At least it’s something
There may be some hope yet on the climate change front. To be sure, last weekend’s Paris Agreement on climate change doesn’t amount to much as international agreements go: the only commitments are to produce a plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to provide period progress reports. These plans don’t even need to satisfy a minimal level of stringency: the phrase “nationally determined contributions” is repeated 40 times. Nor are there provisions for penalizing countries that fail to follow through on their own plans.
People who were hoping for more tangible results have to content themselves with talk of goals, although even these objectives are heavily qualified. Signatories are to “aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible,” noting that “peaking will take longer for developing countr( ies).” And for all the talk of the news of the new, stricter ceiling of a 1.5 C increase in global temperatures, the only concrete gesture to achieve it was to invite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to do more research based on this scenario.
This may be disappointing, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Greenhouse gas emissions are probably the biggest and toughest collective action problem that we’ve tried to address. From the point of view of an individual — or even an individual country the size of Canada — there’s not much point in taking action. If everyone else reduces their emissions, then Canada’s emissions aren’t going to drive up global temperatures. And if no- one else slows their emissions, then a reduction in Canadian emissions will only produce economic pain for no environmental gain. The problem negotiators faced in with Paris is the same one they faced in Kyoto and in Rio before that: it’s in everyone’s interest to sign an agreement, and it’s in no- one’s interest to take action.
The same dynamic plays out within countries as well. Although a significant minority of the population is prepared to dismiss the work of climatologists without taking the trouble to produce a credible climate model that supports their opinion, most Canadians agree that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced, or at least increase at a slower rate.
This collective will is not matched by individual readiness to act, however. According to the most recent National Survey of Canadian Public Opinion on Climate Change, one Canadian in four is unwilling to pay any cost to reduce emissions. Of those who are willing to pay something, more than half said they were only prepared to accept a cost of $ 100 or less. To put this in perspective, this is the per capita equivalent of a $ 5 a tonne carbon tax, much less than the $ 30 a tonne tax that is already in effect in British Columbia and which has been proposed for Alberta. ( Support for a revenue- neutral carbon tax is somewhat stronger.)
This tension between the collective desire to do something and the individual resistance against doing anything explains much of the policy paralysis in the climate change file over the past decades, both internationally and within Canada. Successive governments have felt public pressure to do something — or at least be seen to be doing something — but it’s been a challenge to obtain public support for these efforts. Too often, these initiatives degenerated into complicated schemes of regulations, special preferences and exemptions whose goal was to lead people to believe that someone else would bear the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
It is on this last point that the Paris Agreement offers some grounds for optimism: all countries are taking part. A fatal
Greenhouse gas emissions are probably the biggest and toughest collective action problem that we’ve tried to address
weakness of the Kyoto Protocol was that it exempted developing countries, China in particular. Even if all countries had respected their commitments — as Canada famously did not — these improvements would have been largely cancelled out by increased emissions from the rest of the world. Bringing developing nations into the framework and broadening the base of emissions policy was a necessary step for any credible process.
A broader application doesn’t mean reducing emissions uniformly. One of the advantages of policies that put a price on carbon is that it doesn’t reduce all emission activities, just the ones where the benefits from producing emissions aren’t large enough to justify their costs. A price on carbon forces out marginal, low- value activities, while allowing high- value activities to continue. The language in the Paris Agreement that softens the anticipated contributions from developing countries plays a similar role. For example, building power generation capacity for the 300 million Indians without access to electricity is the sort of high- value project that should still go through.
The usual way of dealing with collective action problems is for the government to impose and enforce a solution. This option is still unavailable at the international level, so not much should have been expected of the Paris meetings: the real decisions will be made at the national level.
People hoping for action will no doubt be disappointed by an agreement that reads like a list of talking points. But at least this time, environmental policy- makers around the world will be working from the same script.