a - 1,300

These are emitted in smaller quantities than CO2 (CO2 makes up around 77% of greenhouse gas emissions when figured as CO2e), which is why you don't hear way more about them. But they ARE important. I've heard some people argue that we should be focusing more on methane than on CO2 right now, because it's effect occurs faster; and I've read that the single most effective international action taken versus climate change was in fact the Montreal Protocol controlling ozone-depleting substances (most of which are also potent GHGs).

Temperature
(Source: EPA, http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/downloads/Climate_Basics.pdf)

• How much we've warmed over the past century: 1.3 degrees F
• How much further we're on track to warm no matter what: about 1 degree F
• Current international consensus on the threshold of warming we want to avoid going past: 2 degrees C (roughly 3.6 degrees F)
• Likely average temperature rise by 2100 under business as usual scenarios: 3 to 7 degrees F (but note that emissions have lately been rising at worst-case scenario rates, so the higher value is considered more likely than the lower)

Money
The fact is, it's highly disputed how much climate change mitigation will cost. I've heard "2% of GDP" thrown around a lot as an expected cost of climate change mitigation. But there are those who would argue that that's too low, and those who would argue it's too high, and both arguments have some merit. Here I'm just going to give some representative numbers to give a sense of scale (source: Global Warming Gridlock, Victor 2011):

• What the EU thinks developing countries will need to be given to help them carry out climate change mitigation: $100B per year.
• What China estimated it would need to be given to help it carry out climate change mitigation: over $400B.
• What an MIT team estimated the developing world would need to be paid to cut world emissions in half by 2050: $400B to $3T per year, rising from 2020 to 2050.
• Rough amount of money channeled to developing countries over the lifetime of the Kyoto's Protocol (not per year) via the Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, the current largest international funding source: $50B

For adaptation, things are in my opinion even shakier to estimate, because it depends on how bad the situation you're adapting to is, and there are tipping points whose arrival are hard to predict. However, to give a sense of scale, a recent estimate by the EPA's sea-level experts found that it would cost about $1 trillion in direct costs to fortify the contiguous US against a three-foot sea level rise.

How Much Can the West Do On Its Own?

A lot of developing countries take the position that right now, the burden of cutting emissions should be taken on by the developed countries, while developing countries continue to develop on business as usual (BAU) curves or with moderate controls that slow but don't stop their emissions growth. Is this workable?

I'm not sure I fully understand this yet, but here's my first shot at it. The IPCC 2007 report contains a set of scenarios that assume different GHG projections and the expected warming associated with them: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/figure-spm-5.html. If I'm reading this correctly, the B1 scenario keeps warming to around 2 degrees C, which is considered mostly "safe." In this scenario, emissions are assumed to rise to around 56 GtCO2e/yr by 2030 and 58 GtCO2e/yr in 2040, and decline fairly sharply thereafter.

So, to figure this out, you need projections of the developing world's business as usual emissions trajectory and how much room (if any) that curve leaves underneath the B1 scenario - that's how much developed countries would have to reduce their collective emissions to to do it all on their own. I'm obviously not the first person to have thought of this. Here's a study that suggests it simply doesn't leave enough for developed countries to get down to under any realistic scenario (note that I've just skimmed this.) They figure China's emissions alone at between 11 and 19 GtCO2e/yr by 2030, with the total developing world at between 23 and 37 GtCO2e/yr (the paper uses carbon equivalents rather than CO2 equivalents; the conversion factor is 1 Ce to 44/12 CO2e). They use what looks to me like a more stringent emissions reduction curve than the IPCC B1 scenario, though. In the immortal words of Barbie, modeling is hard; let's go shopping.

Progressive vs. gridlocked treaties

I've realized I need a set of concepts that I haven't seen defined yet: on-going treaties, and their two sub-categories: let's call them progressive on-going treaties and gridlocked on-going treaties.

What I mean by this is that some "treaties" aren't so much treaties as they are multi-year processes, on-going efforts at managing some problem toward a solution or just toward on-going control of the problem. These processes occur because something about the nature of the issue area requires an on-going process. There are several reasons why this could happen: perhaps because the problem is an inherently chronic one that requires long-term management; perhaps because the problem to be solved is not fully understood and requires a process of discovery; perhaps because the solutions needed to solve the problem require development over time. But probably the most important reason these crop up is that a full solution is not politically possible at the outset and requires multiple rounds, perhaps with ratcheting up of the strength of multilateral action over time.

Sometimes these multi-year processes are going well and producing additional pay-offs in each round. An example of this is the process surrounding ozone-depleting substances: in this process, multiple meetings over time led to progressive ratcheting down of ODS emissions. Each round tended to produce further progress.

But sometimes these multi-year processes get gridlocked; they go round and round in circles, or each round of negotiation shipwrecks on the same set of problems that plagued the last one; or gains prove fleeting, with gains made in one round followed by slacking off rather than effective ratcheting up. The climate negotiation process seems to be an example of this. It gets called out constantly for all these problems.

People talk about gridlock specifically in the climate negotiations, but I haven't actually seen someone use this idea that negotiations can be an on-going management process and that that PROCESS can be progressive or gridlocked. But it's a different concept of success that is focused less on whether things are moving toward a successful end goal and more on whether the treaty is healthy in process and is producing an on-going series of gains.

The answer might be in the regime literature; climate negotiations might want to produce a "treaty", but the process of on-going institutionalized negotiation with intermediate goals might better be understood as an on-going regime. But I think that literature misses this point in other ways. Regime research gets the "on-going" part, but doesn't necessarily start from the same assumption of movement toward attainment of a goal or ever-increasing level of management of a problem. Regimes do change over time, but it isn't their goal to change over time, the way it is the goal of a negotiation process. Treaty-making is still about creating rules; regimes typically assume the rules have (largely) been created, though they may be added to.