Seeking agreement on international climate policymaking - Ecology

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 2003 by Seth Dunn

Another obstacle to better climate policy has been the reluctance in some quarters to acknowledge the climate-related efforts of developing nations. One of the enduring myths of Kyoto, perpetuated largely by opponents of the Protocol in the U.S., is that developing nations would be exempt from any commitments because they lacked the same binding targets. What the case studies suggest, on the contrary, is that, even before such targets are set for them, developing nations are moving to address their emissions--more, some have argued, than many industrial ones. In a 1999 report for the UN Development Programme, Jose Goldemberg and Walter Reid asserted that "clearly, developing countries are not passive spectators in the arena of climate change. They have already taken significant steps to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases below the levels that would otherwise occur" These countries' experiences demonstrate that many steps to reduce emissions make sense on economic grounds alone--a lesson that could be usefully exported from south to north.

Among the many impediments to effective climate policymaking in industrial and developing nations alike, the one looming largest has been the absence of leadership among industrial nations to agree to binding, specific commitments to reduce emissions. Indeed, the evidence makes it abundantly clear that the purely voluntary approach of the Rio treaty failed to promote strong domestic climate policymaking over the past decade and was therefore not up to the job of promoting meaningful progress toward reducing global carbon emissions. This conclusion, in turn, points to the vital importance of a global--and binding--framework to coordinate and accelerate action on climate change.

Increasingly, the need to coordinate climate policy globally has been accepted and advocated by distinguished economists. Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University argues in a 2001 paper--released the day after he won the Nobel Prize in economics--that significant movement on climate change requires that governments move on two fronts: to adopt cost-effective domestic climate policies and to set an "agenda for global collective action." William Nordhaus of Yale University, who has criticized the Kyoto Protocol as being potentially expensive, nonetheless concedes in the November 2001 issue of Science that the treaty's mechanisms will "provide valuable insights on how complicated international environmental programs will work.... It is hard to see why the United States should not join with other countries in paying for this knowledge."

Reengaging the world's largest emitter in the Kyoto process will be difficult, but essential. Richard Schmalensee, dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management, writes that "the longer the United States, other industrialized nations, and the developing world head down different policy tracks on global warming, the harder it will be to achieve the coordination necessary for effective action." The purely voluntary approach of the Bush Administration seems unlikely to change in the near future, notwithstanding the fact that such an approach, which was already questionable under Pres. George H.W. Bush during the 1992 Rio talks, is far less defensible today, with a decade of policy history under our belts. Indeed, we can now confidently discard the claim made in 1992--and recycled today--that soft, voluntary aims would get us where we need to go. To continue to make this case demonstrates either policy amnesia or willful neglect of the record of the past 10 years.