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Sub-National Climate Change Policy in China

At a time when there are considerable political challenges in some countries (such as my own!) for national governments to institute meaningful climate change policies, the potential role of sub-national policies becomes more important than otherwise. In other countries, sub-national climate policies may be a stepping stone to significant national efforts, as in China. Partly with this in mind, the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (HPCA) conducted a research workshop in July of this year on “Sub-National Climate Change Policy in China.” Tsinghua University’s Institute of Energy, Environment, and Economy — directed by Professor Zhang Xiliang — hosted and co-sponsored the workshop, which was organized by my colleague at the Harvard Kennedy School, Dr. Robert Stowe. Twenty-seven experts from China, Europe, Canada, India, Australia, and the United States participated (see the photo below). In addition, a group of students observed the workshop, and the Environmental Defense Fund’s China Program hosted a dinner for workshop participants. The Harvard Global Institute provided major support for the project. Here is a link to the full agenda (in both Chinese and English).

Background

Climate change is a global commons problem, and, as such, requires cooperation at the highest jurisdictional level — that is, international cooperation among national governments — if it is to be adequately addressed. Participation by national governments is key, and sub-national governments can also play important roles. Provinces and municipalities around the world have undertaken initiatives — sometimes working together across national boundaries — to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. These include jurisdictions in the largest-emitting countries — China, the United States, and India — as well as in the European Union.

The Workshop and its Analyses

Participants in the Beijing workshop examined how Chinese provinces and municipalities work with the central government to implement policy — and discussed challenges to such cooperation. They focused to a considerable degree on the implementation of China’s national carbon-pricing system, including approaches to integrating the seven pilot sub-national market-based systems into the new national scheme, scheduled to launch in 2020 (see “What Should We Make of China’s Announcement of a National CO₂ Trading System?,” January 7, 2018). Participants also addressed sub-national dimensions of other policy approaches to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in China.

As we have done with previous HPCA research and policy workshops, participants in the Beijing event are now writing briefs on topics related to their respective presentations. We will edit and compile these short papers in a volume to be released later this year. In the meantime, you can view the PowerPoint presentations from the Beijing workshop:

China’s National Emissions Trading Program (Zhang Xiliang)
Ten Drivers Behind Climate Policy Making in China (Qi Ye)
Creating Sub-National Climate Institutions in China (Michael Davidson)
Multi-Dimension Post-Assessment of China’s ETS Pilots (Qi Shaozhou)
Political Economy Framework for Climate Change Policy in China (Christine Wong)
Canadian Climate Change Policy (Katie Sullivan)
Sub-National Carbon-Pricing Policy in the USA (Robert Stavins)
Integration of China’s National ETS with Provincial/Municipal Pilots (Valerie Karplus)
Introduction of Beijing ETS (Mei Dewen)
Sub-National Implementation Pathways for the National Pricing System (Goerild Heggelund)
Assessing Regional Implementation Pathways of National ETS In China (Wu Libo)

The Larger Context

The Beijing workshop was part of a larger initiative of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, supported by the Harvard Global Institute, examining and comparing sub-national climate-change policies in China and India. We will conduct a similar workshop in New Delhi next year.

The Harvard Project has previously conducted three workshops addressing climate-change policy in — or related to — China:

“Bilateral Cooperation between China and the United States: Facilitating Progress on Climate-Change Policy,” June 2015. This was hosted by China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation (NCSC). You can read more about this workshop here, and read the full workshop report here.
“The Design, Implementation, and Operation of China’s National Emissions Trading System,” December 2016. Our host was NCSC. The participants explored technical issues related to the design of China’s emerging national system, including allowance allocation, point of regulation, and price management.
“Cooperation in East Asia to Address Climate Change,” September 2017. This was hosted by the Harvard Center Shanghai, and supported by the Harvard Global Institute. You can read more about the workshop here, and read the complete volume of briefs based on the workshop here.

Placing U.S. Government Views on Climate Change into Historical Context

In this year of 2018, the Europe Union, China, India, Brazil, Korea, Canada, and other countries are negotiating the details for implementation of the Paris Agreement, and are developing domestic policies to achieve their respective Nationally Determined Contributions under the Agreement. At the same time, the United States – under the leadership of President Donald Trump – has announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as soon as permitted (November, 2020), and has taken significant steps to immediately roll back domestic climate change policies put in place by the Obama administration. This may be a good time to place this quite deviant U.S. government behavior into historical context.

Where to Begin?

This blog is dedicated to an economic view of the environment, and my essays here typically feature analyses of existing or proposed policies, with a look to the future, particularly in the realm of global climate change. Today, however, I take a look back, with an examination of the early history of deliberations in the U.S. government about climate change.

Of course, the history of climate change science goes back at least to Svante Arrhenius, the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish physicist and chemist, who in 1896 calculated how increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) would increase the Earth’s temperature through the greenhouse effect, a finding that was picked up many years later by Guy Stewart Callendar, Charles David Keeling, Roger Revelle, and others. But my focus is not on the history of the science, but on a very specific dimension of the policy history, namely the history of discussions within the U.S. government regarding climate change and potential policy responses.

Some might think that the starting point would be the 1988 Congressional hearings – led by U.S. Senators Timothy Wirth and Albert Gore – which the New York Times covered in a long article. That was during the last year of the Reagan administration, but the story really begins more than two decades earlier – in 1965.

Before going further, I want to give credit to two people who have written about this – David Hone, Chief Climate Change Advisor for Shell, and Jairam Ramesh, formerly chief negotiator for India at the conferences of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee, 1965

More than fifty years ago, on November 5, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson released a report authored by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, pictured here.

Remarkably, the report included a 23-page discussion of the climatic effects of increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), due to the combustion of fossil fuels, and – interestingly enough – concluded with a proposal for research on a specific approach to responding, namely with what is now called “geoengineering.” Below is the table of contents of that section of the report – on “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” and you can read that section of the report here.

In his introduction to the report, President Johnson emphasized that “we will need increased basic research in a variety of specific areas,” and then went on to state: “We must give highest priority of all to increasing the numbers and quality of the scientists and engineers working on problems related to the control and management of pollution.” What a contrast with the anti-science approach of the current resident of the White House!

A Striking Nixon White House Memorandum – 1969

Daniel Patrick Moynihan – surely one of the leading public intellectuals of the twentieth century – was a Harvard professor (1966-1969, 1971-1973 ), advisor to President Richard Nixon (1969-1970), U.S. Ambassador to India (1973-1975), U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (1975-1976), and U.S. Senator (1977-2001). On September 17^th, 1969, while he was working in the White House, Moynihan sent a memorandum to John Ehrlichman, then a key Presidential assistant (who subsequently served 18 months in federal prison for his role in the Watergate conspiracy). The original memorandum is in the Nixon Library, but you can also read it immediately below. It is well worth reading!

Historical Context and the Path Ahead

From the perspective of 2018, as we enter the second year of the Trump administration, it may – or may not – be comforting to recognize that scientific and even policy attention by the White House to climate change goes back more than five decades, to the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Since then, there have surely been ups and downs – through the administrations of Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush (I), Clinton, Bush (II), and Obama, but the current administration is an outlier in its utter disdain for sound science and related hostility to sensible public policy (in this and other domains).

The list of Presidential administrations above should remind us that whether a single four-year term or the maximum eight years, administrations are relatively short-lived when judged in historical context. And they tend to swing back and forth between the two political parties.

All of which reminds me of a true story. In November, 2016, just days after the U.S. Presidential election, I was in Marrakech, Morocco, for the annual U.N. climate negotiations. I was speaking on a panel assembled by the government of China in their Pavilion. Those who preceded me voiced their dismay about the election and their very low expectations for the climate change policy that would likely be forthcoming from Donald Trump and his administration-to-be.

Our moderator from the Chinese government then introduced me to speak, and as I listened with headphones to the simultaneous translation, I heard him say, “And now Harvard’s Professor Stavins will bring us some good news from the United States.” I was dumbfounded. What could I possibly say? I walked to the lectern, sipped some water, took a deep breath, and said to the audience, “When you get to be my age, you recognize that four years is not a long time!”

That will have to suffice as an “optimistic” conclusion to today’s essay.

Why Trump Pulled the U.S. Out of the Paris Accord

I want to bring to your attention my article just published by Foreign Affairs, “Why Trump Pulled the U.S. Out of the Paris Accord – And What the Consequences Will Be.” The article begins as follows:

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement on June 1 was terribly misguided, and his justification for doing so was misleading and untruthful. As he announced in the Rose Garden that day, “The Paris climate accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers…and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production.” The reality is that leaving the accord will neither bring back jobs nor help the taxpayer, but will most certainly hurt the United States and the world.

The initial reaction from abroad was one of dismay and confusion over what the president was actually trying to say. Trump declared, without seeming to understand the terms and dynamics of the agreement, “I will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States.” First of all, renegotiation is a nonstarter. If this was not already clear, it was made more so when within hours of the announcement world leaders rebuked the idea. British Prime Minister Theresa May, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni, among many other heads of state expressed their refusal to return to the drawing board …

To Continue Reading the Article in Foreign Affairs, just follow this link.