Moving Forward With Climate Change Management

As should have surprised no one the Copenhagen climate summit was a debacle. According to Mark Lynas the Chinese got just exactly what they wanted out of the summit:

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”. The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.

What they wanted was for nothing to be accomplished and they were successful in achieving that end.

There are several things that should be clear from the summit. The first is that President Obama had the right of it when he noted that group action was proving elusive. Group action has eluded the grasp of the reformers and there are no prospects for changing that in the foreseeable future.

Let’s assume just for the sake of argument that anthropogenic climate change is real and that it genuinely poses a threat to us. What is to be done? Even if the people of Europe and the United States decided to live in caves and eat our meat raw it wouldn’t reduce the rate of greenhouse gas production enough to make any difference. That’s how fast the production of greenhouse gases is growing in places like China and India. It isn’t just their coal-based power generation that’s the problem. It’s coal-based power generation, vehicle emissions, methane production from the ponds behind hydroelectric dams on slow-moving rivers, the carbon dioxide produced by the manufacture of cement, and 1001 other sources. And they’re not going to change.

Conservation simply isn’t going to cut it. Right now geo-engineering is the only game in town. We don’t need international accords to start doing it and we can eliminate more emissions via geo-engineering than produce which is not something that we can do via conservation.

I continue to believe in Pigouvian taxes to address the negative externalities of fossil fuel consumption, ending our subsidies for road building, and, generally, using resources efficiently. I also think we should start moving towards producing electricity via small, efficient, cheap, safe thorium reactors or something of the sort. They tend to avoid the problems in building and maintaining the large uranium or plutonium based reactors. I think that we should do those things whatever China and India do.

But we’ve learned something valuable from the Copenhagen conference if we’ve the wit to recognize it. People who are serious about reducing climate change will put new energy behind talking about nuclear power generation, more emphasis on geo-engineering, and a lot less on collective action. People who aren’t serious will keep pushing the same, tired old stuff.