Forests and Rice

At an interesting talk right now. The point it's making is that naively, we view (re)forestation as a simple win for carbon dynamics: forests = sequestration and new forests are the best, because old-growth forests are basically in carbon balance, just storing carbon, while new forests are actively sequestering carbon that would otherwise stay in the atmosphere, lowering the net carbon content.

Of course, forest management can be a great tool for carbon management. But what complicates this is that not all forests and settings are created equal. If we engage in willy-nilly forestation that don't fit the ecological history and profile of the setting, we may fail to account for unintended consequences like catastrophic fires and the large carbon releases they create.

Edit: Now listening to a talk by a bioengineer whose team is currently testing a bioengineered rice plant with a gene that allows it to survive sitting in a submerged field for 17 days (ordinary rice dies after about three days of submersion.) Since most of Bangladesh is going to become increasingly prone to catastrophic flooding with global warming, this as a big deal. SUPER COOL.

Get-green-quick schemes

For every generation of environmental problems, there is a group of scientists willing to come up with whacky Rube Goldberg solutions:

Leon Sadler of Alabama University says we could do it [fix an ozone hole] by injecting 5,000 tonnes of ozone into the stratosphere a day for a century. You could, he says, hitch small ozone generators to ordinary commercial aircraft which could spray the ozone into the stratosphere on their normal flights, or you could fly special flights from world ozone production centres or even fire frozen 'bullets' of ozone into the air from special guns. 

--Fred Pearce, The Sunday Times (London), Mar. 5, 1989.

Frozen ozone bullets. From special guns.

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.