Curbing Carbon, Sustaining Development: The Tensions in Climate Change Mitigation

D.Moellendorf on the Copenhagen Conference

THE LONG-AWAITED meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen is upon us. There was considerable hope that a comprehensive successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be negotiated at this meeting, a new treaty that would reconcile two of the most important projects confronting humanity: mitigating climate change and raising billions of people out of poverty through energy-intensive economic development. There was also hope that the United States would join the global community in a good faith effort to complete those negotiations.

President Obama’s recent declaration that the United States would significantly reduce CO2 emissions by midcentury has signaled that he is willing to commit the United States to the reduction of global emissions. But declarations are not policy, and as a result, Obama and other world leaders have decided to indefinitely push back the date at which a successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be negotiated.

Little of substance is now expected to come out of the Copenhagen meeting. Instead, we can hope only for a timeline that would replace the Kyoto Protocol and for a climate policy to be passed by Congress later this year–a policy that would make it feasible for the United State to abide by a new timeline. But even if both of these goals are realized by the end of the year, a climate change mitigation treaty must still reconcile the tensions between reducing carbon emissions and allowing economic development in the developing and underdeveloped world.

THE GOAL of limiting warming this century to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels has gained widespread international legitimacy. But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), keeping global warming to no more than 2 to 2.4 degrees Celsius requires that emissions peak sometime in the years between 2000 and 2015 and that by 2050 global emissions are 50-85 percent below 2000 levels.

This is an ambitious and unprecedented project. According to the IPCC predictions, halting warming in this range requires stabilizing CO2 concentration levels between 350 and 450 ppm (“ppm” stands for parts per million). Concentrations are currently around 380 ppm with the rate of growth increasing every year. In the early 1990s, for example, emissions grew at about 1 percent per year. But in the first four years of this decade, they have grown at about 3 percent per year. The IPCC projects that, in the absence of additional mitigation strategies, emissions will increase by an additional 40 to 110 percent between 2000 and 2030. Over two-thirds of this increase would come from developing countries.

These figures represent a huge stumbling block for any climate change treaty. Emissions growth in developing countries typically indicates social progress—the economic growth that is necessary for advances in human development. Development requires energy, and fossil fuels are by far the cheapest source of such energy.

Appeals to both the legitimacy and justice of any climate change treaty support the claim that poor countries should not be burdened with costly emissions reductions. The legitimacy appeals rest on the UNFCCC text, which requires “that responses to climate change should be coordinated with social and economic development…taking into full account the legitimate priority needs of developing countries for the achievement of sustained economic growth and the eradication of poverty.”

In addition, Article 3 of the Convention adds that “the parties have a right to, and should, promote sustainable development” and that climate change policy must be negotiated “in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” In other words, states that have contributed more to atmospheric CO2 concentrations are to have different responsibilities from those that have contributed less, and states that have more resources are to have different responsibilities from those that have less.

The justice of a treaty also rests on the immense hardship that would be caused by an institutional order that did not permit deeply impoverished states to increase their CO2 emissions. For example, in 2006 Bangladesh, which was ranked 137 out of 177 on the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index, emitted 42.74 million Mt CO2 (“Mt” stands for metric tons). Its per capita emission was 0.29 Mt CO2 while the global average was 4.48 Mt CO2.

If a treaty made it prohibitively costly for poor countries like Bangladesh to increase their emissions, it would consign several billion people to shorter lives, fewer educational opportunities, and almost no income. A global order producing such hardships would certainly be unjust.

THE ARGUMENTS over the legitimacy and justice of a potential treaty establish a principled limit to what a climate change treaty can demand of the poorest countries: a treaty must not constrain human development. To appreciate the difficulty of abiding by this, consider a proposal for distributing the burdens of a 50 percent global reduction in emissions by 2050.

The proposal requires that the per capita emissions of each country converge to an equal share, and it has been championed by several NGOs and is often taken to represent an appropriate egalitarian ideal. It is one of several proposals that have found a place in the official negotiating texts of the Copenhagen meeting. In the case of Bangladesh, which had a 2006 per capita emissions of 0.29 Mt CO2, the equal per capita limit (1.24 Mt CO2) would allow the country to increase its emissions by about 4.5 times by 2050. But for several developing countries the per capita limit would require the reduction of emissions. Brazil, for example, had 2.01 Mt CO2 in 2006 and China had 4.58 Mt CO2. For the developed world, the reduction to 1.24 Mt CO2 seems almost impossible. The 2006 per capita emissions in the United States, for example, were 19.78 Mt CO2—and this mean the U.S. would be required to reduce its emissions by nearly 94 percent by 2050.

The requirement that some states undertake enormous reductions by 2050 would be softened by three considerations. First, although global emissions must soon peak, immediate reductions are not required. Second, since CO2 dissipates uniformly in the atmosphere, an international market in emissions entitlements is consistent with achieving a global reduction in concentrations, and many countries that emit less than their target would be able to sell their remaining entitlements to other countries that find the purchase of additional entitlements more cost-effective. (In underdeveloped states with very low per capita emissions, such sales could be a major source of revenue.) Third, since the goal is global reduction, it should be permissible in principle for states to earn credit against their target by investing abroad in a way that lowers emissions elsewhere—of course, as long as this reduction is not counted twice.

Assuming that global emissions should be reduced 50 percent by 2050, the equal shares proposal would require massive reductions from the United States. But of greater concern for the legitimacy and justice of such an arrangement would be the reductions that are required of developing countries like Brazil and China since reductions of that size would mean substantially retarding economic and social development. This raises doubts that the equal shares view is consistent with safeguarding human development. And surely safeguarding human development is morally more compelling than equalizing per capita emissions.

Recall that limiting warming to two degrees is predicted to require global emissions reductions in the range of 50 to 85 percent below 2000 levels. The ability of the equal shares proposal to protect human development is even more doubtful on an 85 percent reduction scenario. This would require a per capita limit of 0.37 Mt CO2. Of the forty countries that had per capita emissions below this limit in 2000 all were in the bottom half of UNDP’s Human Development Index. Equalizing per capita shares in conformity with an 85 percent global reduction would require emissions reductions of 99 percent in the United States by the midcentury—and 65 percent in India, 81 percent in Brazil, and 91 percent in China.

THE PROBLEMS with the equal shares proposal illustrate the immense difficulties of arriving at an international treaty. In order to limit warming to two degrees Celsius and permit development, several developed countries would have to reduce their CO2 emissions by more than 100 percent.

Achieving negative emissions would require very significant domestic reductions as well as contributions to reductions in the developing and underdeveloped world. But there is at least one well-developed alternative proposal. Dubbed “Greenhouse Development Rights” by its advocates, its goal is to keep the atmospheric concentration of CO2 under 420 ppm.

Each state, it proposes, would be assigned an emissions entitlement that is a function of both its responsibility for past emissions and its economic capacity for mitigation. In assessing responsibility, emissions resulting from people living below a development threshold are not counted; and in tallying capacity, only personal income above the same threshold is aggregated. The effect is to relieve the very poor from responsibility and not to count their income against them.

According to Greenhouse Development Rights, China would be allowed to increase its emissions nearly threefold above 1990 levels, but would have to make reductions in comparison to a 2030 projection in which its emissions grew without hindrance. In addition, the proposal would require extremely large emissions reductions from developed countries. By 2030, the United States must effect reductions of 120 percent below 1990 levels while the European Union would have to reduce its emissions by nearly 140 percent (reductions that could be accrued by helping other countries reduced their emissions as well).

Any proposal that requires the United States to reduce CO2 emissions would also require attention to domestic policy since the reductions would increase the costs of energy production and therefore the costs of virtually all goods and services. If, for example, the United States were to impose a carbon tax or if it were to sell entitlements to emit CO2, it would be able to capture the economic value of the emissions for public use—perhaps to provide income support to the poor. There is likely to be significant resistance from corporations since prior to placing a price on emissions, major domestic emitters were able pollute at no cost.

But, in order for a domestic policy to protect the poor, entitlements could not be given away because these entitlements would have the possibility of becoming liquid assets in an emissions-entitlement market, and the imposition of significant costs would remain on the poor, who would pay more for most goods and services. Such a giveaway would result in windfall profits, accruing ultimately to company shareholders. As James W. Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, stated in recent testimony to the Senate Finance Committee, “[G]iving away allowances unconditionally would be significantly regressive, making higher-income households better off…and making lower-income households worse off.”

GREENHOUSE DEVELOPMENT Rights provides a source of hope that limiting warming to two degrees could be reconciled with permitting human development. But the requirement of negative emissions in the United States and the European Union by 2030 makes it a tough sell to American and European negotiators. Moreover, the recent narrow victory of the Waxman-Markey Bill in the U.S. Congress casts doubt on the likelihood of any treaty requiring negative emissions being ratified by the United States.

It is tempting to think that the answer to these difficulties is to dispense with the goal of limiting warming to two degrees. In that case, developed countries would not have to so drastically reduce their emissions. For example, according to the IPCC, limiting warming to no more than three degrees Celsius would require that global emissions be between 30 percent less and 5 percent more than 2000 levels.

But the choice between a two- or three-degree limit has profound implications for both the legitimacy and justice of any mitigation treaty. It is doubtful that such a treaty could satisfy the principle objective of the UNFCCC—to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” But, more important, a climate treaty based on a three-degree limit would expose poor and vulnerable people in the future to substantial but avoidable risks.

What are the risks? The IPCC predicts with high confidence that a two degree increase would result in increased damages from floods and storms and extensive bleaching of most coral reefs, and that a three degree increase would leave hundreds of millions of people exposed to increased water shortages. Of course, it will be the poor and vulnerable who suffer the most from climate change in any case; many of these people will be living in drought-prone tropical areas and in the low lying mega-deltas of Egypt, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. The exposure of future men and women to such risks raises the difficult question of what intergenerational justice requires of us. But we do not need a complete theory of intergenerational justice to insist that the more these poor and vulnerable people are endangered, the less confident we should be that our policies and institutions are morally defensible.

Some people would like to discount the risks cited above because they are projections based on fallible computer models. But fallibility cuts both ways. Reality could be better than the models project—or much worse. To cite just one example, the prominent NASA climate scientist James Hansen warns of a sea-level rise in excess of five meters this century if there is extensive ice sheet collapse as a result of global warming. Presently no one knows what probability to assign to a disaster of this magnitude at any given temperature increase.

We can be confident that underdeveloped and rapidly developing countries will insist on treaty terms that ensure their ability to generate economic growth, and that both the legitimacy and the justice of any climate treaty support this insistence. The remaining question, the one that currently bedevils the negotiations, is whether the developed countries will take on the burden of drastically reducing their emissions in order to allow for economic growth among the poor.

Darrel Moellendorf is a Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs at San Diego State University. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Justice (2002) and Global Inequality Matters(2009). He is currently working on a book on morality and climate change. Much of the research for this article was conducted while he was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is grateful to the Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study for their generous support.

The figures and projections discussed in this article are drawn from the following sources:
James Hansen, “Huge sea level rises are coming—unless we act now,” New Scientist 2614, (25 July 2007). Available on line at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526141.600-huge-sea-level-rises-are-coming—unless-we-act-now.html?full=true
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Summary for Policymakers,” in B. Metz, et al., Climate Change 2007: Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Available on line at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-spm.pdf.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report summary for Policy Makers. Available on line at http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-syr.htm.
Michael R. Raupach, et al., “Global and regional drivers of accelerating
CO2 emissions,” PNAS June 12, 2007 vol. 104 no. 24 10288-10293. Available on line at http://www.pnas.org/content/104/24/10288.full.pdf+html.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Available on line at http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf.
United Nations Human Development Programme, Human Development Report 2007–2008; available at hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2007-2008/.
United Nations Human Development Programme, Human Development Index. Available on line at http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/.
United States Energy Information Association data. Available on line at http://www.eia.doe.gov/.
See also See Paul Baer, et al., The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework: The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World, rev. 2nd ed. (Berlin: The Heinrich Böll Foundation, Christian Aid, EcoEquity and the Stockholm Environment Institute, 2008). Available on line at http://www.ecoequity.org/docs/TheGDRsFramework.pdf.