Limping Towards Cancun

Moellendorf: Limping Towards Cancun

Last November, just prior to the much-anticipated Copenhagen meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), President Obama and several other leaders took time out of an Asian economic summit to announce that no one should expect a legally binding treaty to be produced in Denmark. This past March, Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, said that he did not expect even the November 2010 meeting in Cancun to produce a legally-binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The pressure to keep expectations low continues. Indeed, de Boer’s announced resignation from the post of Executive Secretary effective this July seems evidence of the gloom that surrounds the secretariat.

After considerable lobbying to choose a successor to de Boer from the developing world, UN Chief Ban Ki Moon recently appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica. But the odds of Figueres being able to broker a desperately needed political breakthrough in Cancun seem long. The text of the UNFCCC calls on developed countries to “take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.” Europe has demonstrated a willingness to meet this obligation. The EU’s offer at the Copenhagen conference to reduce its CO2 emissions to 20 percent less than 1990 levels by 2020, and even to 30 percent less if other developed countries signed on, signaled its seriousness of purpose. Similar seriousness remains to be seen from the United States. The American position in Copenhagen, embarrassingly contingent on a most uncertain Senate vote, was a pledge to reduce emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, about a 3.75 percent reduction from 1990 levels.

The two most significant decisions to come out of the Copenhagen meeting—the commitment to limit warming this century to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to provide $100 billion annually (by 2020) to help developing and underdeveloped countries cope with climate change—lack any clear means for implementation. The Copenhagen Accord merely provides states the opportunity to list their domestically negotiated commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Unless this is somehow replaced by internationally negotiated commitments, the agreement to limit warming to two degrees will almost certainly be fudged. The two-degree limit requires emissions reductions that are just too demanding for there to be any confidence that states will voluntarily accede to them without external pressure.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), limiting warming this century to 2 to 2.4 degrees will most likely require that global emissions peak by 2015 and fall very rapidly thereafter. By 2050, global CO2 emissions should be 50 to 85 percent below 2000 levels. This reduction must occur in the context of rapid, poverty-relieving economic growth in China, India, and other parts of the developing world, and in the context of significant global population growth—projected to increase by nearly 30 percent to nine billion people by 2050.

The best that can be hoped for now from the U.S. Senate is the Kerry-Lieberman bill, which includes the paltry 3.75 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2020 and a long term goal of CO2 emissions 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. The long term goal sounds impressive, but as a bargaining proposal in an international forum it risks appearing outrageous—and not because such reductions would seem too high. If the goal of Kerry-Lieberman were realized, per capita U.S. emissions in 2050 would be three metric tons (assuming a constant rate of immigration to the United States), only about 24 percent below per capita global emissions in 2000. If the per capita provision of the Senate bill were universalized, in 2050 global CO2 emissions would be about 13 percent higher than in 2000. This would surely damn the attempt to limit warming to two degrees.

To stand a decent chance of limiting warming to two degrees, an international agreement that allows such high per capita emissions in a country responsible for about 19 percent of all emissions must necessarily set far tougher limits for many other countries. If much of the world were not dependent upon cheap fossil fuels to propel poverty-alleviating development, this might not seem unreasonable. But in the absence of inexpensive alternative fuels, such an agreement would have the effect of retarding economic development considerably.

Two factors explain why a U.S. policy to reduce emissions 80 percent below 2005 levels would fail a reasonable requirement of universalizability. One is that per capita emissions in the United States are currently more than four times higher than the global average. So, even 80 percent cuts would not bring the United States near what the global average in 2050 needs to be. The other is that a projected 30 percent growth in the global population requires that per capita emissions fall sharply in order that total emissions simply remain constant.

U.S. representatives might defend U.S. policy against the charge of unreasonableness by insisting that population growth is not their doing. Two things are worth noting about this argument. First, it is only a partial defense. Even if there were no population growth, a pledge to reduce emissions by 80 percent from a country that is four times over the global per capita average is only a pledge to bring it in line with the rest of the world’s current emissions. If every country were to reduce by the same percent, the two degree limit might be satisfied. But then many states would be confined to per capita limits far below that of the U.S., and given the current price of alternative energy, this would radically reduce poverty-relieving development. Second, insofar as the U.S. defense would shift some responsibility for 2050 reductions in the direction of developing countries with fast-growing populations, it would lay a burden on the young people of those same countries—those born between now and 2050—who are hardly at fault for the population policies of their elders.

It is an interesting feature of political deliberation—and a measure of our moral isolation—that a proposal that may seem reasonable here at home seems outrageous when looked at from abroad. Indeed, many in the United States think the Senate proposal to cut CO2 emissions requires far too large a sacrifice. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has recently charged the UN and the IPCC with perpetrating a grand climate change hoax that is corrupting the scientific community through offers of research funding—befuddling the Pentagon, Exxon-Mobil, and certain Evangelical Christian religious leaders, all of whom have expressed concern about anthropogenic climate change. After a blunder by the IPCC on glacial melting and the recent exposé of questionable e-mail correspondence by some climate scientists, the rhetoric of politicians of Inhofe’s ilk seems to resonate with many Americans. Confidence in climate science is at an all-time low. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly half of all Americans believe that the seriousness of global warming has been generally exaggerated.

This makes for a conundrum for anyone who takes the two-degree limit seriously. The international community needs the United States to take the lead in proposing meaningful policy, but support at home for such policy is weak. In the absence of a means to inject the American political debate with the concerns of much of the rest of the world, passage of the Kerry-Lieberman bill in the Senate will be a relief. But if this is the policy that the United States brings to Cancun, the international discussion could continue to grind on very slowly. There is little in this bill to inspire. It may well be a case of too little, and with 2015 looming, too late, to meet the two-degree limit.

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.

(Homepage Photo: Magnus Manske, 2009 / Creative Commons)