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Livros Alfredo Sirkis

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The Hartwell Paper A new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009


Responsável pelo cadastro: THE HARTWELL PAPER: FINAL TEXT

Data do cadastro: 10/06/2010

Resumo do documento:

Hartwell House, Buckinghamshire, where the co-authors conceived this paper, 2-4 February 2010
May 2010
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The co-authors
Professor Gwyn Prins, Mackinder Programme for the Study of Long Wave
Events, London School of Economics & Political Science, England
Isabel Galiana, Department of Economics & GEC3, McGill University, Canada
Professor Christopher Green, Department of Economics, McGill University,
Canada
Dr Reiner Grundmann, School of Languages & Social Sciences, Aston University,
England
Professor Mike Hulme, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East
Anglia, England
Professor Atte Korhola, Department of Environmental Sciences/ Division of
Environmental Change and Policy, University of Helsinki, Finland
Professor Frank Laird, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of
Denver, USA
Ted Nordhaus, The Breakthrough Institute, Oakland, California, USA
Professor Roger Pielke Jnr, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research,
University of Colorado, USA
Professor Steve Rayner, Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University
of Oxford, England
Professor Daniel Sarewitz, Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes,
Arizona State University, USA
Michael Shellenberger, The Breakthrough Institute, Oakland, California, USA
Professor Nico Stehr, Karl Mannheim Chair for Cultural Studies, Zeppelin
University, Germany
Hiroyuki Tezuka, General Manager, Climate Change Policy Group, JFE Steel
Corporation (on behalf of Japan Iron and Steel Federation), Japan
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface...................................................................................................................................... 4
Executive Summary ............................................................................................................... 5
Part I: From ‘How to get climate policy back on course’ to ‘The Hartwell paper’ . 6
Part II: Radical Re-framing................................................................................................ 10
A: Our three over-arching goals ................................................................................... 12
1) Ensuring energy access for all..................................................................................... 12
2) Ensuring viable environments protected from various forcings.............................. 13
3) Ensuring that societies can live and cope with climate risk (‘adaptation’) ............ 14
B: How climate change was systematically misunderstood 1985-2009, and some
consequences arising.......................................................................................................15
C: Misunderstanding the nature of the science of Earth systems ....................... 17
Part III: A Radical Departure from Business-As-Usual in Climate Policy ............ 19
A: Returning the relegated non-CO2 ‘forcers’ to front line service ..................... 21
B: Ensuring that the best is not the enemy of the good in a complex world .... 23
1) The political prerequisite of energy efficiency strategies.......................................... 24
The Potential for and Limits to a Sectoral Approach Focused on Efficiency: A
Case Study of the Steel Industry’s Global Sectoral Approach...............................25
2) The primacy of accelerated decarbonisation of energy supply................................ 27
C: How to pay for it: the case for a low hypothecated (dedicated) carbon tax. 32
Conclusion............................................................................................................................ 35
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Preface
This paper arises from a meeting convened by the LSE in February 2010 to consider the
implications of developments in climate policy in late 2009.
The Hartwell meeting was a private meeting, held under the Chatham House Rule. It
included participants from various disciplines in the sciences and humanities, from
academic and other walks of life and from around the world. The resulting Hartwell Paper
is the third in a series to have been co-published in a collaboration between London and
Oxford. In 2007, Professor Steve Rayner and I published The Wrong Trousers: Radically
Rethinking Climate Policy, and an associated summary of some of the main arguments in
Nature (‘Time to ditch Kyoto’, 449, 25 October). This was followed in July 2009, with a
larger circle of co-authorship, by ‘How to get climate policy back on course’. That circle
has changed and expanded further for the present work.
The Mackinder Programme at the LSE exists to delve into the deeper driving forces of
events, which may, like a volcano, produce sudden eruptions but which are different from
and more than the accumulated visible clouds of smoke and ash. It is concerned with the
magma and the tectonic plates – the geopolitics, including especially the many cultural
dimensions – of events. Accordingly, the purpose of the Hartwell meeting was to take a
long view of all the aspects of the crisis which enveloped global climate policy during the
winter of 2009/10. Many of us were not surprised that climate diplomacy had crashed: we
had been predicting this for some time. Other aspects were less expected. Therefore, in
early February 2010 we sought to discover to what degree we shared an understanding of
what had gone on and why; but especially, we sought in discussion and concretely in this
paper, to look forward and to recommend productive courses of action.
The School is grateful for financial support from the Japan Iron and Steel Federation and
the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, the Nathan Cummings Foundation
(NCF), New York and the Fondation Hoffmann, Geneva which made this meeting and
project possible. We have a special debt to Peter Teague, Program Director at NCF, for his
advice and help. None of the funders necessarily endorses any or all of the resulting
paper, of course. As convenor, I am grateful to colleagues in the Research Project &
Development Division and in the Office of Development & Alumni Relations at LSE who
nimbly and efficiently helped to put together and to manage the support for this work.
I am also extremely grateful to my colleague Johanna Möhring, Visiting Fellow in the
Mackinder Programme, and to Dalibor Rohac, Weidenfeld Scholar at the University of
Oxford, for assisting me in the conduct of the Hartwell meeting. Michael Denton and the
staff at Hartwell House deserve our thanks for providing us with peaceful surroundings in
which to meet and for ensuring that the conference-calling all worked faultlessly to
enable us to include in the discussions Indian and Chinese colleagues who were not able
to be present in person. Finally, I wish to express my thanks to all co-authors for their
collegial and intensive engagement.
G. Prins
London School of Economics
London
April 2010
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Executive Summary
Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the
world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernable real
world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years. The underlying
reason for this is that the UNFCCC/Kyoto model was structurally flawed and doomed
to fail because it systematically misunderstood the nature of climate change as a policy
issue between 1985 and 2009. However, the currently dominant approach has acquired
immense political momentum because of the quantities of political capital sunk into it.
But in any case the UNFCCC/Kyoto model of climate policy cannot continue because it
crashed in late 2009. The Hartwell Paper sets and reviews this context; but doing so is
not its sole or primary purpose.
The crash of 2009 presents an immense opportunity to set climate policy free to fly at
last. The principal motivation and purpose of this Paper is to explain and to advance
this opportunity. To do so involves understanding and accepting a startling
proposition. It is now plain that it is not possible to have a ‘climate policy’ that has
emissions reductions as the all encompassing goal. However, there are many other
reasons why the decarbonisation of the global economy is highly desirable. Therefore,
the Paper advocates a radical reframing – an inverting – of approach: accepting that
decarbonisation will only be achieved successfully as a benefit contingent upon other
goals which are politically attractive and relentlessly pragmatic.
The Paper therefore proposes that the organising principle of our effort should be the
raising up of human dignity via three overarching objectives: ensuring energy access for
all; ensuring that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the essential
functioning of the Earth system; ensuring that our societies are adequately equipped to
withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever
their cause may be.
It explains radical and practical ways to reduce non-CO2 human forcing of climate. It
argues that improved climate risk management is a valid policy goal, and is not simply
congruent with carbon policy. It explains the political prerequisite of energy efficiency
strategies as a first step and documents how this can achieve real emissions reductions.
But, above all, it emphasises the primacy of accelerating decarbonisation of energy
supply. This calls for very substantially increased investment in innovation in noncarbon
energy sources in order to diversify energy supply technologies. The ultimate
goal of doing this is to develop non-carbon energy supplies at unsubsidised costs less
than those using fossil fuels. The Hartwell Paper advocates funding this work by low
hypothecated (dedicated) carbon taxes. It opens discussion on how to channel such
money productively.
To reframe the climate issue around matters of human dignity is not just noble or
necessary. It is also likely to be more effective than the approach of framing around
human sinfulness –which has failed and will continue to fail.
The Hartwell Paper follows the advice that a good crisis should not be wasted
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Part I: From ‘How to get climate policy back on course’
to ‘The Hartwell paper’
One year ago, few would have guessed that by the spring of 2010 climate
policy would be in such public disarray. Two watersheds were crossed during
the last months of 2009, one political and one scientific. The narratives and
assumptions upon which major Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) governments had relied until that moment in shaping
and pushing international climate policy towards becoming global climate
policy have been undermined. The course that climate policy has been
pursuing for more than a decade is no longer sustainable – climate policy
must find a new way forward. And that presents us with an immense
opportunity to set climate policy free to fly at last. The principal motivation
and purpose of this paper is to explain and to advance this opportunity.
The first watershed is to be found within intergovernmental and international
diplomacy. It was crossed on 18th December, a day which marked the
confusing and disjointed ending to the climate conference in Copenhagen.
The Accord which emerged from that meeting holds an uncertain status and
it is not clear what the commitments under it might signify. Not only had no
agreements of any consequence been reached, but the very process of
multilateral diplomacy through large set-piece conferences had been called
into question. So too was the leading role in global climate policy previously
assumed by Europe. China, India, Brazil and South Africa in particular took
initiative and expressed different views from those of the previous ruling
consensus.1 Yvo de Boer, the long-serving chairman of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), who had guided the
process through meeting after increasingly inconclusive meeting in recent
years, has since announced his resignation and future plans to work in the
private sector.
The second watershed is to be found within the science of climate change. It
was crossed on 17th November. The climate science community has
experienced an accelerated erosion of public trust following the posting on
that date of more than a 1,000 emails from the University of East Anglia
Climatic Research Unit.2 These emails, whose authenticity is not denied,
suggested that scientists may have been acting outside publicly understood
norms of science in their efforts to bolster their own views and to discredit
the views of those with whom they disagreed.3 Not long after this, and partly
as a consequence of the questions of trust thus raised, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which many governments had represented
to their subjects or citizens as an impeccable “Gold Standard” validating their
policies, also came under increased (and continuing) scrutiny as a
consequence of errors and sloppiness, many of longer standing, but
highlighted specifically in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. Universities,
governments and the United Nations are all now conducting inquiries into
many aspects of climate science and the conduct of climate scientists and
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science bureaucrats. In short, the legitimacy of the institutions of climate
policy and science are no longer assured.
In fairness it must be said that the task at Copenhagen was intractable
because in the years since the promulgation of the “Kyoto Protocol” in 1997 so
many issues troubling the world have been woven into the tangled knot called
‘climate change politics’: the loss of biodiversity, the gross inequity in patterns
of development, degradation of tropical forests, trade restrictions, violation of
the rights of indigenous peoples, intellectual property rights. The list seemed
to grow by the month. Copenhagen has shown us the limits of what can be
achieved on climate change through centralising and hyperbolic
multilateralism. Climate change – least of all the version of climate change
we have chosen to construct – cannot be addressed through any single,
governing, coherent and enforceable thing called ‘climate policy’.4
In July 2009, a group of scholars from institutions in Asia, Europe and North
America, including a number of the present co-authors, collaborated on a
paper entitled ‘How to get climate policy back on course’. It explained why
the “Kyoto” approach, in development since the Rio “Earth Summit” of 1992,
had failed and was doomed to fail. It recommended an alternative approach
centred on direct steps to accelerate decarbonisation of the global economy.5
The July paper also hinted at a much deeper fatal flaw in the dominant
framing for climate policy:
The … problem is epistemological. It is a
characteristic of open systems of high complexity and
with many ill-understood feed-back effects, such as
the global climate classically is, that there are no selfdeclaring
indicators which tell the policy maker
when enough knowledge has been accumulated to
make it sensible to move into action. Nor, it might be
argued, can a policy-maker ever possess the type of
knowledge – distributed, fragmented, private; and
certainly not in sufficient coherence or quantity – to
make accurate ‘top down’ directions. Hence, the
frequency of failure and of unintended
consequences.6
Without a fundamental re-framing of the issue, new mandates will not be
granted for any fresh courses of action, even good ones. So, to rebuild climate
policy and to restore trust in expert organisations, the framing must change
and change radically.
The authors of this paper are an eclectic group of academics, analysts and
energy policy advocates without any common political or professional
affiliation. We are citizens from a small number of OECD countries – UK,
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USA, Germany, Japan, Finland, Canada – each of us working through
heterogeneous sets of scholarly, scientific, academic, industrial and policy
networks. We share a common concern that the current framing of climate
change and climate policy has ‘boxed us in’. The previous “Kyoto” model has
dangerously narrowed our option space for thinking seriously and realistically
about energy and environmental policies. We wish to contribute to a new
pragmatism in the policy discourse surrounding climate change. To this end,
we gathered at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire in February 2010 and this
paper is the fruit of our work.7
We begin by observing what was once controversial but which now seems
inescapable: for progress to occur on climate policy, we must reframe the
issue in a fundamental way: not simply in various procedural details. We must
describe a different comprehensive approach for climate policy. To that end
this paper proceeds as follows:
In Part II(A), we first re-focus and state our goals. Then in II(B) we sketch the
way in which the ‘climate politics’ issue has been framed in the period 1985-
2009. Starting narrowly from hypotheses about global warming and climate
change as presented to policy makers in the 1980s, the politics of these issues
grew luxuriantly and began to do very different sorts of work – for
economists, for theologians, for activists and for politicians of different
stripes, arrayed on every side of the issue.8 Part II(C) explains why it is in vain
to hope that science will be capable of telling us what to do. Instead, we offer
a modest and practical way to think about science in relation to Earth
systems. We seek to anchor our policy proposals with the three dimensions of
this radical re-framing.
Part III, the final part of the paper, updates and details what we believe to be
essential policy drivers to go forward from 2010. We recognise the immense
complexity of the systems under examination. Indeed, we explain the special
nature of that complexity in Part II(C). Our strategy and our proposed
sequence of actions are shaped principally by that understanding of
complexity. Therefore, the practical recommended actions in Part III move
from the relatively most immediate and easily productive to the more
complicated and long term. In this paper, we discuss but do not dwell on the
issue of adaptation.
To date, climate policy has focused on carbon dioxide primarily, and even to
the exclusion of other human influences on the climate system. We believe
this path to have been unwise, even if in retrospect the approach was
understandable, for reasons of gaining political traction.9 We think that there
is encouraging evidence to suggest that early action on a wider range of
human influences on climate could be more swiftly productive. We review
that evidence and make that case in Part III(A). In Part III(B), first we review
the case for energy efficiency as a means to accelerate decarbonisation of the
global economy. Energy efficiency is well worth doing for many reasons, but it
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has mainly short-term benefits for emissions reduction, and its potential is
limited in the face of the current global growth rate. But efficiency gains give
political traction by creating a sense both of benefits and of progress; and
without traction, we are left as we are now, simply spinning our wheels. So
that is why it comes next. Through a case study of the best documented
example, we illustrate what best practice can achieve. The third step with
respect to the accelerated decarbonisation of the global economy is the most
indispensible but also the most arduous. We therefore present in the second
part of Part III(B) what we called in our previous paper the “Kaya Direct”
approach to accelerated decarbonisation. In so doing, we do not propose a
grand and comprehensive governance regime to replace the failed regime.
We are aware that in a complex world, the solutions we propose are not
practically perfect but rather clumsy: that is our intent and we build this
awareness into our approach.10
Finally, there is the question of money. Our proposals in Part III (C) for
innovation to achieve accelerated decarbonisation require additional funding
from somewhere, by someone. We agree with others that the huge efforts
that have been invested in elaborating complex top-down regulatory regimes,
and in particular the ambitions for regional – let alone global – “Cap & Trade”
regimes to regulate carbon by price, can be now seen to have been barren in
their stated aims although profitable for some in unexpected and unwelcome
ways.11
If one seeks long-lasting impact, the best line of approach may not be headon.
“Lose the object and draw nigh obliquely” is a dictum attributed to the
famous eighteenth century English landscape gardener Lancelot “Capability”
Brown.12 Brown’s designs framed the stately home at the entrance, but only
briefly. After allowing the visitor a glimpse of his destination, the driveway
would veer away to pass circuitously and delightfully through woodland
vistas, through broad meadows with carefully staged aperçus of waterfalls and
temples, across imposing bridges spanning dammed streams and lakes, before
delivering the visitor in a relaxed and amused frame of mind, unexpectedly,
right in front of the house. That displays a subtle skill which has manifest
political value: the capacity to deliver an ambitious objective harmoniously.
“Capability” Brown might be a useful tutor for designers of climate policies.13
His advice would be to approach the object of emissions reduction via other
goals, riding with other constituencies and gathering other benefits.
Throughout this paper we are critical of the way in which the carbon issue has
been overloaded with the baggage of other framings and agendas. The oblique
approach which we advocate may appear at first glance to be no different because
it adopts multiple framings and agendas as well. But that would be a mistake.
Currently, all the framings and agendas are mobilised to advance the one core
goal of decarbonising the energy system via the UNFCCC/Kyoto process. Our
approach is actually the opposite: multiple framings and agendas are pursued in
their own right, and according to their own logics and along their own appropriate
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paths. Decarbonisation is a contingent benefit, not an encompassing one. This is
a radical difference: indeed, an inversion.
In our opinion, the experience of the recent failure of the frontal assault on
climate policy – the implausibly straight driveway from the present to a
magically decarbonised future – suggests that a more indirect yet
encompassing approach via the attainment of different objectives which bring
contingent benefits is, indeed, the only one that is likely to be materially (in
contrast to rhetorically) successful. As ‘How to get climate policy back on
course’ already documented, despite being the dominant policy for many
years, there is no evidence that, despite vast investment of time, effort and
money, the “Kyoto” type approach has produced any discernable acceleration
of decarbonisation whatsoever: not anywhere; not in any region.14
Therefore, in our view, the organising principle of our effort should be the
raising up of human dignity and in that pursuit, our re-framed primary goals
should be three:
1) to ensure that the basic needs, especially the energy demands, of the
world’s growing population are adequately met. ‘Adequacy’ means energy that
is simultaneously accessible, secure and low-cost.
2) to ensure that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the
essential functioning of the Earth system, in recent years most commonly
reflected in concerns about accumulating carbon dioxide (CO2) in the
atmosphere, but certainly not limited to that factor alone;
3) to ensure that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks
and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever may be their
cause.
These primary goals are articulated with the goal of emissions reduction via
“Capability” Brown’s dictum.
Part II: Radical Re-framing
On hearing of the death of the hitherto indestructible French diplomat
Talleyrand, who had managed to switch allegiance successfully from
Napoleon to the Bourbon restoration, Count Metternich of Austria is reputed
to have asked suspiciously, “I wonder what he meant by that?”
Apocryphal or not, the anecdote simply applies the correct question to ask of
any diplomatic action. It is correct because it forces us to check for any
hidden agenda or, in the language of social theory, to check for and to
identify the framing of a statement or policy. The more highly charged the
issue, the more likely that there will be multiple framings, or multiple
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agendas hiding behind one framing. In the case of climate change, one of the
co-authors in this paper first made this essential point more than a decade
ago and Mike Hulme has most recently provided an extended discussion of its
multiple framings.15
What might an alternative strategic approach to meeting these three primary
goals look like in practice? It should be politically attractive, meaning an
approach which allows us to take a few small steps which offer rapid and
demonstrable pay-back, thus helping to sustain the effort. It should be
politically inclusive, meaning an approach which is pluralist in instinct. And it
should be relentlessly pragmatic, meaning an approach which prizes progress
that can be measured in the short as well as long terms. In stating these goals
we assume a radically different framing of what the idea of anthropogenic
climate change means for an early twenty-first century world and what that,
in turn, means for practical politics.
The first step is to recognise that energy policy and climate policy are not the
same thing. Although they are intimately related, neither can satisfactorily be
reduced to the other. Energy policy should focus on securing reliable and
sustainable low-cost supply, and, as a matter of human dignity, attend
directly to the development demands from the world’s poorest people,
especially their present lack of clean, reliable and affordable energy. One
important reason that more than 1.5 billion people presently lack access to
electricity is that energy simply costs too much. Obviously, if energy were
free, then its provision would be simple. Even if such access could be supplied
from fossil fuels – which is plausible but also debatable – this demand for
access to energy, for reasons of cost and security should not be satisfied by
locking in long-term dependence on fossil fuels.16
Providing the world with massive amounts of new energy supply to meet
expected growth in demand, while simultaneously vigorously increasing
access to energy for people currently without it, will therefore require
diversification of supply. Diversification beyond fossil fuels necessarily implies
an accelerated pace of decarbonisation. Such diversification ought to be a
leading incentive to decarbonise future energy supplies.
We then need to separate the policy frameworks and interventions for
attending to short-lived versus long-lived climate forcing agents. There is no
obvious logical reason, for example, for connecting policies for reducing
emissions of methane with those for reducing the emissions of halocarbons.
The physical properties, sources and policy levers of short-lived forcing agents
– black soot, aerosols, methane and tropospheric ozone – are quite different
from those of long-lived forcing agents – carbon dioxide, halocarbons, nitrous
oxide. In Part III below, where we set out our policy priorities, we argue that
early action on non-CO2 forcing agents should be part of a radically different
and radically realistic response to our goals.
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And thirdly, with the failure of the UNFCCC process to fulfil the function, we
need to stimulate new thinking for enabling societies better to manage
climate risks. All societies are ill-adapted to climate to some degree. In other
words, climate extremes and variability imposes costs on all societies (as well,
of course, as generating benefits). It is, therefore, important to evolve
technologies, institutions and management practices which address the
avoidable costs and damages wrought by climate, even more so to build this
adaptive capacity whilst climate and society – and consequential risks – both
change. These initiatives and the sharing of good adaptation practice make
sense irrespective of views on the degree to which climate risks are being
changed by human activities or how quickly they are changing. Adaptation
policies should be untethered from those focused on decarbonisation.
These three strategic goals need not – indeed must not – be stitched together
into one single impossible policy package, where connections between ends
and means become inextricably intertwined. When connections between
ends and means become obscured, policy discussions are too easily hijacked
by diversionary disputes, such as the argument about whether or not the
science behind preventing a two degree global temperature target – or indeed
any comparable global target – is sound. Similarly, the degeneration of debate
at Copenhagen from windy rhetoric about planetary emergency into hard
anger from many NGOs and ‘global southern’ states was revealing. When the
large, rich states refused to agree to the cash transfers that were being
demanded, it displayed how different interests and agendas were concealed
within utopian talk of global and universal solutions.
A: Our three over-arching goals
1) Ensuring energy access for all
In his forthcoming book, The Climate Fix, Roger Pielke Jr argues that a
commitment to fulfilling all three of the objectives of energy access, security
of supply and lower cost together, implies necessarily a requirement to
diversify energy supply beyond fossil fuels. Diversification in turn necessarily
means accelerated decarbonisation. Prospects for diversification will be
greatly enhanced if alternatives to fossil fuels at lowere costs can be
developed. Google has advocated this in its RE