The Kyoto Protocol, completed in the early hours of December 11th 1997, at present is
no more than a potential breakthrough in the development of effective global policy for
the control of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and the mitigation of
human-induced global climate changes. The core issue of the negotiations has been deferred
until COP4 in November 1998. The industrial countries have negotiated a compromise that
subject to ratification will legally bind them to commitments beyond those in the UNFCCC.
But, the ratification of the Protocol by the US still remains contingent on achieving the
"meaningful participation" of "key" developing countries in the
abatement regime and the multilateral acceptance of international emissions trading. This
is a struggle to define property rights. These key developing countries include India and
China and they have made it clear that their acceptance of trading is contingent on the
achievement of "equitable allocations" of emissions entitlements based on
achieving equal per capita entitlements globally. COP issued instructions to the technical
bodies attached to the UNFCCC to "define the relevant principles, modalities, rules
and guidelines for emissions trading" in time for COP4 in November 1998 in Buenos
Aires.
GCI argues that "Contraction and Convergence" is the approach that can break
through this deadlock and welcomes the fact that major parties and interest groups in this
dispute have already acknowledged that they take this approach seriously and that it has
growing support throughout the world. As a leading economics commentator Peter Jay has
noted, "… unless there is some recognition that eventually no one group of
human being can expect to have an internationally recognised right to consume more of the
world's limited capacity to absorb greenhouse gas emissions than any other group, it is
hard to see how a globally enforceable policy can be built by consent." And in
the words of the President of GLOBE International, "Contraction
and Convergence is not simply the right way to solve the problem, it is the only way to
solve the problem."
CHALLENGE FROM IPPC CLIMATE SCIENCE The First Assessment Report (FAR - 1990) of the
Intergovernmental Panel climate Change (IPCC) noted that atmospheric concentrations of CO2
were 25% higher (350 ppmv) than pre-industrial (280 ppmv) and rising faster and higher
than anytime in the previous 160,000 years. An extremely strong correlation between rising
CO2 concentrations and human CO2 emissions [mainly from fossil fuel burning] was observed
from around 1800 forward. The IPCC also observed circumstantial links to rising global
mean temperature and stated that immediate minimum 60% to 80% cuts in human CO2
emissions were necessary if atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were to be stabilised just
at 1990 levels (see chart 1). Since then, IPCC has stated that the balance of evidence
suggests that there is a discernible human influence on the climate system. They also
suggested the damages consequent on no abatement and further global temperature increase
as being between serious and potentially catastrophic, regionally and even globally. Since
1990 there has been much investigation into what constitutes atmospheric greenhouse gas
concentrations levels that do not dangerously affect the climate system.
According to carbon cycle and global climate modelers, the time frame foreseen for
achieving at least 60% cuts in emissions is between 50 and 200 years, depending on the
ultimate atmospheric CO2 concentration goal. There is a real concern however, that even
going to 450 ppmv (60% cuts in emissions over roughly one hundred years) may result in
serious ecological and consequent socio-economic damages. The IPCC has published data
derived from climate models that attempt to demonstrate the quantitative links between
greenhouse gas emissions and accumulated atmospheric concentrations.
At the very least, sensible contingent planning requires that if the global community is to demonstrate both technically and politically that the worst of the potential damages from human-induced global climate change can be avoided, it will have to demonstrate that the cuts in emissions can be achieved. There will be a twin compromise. The rate of cutting emissions must rapid enough to halt the rise of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations below levels that dangerously affect the climate system. However, it must also be gradual enough to give time for non-fossil alternative energy sources and energy saving measures to be introduced so as not to precipitate an economic crisis. Moreover, the whole operation will have to be planned for inclusivity under continuous political and scientific review. Not only is it appropriate to insist that "a global solution is required for a global problem" as the US has repeatedly done, it is also necessary to actually come up with a global solution. This unavoidably means having to recognise and acknowledge that a global solution is by definition, constitutional. It will be the result of having first had to determine the principles upon which the rules for globally sharing finite resources will be founded and applied. In the case of climate change, this means determining the principles and rules for sharing a future global carbon budget that is also consistent with the twin compromise above The political struggles at Kyoto have brought the need for this unprecedented imperative into focus more sharply than before.
Deliberate limitation of CO2 emissions from industrial activity is certainly contentious. Dollar GDP from the formal economy has so far been very closely correlated with CO2 from fossil fuel burning (see Chart 1) and anything less than the positive growth of dollar GDP is regarded as a primary signal of macroeconomic failure. Consequently now achieving a delinking of GDP and CO2 emissions must be a primary feature of any future economic planning. Moreover, CO2 emissions and GDP are both historically and currently, very unevenly generated and distributed throughout the global economy. In simple language, it is those who have made the money who have also made the mess in the atmosphere. This is now increasing instability in global politics as well as in the global climate system, where the increasing risks of environmental adversity are increasing the risks of attendant social and political conflict. The issue of how to determine the "differentiated responsibilities" in any global programme required to achieve the necessary levels of emissions abatement is thorny and has confounded the UNFCCC negotiations all the way from INC1 in Washington in 1991 to COP3 in Kyoto in December 1997. The argument is fundamental, but is quite novel for being truly "global". Everybody regardless of levels of wealth and development is implicated, some as alleged perpetrators but all as probable victims.
Since 1990 we have been through three periods of argument about whether human-induced climate changes were occurring. The initial period of "no problem" gave way to a period of "no regrets" (perhaps there's a problem so do what makes sense for reasons of economic efficiency). In reality this all seems to have reflected a wish to postpone any genuine engagement with the real issues. For example John Knaess, the head of the US delegation to the Second World Climate Conference, insisted that "simple sophomore physics reveal that the problem is real" (greenhouse gases trap heat so more greenhouse gases trap more heat) and that the only questions were "how much" and "how soon". It bears some reflection as to why it took seven years until June 1996 at COP2, for the US government to attempt to get behind emissions abatement policy consistent with the acceptance of human-induced climate change as a reality. It seems probable that the real argument has always been about how to compute and then most particularly share the future sustainable "Global Carbon Budget". Post-Kyoto we are all now openly being called to account on this point. So, since COP2 we have been in the third period called "no solutions without developing countries". For the last eighteen months the call from across the board in the US has been that there has to be, "meaningful participation by developing countries" because "global problems require global solutions." This was in spite of the Berlin Mandate with its focus on developed country commitments only.
The period of tactical denial could well have related to the battle between two competing socio-economic arguments that were advanced at the outset for determining the international distribution of future CO2 emissions entitlements in the carbon budget. These were flat-rate emissions cuts globally with budget shares, or emissions entitlements, proportional either to GDP or to population. Application of each argument leads to very different distributions of entitlements globally. For example the USA in 1990 had approximately 4% of global population but emitted 25% of CO2 emissions with a GDP share to match. In the same year India had approximately 15% of global population but emitted 3% of CO2 emissions with a GDP share to match. It is no surprise therefore to find the US favored flat-rate cuts applied to shares proportional to initial GDP figures, while India favored shares proportional to population. In the World Bank's Development Report of 1992 the arguments were applied, the consequences were analysed and the inverse distributional results were compared. They noted distribution from shares equal on a per capita basis accumulated between 1950 and 1990, gave an overall negative share to developed countries stating simplistically that for that reason the alternative seemed the more feasible approach.
However, what the arguments have in common is that they are "pro rata" arguments where entitlements would be the result of applying a central organising principle to distribution out of necessity, simply to enable the collective contraction to be computed. The point here is that you have to make some assumption other than business-as-usual about distribution if you want to deliver the purpose of the UNFCCC, pre-eminently to deliver overall contraction of greenhouse gas emissions. Over the full period of achieving the 60% cuts in global emissions, this is unavoidably a negative-sum-game on emissions for everyone. And it is self-evident that without the application of a central organising principle to the determination of future allocations of emissions entitlements, the negative-sum-game of global carbon contraction will be unachievable. Business-as-usual and the now globally competitive character of market forces tend to engender deregulation and an erosion of democratic politics. If this culture is assumed for the management of greenhouse gas emissions, the future global carbon budget and its distribution will simply be the "invisible hand" in its malignant guise. It will be the ad hoc result of each party to the negotiations continuing the attempt to maximise its shares of the budget at the expense of all its competitors. Consequently, the future global carbon budget will expand indefinitely as the global aggregate of reluctance to clean up causing dangerously raised levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration. In other words it will be the ever more visible and aggressive hand of climate change and the painful damages it will bring. This will continue unless and until there is a multilateral willingness to accept the application of a central organising principle to the determination of future international shares of what globally is a deliberately conceived and managed budget for carbon contraction. Put another way, more and more people now seem to accept that two hundred countries times two hundred arguments will never achieve the level of international agreement required to secure 60% cuts in emissions globally. What should also be self-evident is that the defining character of such arrangements will be based on some universally recognisable principle of equity simply to secure the necessary multilateral acceptance of Quantified Emissions Limitations Reductions Objectives (QELROS). If so it would then be recognised that any efficiencies that are achievable will be derived from - rather than give rise to - the primacy of the equity based arrangements. In other words principle and practice are inseparably linked and the old adage is true: "principle without practice is useless and practice without principle is dangerous."
So far, the most frequent argument of many Western economists has been that sustainable future CO2 emissions entitlements should be distributed between countries proportional to GDP precisely because of the close correlation between CO2 and GDP. Contrarily, most developing countries have argued that sustainable future CO2 emissions entitlements should be distributed between countries proportional to population because the global atmosphere and climate system are a "global commons", the sustainable use of which should be the equal responsibility of all members of the global community. If the commons belongs to anybody, it belongs to everybody. Both themes are embedded in the language of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Moreover, while the "basis of equity" is recognised in the UNFCCC in the context of international per capita emissions paths which are historically disparate, "cost-effectiveness" of global emissions abatement measures is also called for, which is portrayed as pursuing the "global benefit" (of avoided emissions) at least possible cost.
But so far they have been polarised to an intractable seeming deadlock. Those who see entitlements as being proportional to GDP not only get the bulk of entitlements, they have also seen themselves as the main providers of entitlements in any market that may emerge where entitlements are tradable internationally. In other words if there was emissions trading and we were following the World Bank's "most feasible" case, India would purchase entitlements from the USA. The US Mineworkers Association put out material making this case in the run up to COP3 in Kyoto. Contrarily, because at least 50% of any year's emissions continue to reside in the atmosphere over very long time frames, countries with low per capita consumption have argued that they are innocent of causing climate change historically, currently and even into the medium term future. The Brazilian proposals to COP3 for example attempted to define responsibility for observed global temperature rises by computing national proportions of blame as a function of nationally accumulated historical emissions. The result of this analysis shows that countries such as Brazil remain "blameless" well into the future. Bach Koomey and Krause did a related exercise in a report for the Dutch Government ("Energy Policy in the Greenhouse" – Earthscan 1989) where "blame" was linked to nationally accumulated historical per capita emissions. The result of this particular analysis demonstrated that if equal emissions entitlements were the currency for resolving the problems of global abatement, the industrial countries are already indebted to developing countries to the extent of total bankruptcy. There have been many other attempts at straightening out distributional methodology for the allocations of future emissions entitlements. They usually involve more or less complex combinations of weighted indicators such as carbon intensity of emissions, per capita GDP and per capita emissions (proposed by the Norwegians) and emissions per unit of export (favoured by coal-rich Australia). This has usually been applied to time frames well short of stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations and often to only sub-global country groupings such as the Annex One of the UNFCCC for example. Moreover, special exceptions have been achieved as well where for example the US has successfully negotiated that emissions associated with UN-backed military operations should not be added to the accounts of the countries undertaking the operations.
Faced with this degree of intractable complexity and quarreling, some commentators have pooh-poohed the need for a central organising principle altogether. Some are non-contrarians suffering from real anxieties about climate change and a process which seems fundamentally unwilling to really engage in the politics beyond denial, self-exemption and exclusivity. Often they have expectations based on accepting the continued operations of unfettered markets and link these to programs conceived in the mould of "Joint Implementation". Others suggest a general disposition towards "adaptation to" rather than "mitigation of" climate changes is a more realistic way of "submitting to" the future. This occasionally tends – probably not co-incidentally – to accompany the at least residually contrarian views of human-induced climate change, where the need for carbon contraction per se is still questioned. The adversities of climate change are seen as being on a scale from exaggerated to non-existent and the extent of human-causation of climate changes either as over-emphasized or invented and overwhelmingly irrelevant. There is also a line of reasoning which says that with or without climate change, the ability of humans to devise and operate to anything political that has a component of central planning is "ideological" and therefore undesirable and probably ineffective or unachievable in practice anyway.
What this reveals is that without a clearly perceived need for carbon contraction, the issue of "fairness" remains as ambiguous as ever it was. "Haves" defend unequal distribution as "fair" because rewards should be proportional to factors such as competence, initiative and sustained effort. "Have-nots" usually defend redistribution towards equal distribution as "fair" pointing to structural disadvantage usually in the context of the traditional arguments between capital and labour. In essence the "North/South" argument is no different from this albeit at a global level.
Distributional fairness, in circumstances where the increasing gap between "haves" and "have-nots" is structurally resisted, is probably easiest identified with the application of welfare economics as at least a necessary buffer against the social distortions of unmitigated market-forces. Distributional fairness, in circumstances where the increasing gap between "haves" and "have-nots" is seen as requiring reversal and even closure, probably embraces everything between the tendency to philanthropy on the one hand and the tendency to say "when's it my turn?" on the other. Some people (usually characterised as coming from the left and often but not always in the constituency of "have-nots") appear to be for distributional fairness. And some people (usually characterised as coming from the right and often but not always in the constituency of "haves") appear not to be. These inverse policy attitudes about "fairness" tend to centre on the distribution of socially created and privately partitioned wealth measured as GDP or the "benefit" of income alone. Seen this way arguments concerning "distributional fairness" would seem to have no altered prospects of relevance or realisation one way or the other now than in the past. Although globally the have-nots consistently have been and remain the majority, the "haves" dominate the political decision-taking related to distributional fairness. The resultant status quo embeds a trade-off between these left/right tendencies, stabilised by a well-established legal framework for continuity in property rights with much attendant academic and theoretical work explaining and justifying the "political economy" of this status quo.
In global terms, this framework has not been subjected to any pressures that seriously challenge its sustainability and therefore its legitimacy until the present and the advent of human-induced global climate changes. But in the economics of the global commons everything changes. The rules which developed for the distribution and protection of the socially "created wealth" cannot simply be transposed to encompass the "received wealth" of the commons. The commons are the nearest thing we could identify with providence itself. This is wealth we did not create nor could we. As Tim Wirth of the US State Department said on the subject last year in his lecture at Kew Gardens, "the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment." With this understanding of subsidiarity and the very global scale of the problem, it is not foolish us to look for new principles of wealth protection and security and distribution related to establishing property rights in the global commons.
An eminent contributor to the climate change debate – Professor William Nordhaus
of Yale University –introduced ideas for "The Economic Management of the Global
Commons". However his have relied mainly on neo-classical assumptions in favour of
using "Global Cost-Benefit Analysis" for this task. He and many other economists
contributing to the IPCC's Second Assessment Report (SAR) maintained that the whole
question of what to do about climate change is answerable through recourse to analysis of
this kind. Their early results were collated in the SAR published in 1996. The results
tended to portray the costs of damages from climate changes as being less than the costs
of the actions for emissions abatement necessary to avoid these damages. Bluntly, it was
cost effective to go along with climate change, not to resist it. The whole exercise
seemed to have the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy in favour of business-as-usual.
In effect it was polluters contentiously tending to put a high price on abatement and a
low price on damage. The clearest example of the latter being the cash evaluation of
global mortality at CO2 doubling where crudely fifteen dead Chinese equaled one dead
American, despite one living Chinese emitting about one tenth of the industrial CO2 of one
American. It was also despite the even more skewed history of the emissions of industrial
CO2 and the fact that at least half the emissions in any year accumulate there with a
residence time of about 100 years. (The US alone with an average 3% of global population
over the last century and a half remains responsible for just under 35% of accumulated
industrial CO2 emissions to date). In fact all damage evaluation resorted to the snap-shot
convention of expressing units of damage as cash values proportional to the average levels
of local income. The predictable result was that damages of all kinds in developing
countries were devalued relative to the equivalent unit of damage in a developed country.
So in spite of the prediction that there would be roughly five times as much damage in
developing countries as in developed countries, the overall cash value assigned to the
damages in developing countries was about half that of the value of the damages predicted
to occur in developed countries. And all this was contributing to a global cost/benefit
comparison that broadly suggested that it was cheaper to adapt to the damages from climate
changes than to prevent them. Unsurprisingly it was characterised as the economics of
genocide in the Indian press.
These analytical results attracted much criticism in the fora of the United Nations such
as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). These fora had been
created especially to mediate and resolve the international policy conflicts of
human-induced climate change, not to exacerbate them. The attempt to mediate some of the
dispute that followed in the IPCC itself is recorded in the Summary for Policy Makers of
Chapter 6 of the Working Group Three contribution to the IPCC SAR. (It is reproduced as
Appendix B). The period seems in retrospect to have been one of "stressful
learning". Perhaps a more relaxed and robust attitude is now possible with regard to
the need to test a whole array of relevant assumptions. Some at least of these will
inevitably underpin the next round of analysis and its assessment in the IPCC's Third
Assessment Report (TAR) due for completion some time after the year 2000. It seems crucial
in the preparations for the TAR that the economic assumptions related to the assignment of
property rights in the global commons are reassessed. This is relevant because
"meaningful participation" in the UNFCCC of developing countries is one of the
conditions the US attaches to its ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
It is fair to point out that much of the economic analysis reflected in the SAR was conceived during the earlier period of "no regrets". During this period, climate change as a human-induced problem was generally downplayed, alongside the continuing efforts of climate contrarians who were attempting to demonstrate that there was actually "no problem" at all. Their efforts continue at this time in an increasingly implausible way. However, at that time uncertainties to do with the climate changes were clearly more about whether the problem really existed than with concerns about actually under-reading the dangers of climate change and potential catastrophes. For example the most of the potential for biogeochemical feedbacks was omitted from the climate models because of their complex non-linearity. Much of this potential would contribute to the upward forcing of global temperature if the mechanisms become active. Large releases of the greenhouse gas methane from beneath tundra and icecaps as they melt will increase warming. Little understood but globally crucial CO2 sinks in the boreal forests and elsewhere could easily switch off as the temperature rises. Increased water vapour in the atmosphere as a result of ocean warming will compound the warming effect. The range of increased temperature predicted by the models (e.g. with a best-guess 2.5 degrees Celsius rise at CO2 doubling) are inadequate because the models could only in effect assign a zero value to these factors. The quantitative results acquired have nonetheless achieved the status of "received wisdom" simply by virtue of the frequent reference made to them. When uncertainty is cited in this context it has been of the "even-handed" kind, which positions the results as being between either too high or too low. The quantitative absence of feedbacks in the models results clearly give results that err on the side of caution however.
Faced with these dimensions of complexity, it is not surprising that economics has been struggling to redefine itself in the face of global ecological imperatives. Even Professor Nordhaus by 1997 had loosened his neo-classical belt a little. In a paper for the IPIECA conference last year he commented as follows, "Once we open the door to consider catastrophic changes, a whole new debate is engaged. If we do not know how human activities will affect the thin layer of life-supporting activities that gave birth to and nurture human civilization and if we cannot reliably judge how potential geophysical changes will affect civilization or the world around us, can we use the plain vanilla cost-benefit analysis (or even the premium variety in dynamic optimization models). Should we no be ultraconservative and tilt towards preserving the natural world at the expense of economic growth and development? Do we dare put human betterment before the preservation of natural systems and trust that human ingenuity will bail us out should Nature deal us a nasty hand?" Having asked the questions he asserts a preference for the reasoned judgement of natural and social scientists over the judgement of philosophers and politicians. But he acknowledges the "massive uncertainties" and suggests that "coping with climate change is a worthy challenge for us all." This is all a far cry from his suggestion a few years back when he suggested that climate change was of no consequence to the US as they had air conditioning and shopping malls. Later he suggested that spotted-owl-equivalents would do just as well as money for the numeraire in the global cost benefit analyses of climate change. It was the one moment of mirth in the period of "stressful learning"; - no one at the UN could understand how 15 dead Chinamen equaled one dead Englishman if a spotted owl equaled a spotted owl. Economics is sometimes more daft than dismal.
So what do social scientists – and most particularly the neoclassical economists - now suggest is the solution to the international distributional struggle? How do we establish the pattern of the ownership of the entitlements to consume a future global carbon budget that is finite and contracting by around 60% so as to be consistent with the objective of the UNFCCC? Is the role of politicians simply to relay the wisdom of social scientists to the negotiations at the UN and so deliver the climate treaty? It certainly hasn't worked so far. And critically the US is seeking the general acceptance of the international tradability of pollution permits and the assigning of property rights in the global commons is essential to the exercise. Simply trading margins off the existing trends of pollution in the globally inequitable status quo will not bring about the reductions to which the developed countries are now legally committed. Nor particularly will it encourage the involvement of the developing countries on whose participation the process and its success so obviously depends and whose participation in an unavoidable way depends on the issue of distributional fairness globally. As the end-game of Kyoto clearly demonstrates, China, India and the Africa Group of nations are making "equitable allocations" and the acceptance of linking Contraction to Convergence a precondition of their acceptance of emissions trading and their involvement in any global solution. This not an invitation to have another century of neoclassical economics. It is about limits. Its more than a worthy challenge, it is wholly unprecedented in human affairs. Just as capitalism surrounded and contained communism, now the massive uncertainties of climate change engendered by them both, surround and contain them both. Discovering the way forward is a challenge more rigorous than merely worthy.
Given disputes over early efforts, (the "descriptive" acceptance of CO2
property rights proportional to GDP, mortality evaluation being made proportional to
income and so on), the allegedly left/right relationship of what is presented as
"prescriptive" as against "descriptive" should be re-evaluated in a
common sense way. The free-market model is described as being free choice in action and
largely unfettered by prescription. People vote with their dollars every time they make a
purchase in this market. And this market described as GDP, also currently describes the
human causation of climate change. Here is a descriptive example of the distribution of
dollars globally in the global free-market in 1990. One third of global population
responsible for 90% of fossil fuel emissions had 94% of the dollar-equivalent purchasing
power, while the other two thirds responsible for 10% of fossil fuel emissions had the
remaining 6% of the dollar-equivalent purchasing power. Notwithstanding, the SAR
economists from the wealthy group describing this market with cost-benefit analysis
revealed that it was cheaper to adapt to climate change than not. One consequence was that
the dollar vote of Bangladesh for example was not big enough to weight the cost/benefit
ratio towards prevention and away from adaptation.
The analysis claimed to be merely descriptive and free of prescription, but for the
Bangladeshis it was a prescription about learning to adapt to rising sea level. The
distinction between what is descriptive and prescriptive is not as clear as the
convenience of cost/benefit analysis requires. In the now altered circumstances of
human-induced climate change, it is a false dichotomy. Being in any way rational and
particularly having recourse to measurements of any kind whatsoever, is being both by
definition. Heisenberg clarified that.
This doesn't mean we should all try and seek immediate nescience. And nor does invite a continued tendency to tolerate the unfortunate free-market requirement for the liquidation of people who haven't got any money. What common sense requires is a re-appraisal of our collective prospects freed from some of the absurdities above. It is not wrong to openly contemplate our prospects in terms of a requirement for negotiated prescriptivity in global solutions to global problems.
This re-appraisal may have already begun. At the meeting of IPCC WG3 in Oslo in August 1997, the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) at Stanford University introduced specifications for modelers that for the first time included the device of a "prescriptive" requirement on the future distribution of global emissions entitlements. It was inter alia that the future costs and benefits of climate change control measures be evaluated in the context of carbon budgets which had been internationally distributed on the basis of a deliberate convergence to equal per capita shares globally by various predetermined dates. One of the core group members, Richard Richels, made the sanguine point that no economist can come up with sensible numbers for the international distribution of the costs of climate change policy "until the economists had been given the rules of distribution". In the absence of agreement yet at the political level at the UNFCCC, the EMF had discontinued the pattern of "descriptive-only" distributional assumptions, as continued in the SAR, and admitted the expedient of at least theoretically prescribing a variety of formal convergence-based examples of distribution. Elsewhere on the theme of "Burden Sharing", in the IPIECA "Symposium on The Economics of Climate Change" (1997) he and his colleague Alan Manne, were even more specific. "We begin with one widely discussed proposal: a transition to equal per capita emissions rights (globally) by 2030," again allowing the expedient of a "prescription" to "solve" what is otherwise insoluble.
It is worth emphasizing that there are three key decisions here. One is that an assumption has been made that "prescriptivity" is unavoidably part of the process. Two is that the "prescriptivity" is the result of the application of a central organising principle. Three is that the choice of central organising principle (the convergence to equal per capita) is one which has been "widely discussed" which could be read as evidence of the reasonableness of the idea and that these economists share that judgement about that reasonableness.
We have actively advocated the linking of carbon contraction to percapita convergence of emissions entitlements globally for many years. We see this as the practical expression of recognising the global link between equity and survival. It is not equity just for its own sake but the equity of necessity. And we have also pleaded the wisdom or more probably just common sense of recognising the lack of any viable alternatives to this undoubted political novelty. Consequently GCI welcomes the positive attention being given to these ideas by these academics, and also now many bureaucrats, politicians, diplomats and other NGOs.
Our attempt to make a positive contribution to this debate has been not just to pose the need for "Contraction and Convergence". We have also provided and promulgated a planning model with a central organising principle for distributional equity that can demonstrate many scenarios for the generation of integrated global accounts for emissions entitlements. In these, after the given initial distribution of CO2 emissions entitlements, they are progressively distributed under any chosen (and even revisable) global cap so that the available entitlements become more proportional to population each year. This creates a pattern of international convergence to any chosen future date, from which point forward international emissions entitlements would contract pro rata on an equal per capita basis as determined by the global cap and any revision thereof. "Contraction and Convergence" is not a prescription per se, it is way of demonstrating how a global prescription could be negotiated and organised.
At the First Conference of the Parties (COP1) in April 1995, the Indian Government,
drawing on GCI's equity-focused contributions to the IPCC WG3 sections of the SAR,
proposed a solution to future global carbon budgeting. It is significant that this
happened at a time when the terms of the Berlin Mandate were being drawn up. While the
mandate foresaw only strengthened commitments on greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement for the
Industrial Countries of Annex One – that is with no GHG abatement commitments being
contemplated for the developing countries of Non-Annex One – it is significant that
the Indian Environment Minister declared: -
"We face the actuality of scarce resources and the increasing potential for
conflict. Protecting the world's environment requires that development be sustainable. It
also implies the implementation of a programme for convergence at equitable and
sustainable par values for the use of environmental space on a per capita basis globally.
In our view equal rights to carbon usage is fundamental to the
convention." (This is "Contraction and Convergence").
"Policy instruments such as tradable emissions, carbon taxes and joint implementation
may well serve to make matters worse unless they are properly referenced to targets and
timetables to be observed by those responsible for the damage to the atmosphere and
biosphere. The social, financial and ecological inter-relationships of equity should guide
the route to global ecological recovery."
"Contraction and Convergence" is ever more widely seen as a way of overcoming the negotiating impasse between the United States of America, the other Annex One Countries and the Non Annex countries. Potentially it resolves USA's insistence on emissions trading and "globality", where "all" or "key" developing countries must be pre-figured for abatement commitments if the general Kyoto settlement, is to achieve the necessary ratification, whilst meeting the developing countries requirement for "equitable allocations".
The test of whether global emissions trading is relevant or irrelevant is not merely "avoided emissions at least cost." Stated thus, it is not indexed to the objective of the UNFCCC. The test is stabilisation of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at levels that avoid disruption of the global climate system at least cost. Here "cost" means both damage cost (regardless of whether these costs are or can be monetised or not) and emissions abatement cost required for this. However, effecting the "relevant" trade plan is contingent on establishing globally inclusive QELROs and GCI asserts is not possible without "Contraction and Convergence". Thus pursuing "relevant" emissions trade commands by definition convergence as well as reducing the costs of contraction. This way gives the triple win. The first and second parties, the trading partners, win but because of the equitable distribution so do the third parties. In other words all parties and the planet win because through "Contraction and Convergence" with trade climate change is avoided at least cost globally.
See also the report "Global Equity Dawns during Kyoto's Final
Hour"
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