numbers, not adjectives — D. J. C. MacKay

Mission

I’m seeking collaborators to design and deploy international mechanisms to limit climate change. These mechanisms should be separate from and complementary to the Paris Agreement and UNFCCC COP process and rely on very different principles. The COP process on its own is not going to be succesful; the primary goal of climate mitigation is to limit the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Yet, after 30 years of COPs, not only are atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations still increasing, but they’re increasing at a faster rate now than previously. Only by combining the existing process with new mechanisms, the current weaknesses can be overcome, and we can create an effective process with urgently needed outcomes.

Principles

In this section I list seven principles which are necessary to create an effective process towards tackling climate change. This isn’t meant as an exhaustive or definitive list, but rather a sensible starting point for the types of things which might be considered.

1 Ethical foundation: equity

Our atmosphere is a shared resource. Addressing climate change requires managing this shared resource. Emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere uses this resource, or equivalently, pollutes the atmosphere. But who has the rights and responsibility towards our shared resource? This isn’t meant in a legal question, but a moral and ethical one. An explicit moral and ethical foundation is necessary. The perhaps only reasonable answer to this question is that the rights and responsibilities to the atmospheric resources should belong equally to all of us. Once adopted, equity provides a strong guiding principle.

2 Coalition of the willing

Consensus or unanimity is not a good principle for decision making in climate change. Most importantly, a unanimity requirement allows small minorities to effectively veto decisions which are agreeable to a large majority. In the context of climate change, the circumstances of different nations differ substantially in several important ways, including wealth, exposure to climate change and economic reliance or exposure to fossil fuel pricing. Therefore unanimity is probably unrealistic. Obstruction by small minorities has been the norm in the COP context.

A more appropriate organisation is a coalition of the willing. That is, we accept that a minority of nations may not join. Since the world consists of independent and sovereign nations with no global government, non-member nations are an inevitable consequence. However, the nature of climate change means that the benefits from the coalition’s efforts to limit atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will be shared by all countries, irrespective of coalition membership. Non-members are therefore sometimes referred to as freeriders. In the light of our moral and ethical foundation of equity (above), freeriding is unacceptable. Freeriders will be taking our shared resources, a behaviour considered unacceptable in any other context. Therefore, coalition members must sanction freeriders, using trade barriers and rejection of collaboration. Such sanctions may not seem very nice, but they are necessary to protect the coalition from exploitation.

3 Linking actions and obligations

In order to encourage behaviours which help limit greenhouse gas concentrations, it is essential that actions and obligations are tightly linked. For example, it ought to be the case that large per capita greenhouse gas emissions should lead to more obligations. Thus incentivising good behaviour. This principle may seem obvious, but note that it is largely absent from the COP process: national emissions and voluntary contributions to the Green Climate Fund are unrelated. This unfortunate dissociation causes many countries to question whether their climate change efforts are worth while. To fix this problem, actions and obligations must be linked.

4 Elimination of unpriced externalities

A root cause of climate change is that our atmosphere is not explicitly valued. We pretend that its value is zero by allowing nations to emit greenhouse gases free of change. This is what economists call an unpriced externality. Unpriced externalities lead to overexploitation of the atmospheric resources, ie climate change. To solve this root cause of climate change we must price greenhouse gas emissions. Note, that such payments should not be viewed as a tax, but simply as a payment for a resource being consumed (just like we pay for any other resource). Two issues are immediately relevant: Who should be paid, and how much?

A straight forward consequence of our moral and ethical foundation of equity (above) is that we should all be paid equally. Since it is impractical to account for and pay 8000 million people individually, nation states should be responsible for implementation (and their national implementation would be an internal affair, as long as they kept their aggregate obligations to other nations). Since there is a very strong correlation globally between wealth and greenhouse gas emissions, poor nations would be net beneficiaries of such a system. Note, that this proposal is very different form national carbon taxes, because it is global in scope.

What should the price per ton of CO₂ be? We can’t use what you might think of as the actual price in terms of the costly problems created by climate change for a number of reasons. Firstly, this price may be difficult to estimate, and the value may depend critically on the time horizon over which it is evaluated, a question to which there is no good answers. Secondly, different nations have different exposure to climate change, and the estimated price wouldn’t be identical everywhere. But operationally it is essential that the price in every country is the same, otherwise we would create economic pressures to move activities across borders. An attractive solution is to use (periodic) voting within the coalition to determine a single price, used everywhere. Large per capita emitters may vote for a low price, and low per capita emitters for a higher price, the median may be an effective compromise.

5 Separation of issues

It’s important to address issues at the appropriate level of granularity. In politics, there is a tendency to mix separate issues into one big agreement, and seek a compromise deal. But often this obscures the process. For example, we may separate historical greenhouse gas emissions from future emissions. This is wise because different tools exist for these different times. For the future, options include emission reductions and payments, whereas historical emissions have already happened, and only reparations are an option. Dealing with these separately increases clarity. Specifically, it is not advocated that one issue is more important than the other, only that their solutions not be interdependent.

6 Rapid implementation

We’re running out of time to address climate change. This means that meaningful implementation must be rapid. Unfortunately, the COP process is too slow. For example, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are solicited 10 years into the future. And many nations declare Net Zero by 2050. Such long lead times are inappropriate for our climate change problem. For example, the fact that NDCs are issued for 10 years into the future means that nations must wait 10 years to be able to confirm whether other nations are upholding their promisses. Such long time frames exacerbate uncertainties and builds mistrust between partners. Much faster implementation is necessary.

It is often highlighted that the effects of climate change happen on a longer timescale than the electoral cycle, which is true. And it is not something that we can change. But societies make investments with implications longer than the electoral cycle all the time, for example many infrastructure projects, cultural and educational institutions, etc.

Of course, making large changes to emissions requires time, because infrastructure needs to be changed at scale, which cannot be achieved overnight. But this argument confuses two timelines, the one for emissions changes with the one for incentives. We need to rapidly incentivise cuts to greenhouse gases, even if implementation will lag. Without incentives, implementation won’t happen.

7 Operationalisability

We must be able to readily adopt the proposed solutions. For example, the COP process is based on the so-called Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC). This principle sounds good, but unfortunately it is too imprecise, and cannot be turned into action because it requires interpretation of what these differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities are. So in practise, CBDR-RC is a road block. Not so with our stated alternative: equity. This doesn’t need another level of interpretation, it is clear that it means that everyone has equal rights and responsibilities. (In fairness, it does need some interpretation as to what to about historical emissions which were unequal, in fact it helps by explicitly stating why this is a problem.)

Implementation

The above principles raise a number of questions about how they could effectively be implemented. For example, who decides whether nations are living up to the rules of coalition? For emissions reporting, the coalition could use the UNFCCC reporting rules. In general, members of the coalition make decisions; breaking of the membership rules lead to exclusion.

The ideas discussed here are often criticised on the grounds that it is unlikely that some large per capita emitters will join. This is quite possible, maybe because they don’t accept the ethical foundation of equity of our atmospheric resources. In which case it would be helpful that they say so clearly.

Next steps

What are the necessary concrete next steps? In order for these (or similar) ideas to take hold, we must create a movement. This means:

• Refine and make concrete the principles and specific proposals for practical coalitions of the willing.
• Inform the stake holders: people and policy makers. Create and distribute information.
• Persuade others, that these ideas can make a difference. To do this, we have to answer the questions: What is in it for me? What would be the consequences for me, for my family, for my community if my country were to join the coalition of the willing, or to freeride? Answers to these questions will be specific to each region, depending on local circumstances.

I’m interested in constructive feedback. If you only say “these ideas are naive”, then that’s not super useful for making progress. The only way I can really interpret such feedback is “these ideas are so naive that it is preferable to do nothing” – of course that may be precisely your opinion, but it leave your children in a tricky spot.