Negotiating power in climate change

What constitutes power in a climate negotiation? Assuming you define power as the ability to make other people do what you want, power in climate negotiations is actually a bit tricky. Pretty obviously, no one is going to go to war to enforce a climate goal, so military power is out. Economic power could conceivably be applied, but it almost certainly won't; the developed countries who are the most important backers of climate change deals probably do have enough economic clout to influence decision-making, but they seem to have largely agreed that their commitments to free trade agreements tie their hands in this area (or they've decided wielding economic power isn't worth the potential payoff, and are using free trade as an excuse; it's unclear to me. Maybe a little of both.)

One thing I'm sure about: if you want to have more clout in climate negotiations, start emitting more. Build as many coal-fired plants as you can, and make them as dirty as you can. Flare off natural gas fields. The bigger the share of the emissions pie you have, the more people have to pay attention to you, because the more difficult it is to solve the problem without you.

It's a limited kind of power, though. For instance, you can't use it to make other people do emissions reductions instead of you. You only have power to the extent that you're willing to reduce emissions; if you're just not willing to do that, you aren't part of the solution either way, and you don't matter. If you're individually big enough, you might in effect have veto power over solving the problem at all, but you don't have the power to make other people solve it for you.

You do probably have the power to dictate the form that solutions could take, though. China is currently the biggest individual emitter. If China decided the world should solve the climate change problem, and that the world should do it, for instance, with an emphasis on solar rather than wind, or on efficiency rather than renewables, I'd bet it could exercise some real influence on that aspect of climate deals.

China doesn't seem to be thinking that way, yet, though. China is still backing the Kyoto Protocol (because right now Kyoto essentially puts all the onus on developed countries to solve the problem), and the interesting thing about the Kyoto Protocol is that it doesn't give much latitude at all for negotiating about how to solve the climate problem. It's almost entirely consumed with who's going to solve how much of the problem - the central negotiating problem of the Kyoto framework is working out individual countries' commitments to specific country-level targets; implementation is left to countries to decide. (There are some parallel negotiations on specific issues like deforestation and technology transmission that are to some extent exceptions, but they haven't in my opinion become central enough to change my analysis here.)

I tend to think we'd have taken a major step forward if China would get to the point of accepting that it will, over time, need to make major emissions reduction steps, and therefore the question is how emissions cuts will be accomplished and what global strategies for reduction it can benefit from the most.