Sharing Global CO2 Emission Reductions

Carbon footprint, Climate change, Economics Comments (2)

I’m grateful to Jim Rawles at Survivalblog.com for a link to a recent study which proposes an innovative approach to the calculation and allocation of required emissions reductions. The study, ‘Sharing global CO2 emission reductions among one billion high emitters’ was published on July 6th in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A PDF version can be found here. The authors, hailing from Princeton Environmental Institute, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands, and Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in Milan, seek to address accusations of unfairness inherent in current methods of allocating emissions reductions on the basis of national wealth.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, rich countries shoulder most of the burden for cutting emissions, while developing countries, including fast-growing economies like China and India, are not required to curb greenhouse pollution. Rich countries, notably the United States, claim this gives developing countries an unfair economic advantage. China, India and other developing countries argue that developed countries have historically spewed more climate-warming gases, and developing countries need time to catch up.

The authors’ concept of ‘‘common but differentiated responsibilities’’ refers to the emissions of individuals instead of nations. Using the income distribution of a country,  they estimate how its fossil fuel CO2 emissions are distributed among its citizens,  building up a global CO2 distribution. They then propose a simple rule to derive a universal cap on global individual emissions and find corresponding limits on national aggregate emissions from this cap. All  high CO2-emitting individuals are treated the same, regardless of where in the world they live. A further degree of fairness is introduced with the idea of an emissions ‘floor’ of one tonne of CO2 per person per year. The one tonne threshold exceeds the projected emissions of 2.7 billion individuals in 2030, and would insulate the lowest one-third of the world’s emitters from CO2 reduction strategies.

Co-author Shoibal Chakravarty says that by focusing on rich people everywhere, rather than rich countries and poor ones, the system of setting carbon-cutting targets based on the number of wealthy individuals in various countries would ease developing countries into any new climate change framework.
“As countries develop — India, China, Brazil and others — over time, they’ll have more and more of these (wealthy) individuals and they’ll have a higher share of carbon reductions to do in the future”
These obligations, based on the increasing number of rich people in various countries, would kick in as each developing country hit a certain overall level of carbon emissions. This level would be set fairly high, so that economic development would not be hampered in the poorest countries, no matter how many rich people live there.

Still a long way to go, obviously, but this sounds promising. Sadly, not everyone agrees. Here is what Jim Rawles has to say on the subject:

This is the sort of fallacious logic that foments envy, and inevitably class warfare. Yes, Americans do use a disproportionately large portion of the world’s natural resources. But we also create correspondingly more with those resources. The gross domestic product (GDP) of the US is tremendous. Here is an illustration. (California, just by itself is the sixth largest economy in the world.) Consider this: Why does Kenya Airlines have Boeing 747s in their fleet? Because someone in America builds them. Could those planes be made in Kenya? No, because they have neither the expertise nor the manufacturing infrastructure. Is this situation somehow “exploitive”? No! As my old friend “Jeff Trasel” says: “Please don’t tell me that I somehow magically ‘owe the world’ more because my ‘carbon footprint’ is larger. Well, so is my productivity!” I agree with Jeff. Carbon footprint calculations and swaps of carbon credits are nothing but voodoo economics and socialist scheming.

There’s such a lot that could be said about this ill-informed rant, but I lack the time, space and indeed the patience to get involved too deeply right now. All I would say is that Mr Rawles almost certainly hasn’t bothered to read the study for himself. Why else would he be banging on about the USA’s GDP, an economic measure at the national level, when this study is all about calculating emissions responsibility on an intra-national basis. You would think that Mr Rawles would welcome these proposals, given that he spends a lot of time bemoaning international influence over American national affairs, Federal meddling in State business, and State interference in individuals’ lives. Surely a methodology which leads individuals to take responsibilty for their own actions would be welcomed by a proponent of self-sufficiency, rugged individualism and personal freedoms within a framework of rights and responsibilities.

Pete Smith @ July 12, 2009