What Really Happened at COP-28 in Dubai

If you’ve been reading newspapers, checking your email, listening to the radio, or watching television, you’ve probably learned that the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP-28) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Dubai, U.A.E., the past two weeks, was either a great success, a distinct failure, or somewhere between the two, based to a considerable degree on a paragraph in the COP’s closing statement (officially the “Decision of the First Global Stocktake,” and unofficially the “UAE Consensus”) about the future of fossil fuels, in particular, a statement endorsing “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner …”

Having returned from Dubai a few days ago (the 16th COP I’ve attended), in this essay I step back from the headlines, offer my personal assessment of what happened at COP-28 (and what didn’t happen), reflect on the importance of China-USA cooperation (and sometimes co-leadership), describe the surprising evolution of the role of civil society in these annual Conferences of the Parties, delve into this year’s striking focus on methane emissions, highlight a couple of disappointments at the COP, briefly summarize Harvard’s extensive participation, and offer some closing thoughts about the path ahead.

Behind (and Beyond) the Headlines

COP-28, in my judgment, was successful, but not in the way success has been characterized in most articles I’ve seen.  In the end, the above endorsement of “transitioning away from fossil fuels” (instead of language proposed by greener interests of “phasing down” or even “phasing out” fossil fuels) combined with the endorsement of “accelerating zero- and low-emission technologies, including … renewables, nuclear, abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage …” was sufficient to win the approval of the wealthy oil-producing countries in the Middle East, the large multinational energy companies (who have come to recognize that global movement away from fossil fuels is all but inevitable), the industrialized world, and developing countries.  (I should also recognize that many commentaries have also praised the closing statement for endorsing the tripling of global renewable-energy capacity, doubling of the annual rate of energy-efficiency improvements, and “accelerating and substantially reducing non-carbon-dioxide emissions globally, including in particular methane emissions by 2030” – more about methane below.)

I will leave it to readers of this essay to draw your own conclusion about whether the “UAE Consensus” is a rather vacuous statement of hopes and aspirations, or, in the words of COP-28 President Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, an impressive “paradigm shift that has the potential to redefine our economies” and “a robust action plan to keep 1.5 within reach.”

But, having participated in these annual UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties for 16 years, I don’t think the most important outcome of COP-28 is what is contained in that closing statement, which is essentially a non-binding resolution about future ambitions.   I say this despite my recognition that the closing statement about fossil fuels and – more importantly – the press coverage it has received may have some symbolic, signaling value, and can “normalize ideas and measures once seen as too radical to be globally agreed.”  Indeed, that statement has gotten the lion’s share of press attention, because the press and many others like to characterize these annual COPs as either “successes” or “failures,” and the closing statement provides a very convenient focal point.

The reality is that the negotiations at most COPs are neither successes nor failures (except perhaps when a new international agreement is enacted, as with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and the Paris Agreement in 2015, both legally binding international treaties).  Naming any of the negotiations at the twenty-six other COPs as successes or failures makes no more sense than it would to characterize the annual World Economic Forum meetings in Davos as successes or failures. Both are extensive, complex get-togethers, based on bottom-up processes.  It is not as if the corporate CEOs meeting in Davos agree to take action, and then go home to their respective Boards of Directors to implement their Davos commitments.  The causality runs in precisely the opposite direction.  So too with the annual COPs, where the delegations of the various “Parties,” the 195+ countries, bring with them their predisposed domestic priorities and perceptions of acceptable “international cooperation.” Each COP’s official outcome is essentially the aggregation of those.

What will drive meaningful action around the world – that is, massive cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – is the combination of market realities and public policies (with both having impacts on the other).  The most important public policies – whether carbon taxes, cap-and-trade instruments, performance standards, or technology standards – have been and will be enacted at the national level, the regional level in the case of the European Union, and sometimes the sub-national level (for example, California).  Those policy developments are linked with what happens at the annual COPs, but the direction of causation is fundamentally bottom-up, not top-down.

The Most Important COP-28 Development

Ever since Donald Trump became President of the United States, a major question has been when would the United States and China return to the highly effective co-leadership roles they played during the years of the Obama administration in the runup to the Paris Agreement.  This was an important question at COP-26 in Glasgow in 2021, but it turned out that last year’s COP-27 provided an answer, although in somewhat surprising fashion.

As I wrote at the time (including in a post at this blog), the most important development during COP-27 held November 7-20, 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, took place 6,000 miles away in Bali, Indonesia, when U.S. President Joe Biden and China President Xi Jinping met on November 14, 2022, on the sidelines of the G20 summit, shook hands, and engaged in a three-hour conversation in which, among other topics, they signaled their return to the cooperative stance that had previously been so crucial for international progress on climate change.  That three-hour meeting marked the end of the breakoff of talks that had been initiated by China in response to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in early August of that year.  The two leaders expressed their intention to not allow disagreements regarding international trade, human rights, movement away from democracy in Hong Kong, and Taiwan’s security to contaminate their cooperation on climate change.

The discussion between the two heads of state quickly (and explicitly) trickled down to the heads of the respective negotiating teams at COP-27 — John Kerry of the United States and Xie Zhenhua of China.  They are longtime friends, but had not been engaged in discussions or cooperation on climate change because of the problems that had existed at the highest level between the two governments.  But, after the Biden-Xi meeting in Bali, statements from both John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua indicated that the two countries would resume cooperation.  I expressed hope at the time that there might even be a return to the co-leadership on climate change policy which China and the United States had previously exercised and which had disappeared long before Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, namely with the beginning of the Trump administration and throughout much of the first two years of the Biden administration.

However, it was not until very recently that it became clear that China and the USA might truly resume cooperation and co-leadership, and that was two weeks before COP-28, when the most important development for COP-28 (Dubai) took place 8,000 miles away, in Sunnylands, California, when the same two heads of state met and signaled in even more certain terms (and in writing in their “Sunnylands Statement”) their renewed cooperation on climate change.  It’s not news that U.S.-China cooperation is essential for meaningful progress on climate change, and the reality is that the Sunnylands Statement — jointly signed by the two presidents in November, 2023 – is ultimately more important than any individual accomplishments at COP-28 in Dubai.

Important Context for Change:  Surprising Evolution of the Annual COPs

It is helpful for a full understanding of what happened at COP-28 to reflect on the evolution of the annual COPs since they began with COP-1 in Berlin in 1995, or at least over the 16 years that I’ve been attending these festivities as the leader of Harvard’s delegation, beginning with COP-13 in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007. 

In fact, we need to begin even before COP-1 in 1995, with the UN conference that took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 and that produced the UNFCCC.  The text specifies (in paragraph 6 of Article 7) something quite unusual for a process of ongoing international negotiations, namely that “any body … whether … governmental or non-governmental, which is qualified in matters covered by the Convention, and which has informed the secretariat of its wish to be represented at a session of the Conference of the Parties as an observer, may be so admitted…”  Thus, there is an explicit role for observer organizations – largely from civil society (environmental NGOs of all kinds, trade associations, universities, etc.) – in the annual “Conference of the Parties” of the UNFCCC.

Over time, there were at first gradual and more recently quite dramatic changes in the relative importance and prominence of the core country delegations of negotiators (typically about 10,000 people) versus “observers” from civil society (recently about 30,000 to 40,000 people, reaching 70,000 at COP-28 in Dubai).  When I first participated in the COPs 16 years ago, I would say that 90-95% of the meaningful action was in the negotiations, with 5-10% among the participants from civil society.

But by the time of COP-28 this year, I would peg 10% of the meaningful action as being within the negotiations, and 90% among the myriad events (including official “Side Events,” unofficial presentations and sessions, meetings, and interactions of all kinds) among participants from civil society.  Except when there is a legal agreement to be negotiated (Kyoto, Paris), most action is simply outside of the negotiations.  You can think of the COP as a circus in which the “main event” is eclipsed with increasing frequency by the “side shows.” 

In the words of Somini Sengupta, writing in the New York Times, during COP-28, “there are two climate summits taking place in Dubai. One is the gathering of bleary-eyed, sharp-tongued diplomats parsing over every word and comma” in the closing statement, but “the bigger event is happening outside the negotiating rooms. It’s part trade fair, part protest stage, part debate forum.”  Included in the “trade fair” were battery entrepreneurs, solar panel manufacturers, venture capitalists, financial brokers, mining executives, real estate developers, tech startups, green cement manufacturers, construction companies, global food suppliers, fertilizer producers, pharmaceutical companies, and representatives of dozens of other sectors.

Hence, I christened this year’s festivities in Dubai, “Climate Expo 2023.”  I don’t say this with cynicism or even skepticism, because I recognize, as I stated above, that this is a bottom-up process like the World Economic Forum in Davos each year, and like Davos, the Climate Expo plays a role, indeed a potentially important one.  Great examples of this in Dubai were in the form of events targeting a specific non-CO2 greenhouse gas – methane.

Methane

Something that was very striking at COP-28 was the degree to which methane emissions received greatly increased attention, not necessarily in the negotiations, but in the multitude of discussions and side agreements forged and publicized among governments (the Global Methane Pledge to cut emissions by 30% by 2030) and – importantly – among diverse members of civil society, including business associations, environmental NGOs, and academics. This was a dramatic change from COP-27, just one year ago.  I’m pleased to say that our Harvard delegation was a major contributor to this, with the Salata Institute’s Initiative on Global Methane Emissions Reduction, which I have the privilege and pleasure of directing.  (More about that below, where I summarize Harvard’s work at COP-28.)

I’ve previously written at this blog about the importance of reducing methane emissions, which account for about 30% of the warming that has taken place since pre-industrial times, and may be responsible for nearly half of the warming taking place this decade.  At COP-28, the action on methane outside of the UNFCCC negotiations was quite remarkable.   As the COP was just getting going, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized its regulation to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by approximately 80%, and the USA pledged at COP-28 to marshall some $1 billion to help poor countries cut their methane emissions, which led Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and three other countries to join the Global Methane Pledge, bringing total participation to 155 governments.  Considering the high rates of emissions from these countries, this was a very important development. 

Also at COP-28, the United States, China, and the UAE held a methane summit, which featured a series of relevant pledges.  And the World Bank focused on its Global Flaring and Methane Reduction Partnership, as well as the Global Methane Hub launching its Enteric Fermentation Accelerator.  In addition to the $1 billion in new grant funding noted above, international financial institutions approved more than $3.5 billion in new investments in methane-reducing projects since COP-27.

Of potentially greater importance, a large group of leading oil and gas companies pledged to achieve near zero methane emissions by 2030, and to completely eliminate routine flaring by the same year.  The Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 now counts 120 companies with operations in 60 countries, covering 35% of world oil and gas production, and more than 70% of LNG flows.  Linked with this, the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) expanded it Satellite Monitoring Campaign.

Of course, if the venting/flaring can be reduced/eliminated at reasonable cost, it is very much in the interest of these oil and gas companies to do so, since it means keeping more of a merchantable product in the pipeline for sale.  But that does not detract from the potential importance of the initiatives.  More broadly, whether these multiple pledges and actions from private industry, civil society, and governments will result in real emission reductions will ultimately depend on adequate measurement, reporting, verification, and enforcement, which are among the targets of the research and outreach that constitute the Harvard Initiative to Reduce Global Methane Emissions (see below).

A Couple of Disappointments at COP-28

Adaptation to climate change that is already taking place and will continue to take place regardless of actions to mitigate emissions received a great deal of attention with 84 uses of the word in the COP-28 Decision, but there are no actionable commitments.  Indeed, it seems that the progress made last year at COP-27 on creating a fund for Loss and Damage, and financial contributions to the fund announced at COP-28, which reached $700 million, may have diverted attention and action away from the Adaptation Fund.  That said, it should be recognized that the total now pledged for supplying the Loss and Damage Fund amounts to much less than 1% of what the eventual demand is likely to be.

There was also considerable disappointment regarding support for international carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.  I have written extensively in the past about how international linkage of national policy instruments can bring down aggregate abatement costs and thus encourage greater ambition, and the consequent potential importance of Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement for facilitating such linkages and preventing double-counting of achievements toward meeting Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).  Since the “Rulebook” for Article 6 was completed at COP-26 in Madrid, I have been concerned about the directions that the use of 6.2 seems to be taking.

      If that concern was not bad enough, the negotiations at COP-28 in Dubai took several steps backward, producing a major setback for international carbon markets, with some countries attempting to re-open what had been settled issues regarding the nature of the 6.2 mechanism, as well as ongoing politicization of other parts of Article 6.  In the end, Bolivia was able to block steps toward implementation of market-based approaches under the Paris Agreement (although international exchanges can take place independently).

      I turn next to a summary of some of the work of our Harvard delegation at COP-28, and then conclude with some closing thoughts about COP-28 and the path ahead.

Harvard Participation

I’m very pleased to say that our Harvard delegation to COP-28 played a significant role in the increased attention given to methane, focusing on work of the Salata Institute’s Initiative on Global Methane Emissions Reduction, which I have the privilege of directing.  We held two dozen meetings on our methane work with governments, NGOs, and private industry; and I made four presentations in various side events over two days, including our official Harvard side event.  You can read about all of these at our Tumblr website.  Included were:

Reducing Global Methane Emissions: Imperatives, Opportunities, and Challenges This official Harvard Side Event featured several leading scholars and climate policy experts who discussed current research and practice on technology, policy, and international cooperation, drawing in part on Harvard’s major new methane initiative supported by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University.  Professor James Stock, Director of the Salata Institute, offered welcoming comments; and then I moderated a discussion among:  Claire Henly, Senior Advisor for Non-CO2 greenhouse gases, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate; Daniel Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering, Harvard University; and Helena Varkkey, Associate Professor of Environmental Politics and Governance, Universiti Malaya and Principal Investigator, UM-CERAH-EDF initiative on methane emissions in Malaysia.  There’s an abridged video of the Side Event here.

Net Zero in Action: Showcasing Decarbonization Technologies – I provided the keynote address at an IPIECA event, held at the Pavilion of the International Emissions Trading Association.

Transforming High Global Warming Potential Sectors through Carbon Markets – I made a presentation on “The Promise and Peril of GHG Markets for Reducing Global Methane Emissions,” in a panel at the Asian Development Bank Pavilion.

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Application of Low Emission Development Strategies and Progress of Global Energy TransitionI made a presentation on “Comparing Carbon Taxes and Emissions Trading” at the Ninth Global Climate Change Think Tank Forum, hosted by China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, in the China Pavilion.

In addition to our work on methane at COP-28, the Harvard delegation in Dubai included faculty from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and others from around Harvard.  HSPH sponsored two events at COP-28: 

“Linking Agendas of the UNFCCC and the World Health Assembly – Regional perspective,” in the Guatemala Pavilion.

 “Linking Agendas of the UNFCCC and the World Health Assembly – Global perspective,” in the World Health Organization Pavilion.

There were also a significant number of Harvard College and Harvard graduate students in attendance.

Closing Thoughts and the Path Ahead

First, “COP-28 was a coming-out party for private sector climate action,” to use the phrase of Nat Keohane, president of C2ES.  As I noted above, hundreds of companies from very diverse sectors – including but by no means limited to energy generation (fossil and renewable) – were present to showcase technologies, management practices, adaptation, and finance in support of fulfilling the promise of the Paris Agreement, and the UNFCCC more broadly.  For some observers, this was a distinctly negative aspect of COP-28, while others (including myself) found the participation of private industry to add to the diversity, the meaningful contributions, and perhaps the pragmatism of COP-28.

Second, COP-28 completed the first 5-year Global Stocktake.  Countries are to submit their next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement prior to COP-30 in 2025.

Third, COP-28 was a logistical success, with an excellent venue, with real buildings, not temporary structures.  It was spread over an area larger than New York City’s Central Park, but the weather was perfect (albeit on the warm side)! 

However, it’s not clear that such positive statements can be said about the locations of the next two COPs.  COP-29, set for November 11-24, 2024, will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan (where, by the way, the oil and gas industry constitutes two-thirds of GDP), and COP-30 will take place November 10-21, 2025, in Belém do Pará in the Amazon region of Brazil.

Whether I will maintain my streak of annual COP participation is, as always, an open question.

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International Climate Change Policy & Action in the Biden Administration

Many of us are still reeling from the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, incited by the current President of the United States.  And our thoughts are now dominated by yesterday’s impeachment of the President and the ongoing threats of violence in Washington and across the country from his extremist supporters.  But in less than one week, a new President will be sworn into office, and so it is prudent to think about the incoming administration and the challenges it will face in regard to climate change policy.  This is the focus of my essay published today by Lawfare, the superb host for analysis and debate about the law, politics, and policy of international security.  With the permission of the Lawfare editors, I’m pleased to be able to reproduce my essay below (with just very minor edits, namely, the insertion of some section headings for purposes of clarity and consistency with the standard style in my blog).  I hope you find this of interest.

L A W F A R E

The Biden Administration and International Climate Change Policy & Action

By Robert N. Stavins

Thursday, January 14, 2021

Former Secretary of State John Kerry, with grand-daughter in tow, signs the Paris Agreement in 2016 (UN Photo by Amanda Voisard)

On Jan. 20, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. He will face an unprecedented set of challenges, including global climate change—one of four stated policy priorities of his administration (along with the coronavirus pandemic, economic recovery and racial equity)—in addition to the immediate issue of the looming Senate trial of President Trump and ongoing threats of violence from extremist supporters. Because climate change is a global commons problem and international cooperation is necessary to limit free-rider incentives, President-elect Biden has pledged to immediately initiate the process of rejoining the Paris Agreement (from which President Trump withdrew the United States on Nov. 4, 2020—the earliest date permitted by the agreement). Thirty days after the necessary paperwork is filed with the United Nations, the United States will again be a party to the agreement. That’s the easy part. The hard part is coming up with a quantitative statement of how and by how much U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases will be reduced over time.

The Historical Context

To fully appreciate the challenge the new administration will face, it is helpful to reflect on the history of international negotiations that brought us to this point. At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was first negotiated, committing parties to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Three years later in Berlin at the first annual Conference of the Parties, it was agreed that the wealthier countries (listed in UNFCCC Annex I) would commit to targets and timetables for emission reductions, but not the other 129 (largely developing) countries. This was an attempt to provide for distributional equity among nations —recognizing that the industrialized countries were responsible for the lion’s share of accumulated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and by virtue of their wealth were more capable of taking action. Two years after that, in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was enacted, codifying these objectives with quantitative targets for Annex I countries only.

The Clinton administration negotiated the protocol with considerable enthusiasm under the leadership of Vice President Gore, but it did not submit the protocol to the Senate for possible ratification, knowing that the protocol’s lack of any emissions-reduction responsibility for the large emerging economies (China, India, Brazil, Korea, South Africa, Mexico and Indonesia) meant it would fail in the Senate. This was a reasonable assumption, given that the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which said as much, had passed the Senate by a vote of 95-0 just four months before the Kyoto conference.

The Kyoto Protocol was highly flawed. First, the Annex I countries alone could not reduce global emissions, despite a particularly severe target for the U.S., as the significant growth in emissions came from the emerging economies. Second, because the protocol excluded most countries (in particular, developing countries with relatively low costs of emissions mitigation), the costs were vastly greater than need be—four times the cost-effective level by conservative estimates. Third, it was questionable whether distributional equity was even achieved, given that 50 non-Annex I countries had greater per-capita income than the poorest of Annex I nations. So, the United States never ratified Kyoto, and eventually Australia, Canada, Japan and Russia dropped out, leaving the European Union and New Zealand as the only Annex I parties participating (together accounting for 14 percent of global emissions).

Almost two decades after Kyoto, a fundamentally different approach to international climate cooperation was taken by the Paris Agreement of 2015, which was developed under the joint leadership of the U.S. and China during the Obama administration.

The Paris Agreement

The key attribute of the Paris Agreement is its hybrid structure, combining top-down (legally binding) and bottom-up elements. The former are largely procedural (but binding under international law), including a requirement in Article 4 that countries submit nationally determined contributions (NDCs), statements of their emissions reductions from 2020 to 2025/2030), and update them by the end of 2020 and every five years thereafter. The key bottom-up element consists of the set of submitted NDCs, which are not part of the agreement but, rather, are assembled in a separate public registry. The notion is that the NDCs—unlike the negotiated Kyoto targets—arise from or are at least consistent with domestic policies, goals and politics in their respective countries. The “bindingness” of the targets, therefore, comes not from the Paris Agreement itself, but from any domestic laws and regulations put in place to achieve the NDCs. It was because of this structure, which avoided binding quantitative targets in the agreement itself, that the Obama administration felt it was able to ratify it as an executive agreement, without Senate approval.

One year after its approval in Paris, the agreement came into force in November 2016, when the threshold of 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global emissions had ratified it. Remarkably, it had required seven years for the Kyoto Protocol to achieve the same threshold for coming into force. What caused the exceptionally rapid accumulation of Paris ratifications? The explanation lies in the fact that the agreement also provides that once it comes into force, there is a four-year delay before any ratifying country may withdraw. So, from 2015 to 2016, international concern that Donald Trump might be elected president and live up to his promise to pull the U.S. out of the agreement led countries to move as fast as they could, and the Paris Agreement came into force on Nov. 4, 2016. So, global fear of Trump gets credit (and explains why Trump’s withdrawal date of Nov. 4, 2020, was the earliest allowed).

The U.S. withdrawal from the agreement had no direct effect on domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Those emissions were affected by the Trump administration’s rollbacks of Obama-era domestic climate policies. The greatest concern was that such action by the U.S. would lead China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies to rethink their Paris pledges. But this did not happen, as far as we know. Of course, the comparison ought to be with what those countries would have done had the U.S. not withdrawn, but such a comparison would be with an unobservable hypothetical. It is too soon to assess achievement with the initial set of NDCs, since those describe reductions over the period 2020 to 2025/30, but as of early January 2021, only 23 countries had submitted their updated NDCs, due at the end of 2020.

The Challenge for the Biden Administration

As I said at the outset, the easy part will be submitting the necessary paperwork on Jan. 20 to rejoin the Paris Agreement, but the hard part will be coming up with the new U.S. NDC—a quantitative statement of how and by how much U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced over time. This will be challenging because the new NDC will need to be sufficiently ambitious to satisfy (at least to some degree) both domestic green groups and some of the key countries of the international community (despite the likelihood that Biden and his special envoy for climate change, John Kerry, will initially find a warm reception and abundant goodwill from most world leaders).

This essentially means that the NDC will need to be at least as ambitious as (and probably more so than) the Obama administration target of a 26-28 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, compared with 2005 (which would have been difficult to achieve even if Hillary Clinton had become president). And it will need to compare favorably with the targets now being announced by other major emitters. For example, the European Union is enacting a new target to cut its emissions 55 percent below its 1990 level by 2030. And China recently said it will achieve carbon neutrality (zero net emissions) by 2060.

But if significant ambition is one necessary condition for the new Biden NDC, the other necessary condition is that it be credible, that is, truly achievable given existing and reasonably anticipated policy actions. The only way that both of these necessary conditions can be achieved is with aggressive new domestic climate legislation.

Is Ambitious Climate Legislation Feasible?

Even with the Democratic-controlled Senate—with a one-vote margin—meaningful and ambitious climate legislation will be difficult, if not impossible. The budget reconciliation process, whereby only a simple majority is needed to pass legislation, rather than the 60 votes required to cut off Senate debate, can be used to reverse some of Trump’s last-minute policies that are connected to the tax code or mandatory spending if every Democrat or enough Republicans to make up for any defections support the given move. And the one-vote margin can be effective for confirming Biden’s appointees, and it can help for increasing the budgets of federal agencies. But for ambitious climate (or other) legislation, the 60-vote threshold will be the binding constraint.

Under these circumstances, it will be challenging, to say the least, for Democrats to enact Biden’s climate plan, including its $2 trillion in spending over four years with the goal of making all U.S. electricity carbon free in 15 years and achieving net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050. An analysis by the Rhodium Group suggests that to be on a steady path to achieve Biden’s 2050 goal, a cut of 43 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 would be necessary—in other words, a reduction of about 3 percent every year. Also, keep in mind that the Obama administration’s major climate legislation—the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (the so-called Waxman-Markey bill)—failed to receive a vote in the Senate, even though Democrats (and independents who caucused with Democrats) then held a total of 59 seats. Although climate change is now taken more seriously by the public and receives considerably greater attention in political circles than it did 12 years ago, the prospects over the next two to four years for comprehensive climate legislation—such as a truly meaningful carbon-pricing system—are not good.

But other legislation that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the long term appears more feasible. That includes a post-coronavirus economic stimulus bill, which might have a green tinge, if not a fully green hue. The Obama administration’s stimulus package enacted 13 years ago in response to the Great Recession included some $90 billion in clean energy investments and tax incentives. Another candidate will be a future infrastructure bill, something both parties seem to recognize is important to upgrade aging U.S. infrastructure. This could include funding for improvements in the national electricity grid, which will be necessary to facilitate greater reliance on renewable sources of electricity generation.

Less Ambitious, But Bipartisan Climate Legislation

Finally, there are possibilities for less ambitious but bipartisan climate legislation, with stringency and scope much less than what Biden’s climate plan calls for. The key approaches here might involve tax incentives, that is, nearly every politician’s favorite instrument—subsidies. This may fit well with Biden’s moderate approach to governing and his stated desire to work with both parties in Congress. Specific bipartisan options could include (explicit or implicit) subsidies targeting wind and solar power, carbon capture and storage/utilization, nuclear power, technology initiatives, and electric vehicles via a rebate program.

But such modest, bipartisan initiatives are unlikely to satisfy either the demands of domestic climate policy advocates or international calls for action. Because of this, the new administration—like the Obama administration—may have to opt for regulatory approaches.

Possibilities for Regulatory Actions

The new president, under existing authority, could quickly take actions through executive orders in a number of areas to reverse many of Trump’s regulatory rollbacks. Will Democrats use the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to nullify a rule within 60 legislative days of its adoption? Republicans used this at the end of the Obama administration, but the law prohibits Congress from later adopting a regulation that is of “substantially the same form” as the disapproved rule unless it is specifically authorized by a subsequent law.

More generally, new oil and gas leasing on federal lands could again be prohibited, and the White House could attempt to block the Keystone XL pipeline from being completed. More promising, the president could direct that the social cost of carbon (SCC) be revised, presumably returning it to the Obama administration’s appropriate use of global (not just domestic) damages and a 3 percent (rather than 7 percent) discount rate in the calculations, thereby increasing the SCC from about $1 to $50 per ton, and directing federal agencies to use the revised SCC in their own decision-making. Presumably, the new administration will move to reinstate and surpass the Obama administration’s ambitious corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards, which is justified by the SCC.

Also, there is the possibility of using the authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission to use financial regulation of publicly traded companies to raise the cost of capital for fossil energy development, or to set standards for disclosure of climate-related corporate information. Likewise, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has itself begun to explore options via its Market Risk Advisory Committee.

Thus, regulatory approaches under existing statutory authority through rule-making often appear to be an attractive option, but using new regulations under existing legislation rather than enacting new laws raises another problem—the courts. Rule-making entails lengthy notice and comment periods and requires extensive records and interagency consultation. Furthermore, rules are frequently subject to litigation. The Obama administration promulgated its Clean Power Plan after the Senate failed to deliver on the administration’s comprehensive climate legislation. And the Clean Power Plan was subject to a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court even before Trump entered office. Then Trump arrived and killed the regulation outright.

But the real challenge to the regulatory approach is that new regulations are much more likely to be successfully challenged in federal courts in 2021 than they were during the Obama years. This is partly because there are 228 Trump-appointed federal judges. But more importantly, the Supreme Court’s new 6-3 conservative majority is likely to favor a relatively literal reading of statutes, giving executive departments and agencies much less flexibility to go beyond the letter of the law or to interpret statutes in “innovative ways.” In particular, the Supreme Court may move to modify or even overrule the critical Chevron Doctrine, under which federal courts defer to administrative agencies when Congress was less than explicit on some issue in a statute (such as whether carbon dioxide can be regulated under sections of the Clean Air Act of 1970 intended for localized pollutants).

Other National and Sub-National Climate Policies

During the presidential transition, there has been considerable talk about a “whole of government” approach to climate change, in which the White House pushes virtually all departments and agencies to put in place changes that are supportive of decarbonizing the economy. This would be beyond or instead of the focused statutory and regulatory policies described above. Of course, the critical question is what such an approach can produce in terms of short-term emissions reductions and/or long-term decarbonizing of the economy. This is, at best, an open question.

Of course, even if little can be accomplished at the federal level over the next two to four years, surely the new administration will not be hostile to states and municipalities taking more aggressive action. Indeed, climate policies at the state level (California) and regional level (the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeast) have become increasingly important, particularly during the four years of the Trump administration. Bottom-up evolution of national climate policy may continue to evolve from the Democratic-leaning states in the Northeast, Middle Atlantic, Upper Midwest, Southwest and West Coast (and Georgia!), which together represent more than half of the U.S. population and an even larger share of economic activity and greenhouse gas emissions.

A Note of Optimism for the Path Ahead

The new administration may or may not find creative ways to break the logjam that has prevented ambitious national climate change policies from being enacted (or, if enacted, to be sustainable). My greatest source of optimism is that the Biden-Harris team, in sharp contrast to the Trump-Pence administration, gives every indication that it will embrace scientific and other expertise across the board—whether that means the best epidemiologists and infectious disease experts designing an effective strategy for the coronavirus, or the best scientists, lawyers and economists designing sound climate policies that are also politically feasible.

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A Positive Take on the Future of International Climate Negotiations

In most institutions, individuals range from highly competent to barely qualified.  And they also range from a real pleasure to a real pain to work with.  Such a range of individuals may exist in any organization, and the international climate change negotiations – otherwise known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – is no exception.

I’m pleased to say that Kelley Kizzier, my guest in the latest episode of our podcast, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” is an outlier in both of those dimensions.  She is highly competent and exceptionally engaging.  That made me particularly happy to have an opportunity to sit down with her for this podcast.

Kelley Kizzier is well known – and highly respected – by those who have labored in the international climate negotiations over the past 15 years.  But hers may be a new name to some of you. So, please read on.

Kelley Kizzier speaking at COP-24, Katowice, Poland, December 2018

Kelley was the European Union’s lead markets negotiator in the climate negotiations for 14 years. And for the last three years of that period, she also served as the UNFCCC co-chair of the negotiations on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, a key part of the Agreement, which we’ve had an opportunity to discuss in previous episodes of the podcast – with Andrei Marcu, Paul Watkinson, Jos Delbeke, and Sue Biniaz.

Speaking on a panel (with yours truly) at COP-25, Madrid, Spain, December 2019, organized by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

Before beginning work with the EU in Brussels, Kelley held senior roles in Dublin with the Irish Environmental Protection Agency. And most recently, since 2019, Kelley has served as Associate Vice President for International Climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Our conversation was wide ranging, including Kelley’s professional background, the evolution of the UNFCCC, the structure of the Paris Agreement, and the challenges and opportunities now facing the climate negotiations.  Through it all, she demonstrates considerable optimism, mixed with a healthy dose of realism.

In addressing a question about the postponement of COP-26 in Glasgow, Scotland, originally scheduled for November, 2020, she remarks that “the postponement of the COP should not delay urgent action by countries to step up their ambition. And I hope that no one finds comfort in that delay, that we are still urgently looking to up our game in terms of ambition.”

Kelley cites several recent positive developments in international climate policy, particularly in the EU where its new “Green Deal” may be implemented.  The Deal stipulates even more significant carbon emission reductions than the 40% cut that was previously promised by the EU member states.

“It’s a centrist acceleration of established EU climate policy,” she says. “And through that, they have announced that they’re going to take that target to 50 or even 55% reduction by 2030 [as compared with 1990 levels].”

Looking forward to the re-scheduled COP-26 in November, 2021, Kizzier expresses her optimism that nations will be prepared to finalize the rules (the so-called “Rulebook”) of international climate policy cooperation (and carbon markets) under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.

Co-Facilitator of Article 6 discussion at UNFCCC meeting, Bonn, Germany, May 2017

“COP-26 is about ambition, and it’s going to be important, in that context, to push for us to complete The Paris Rulebook. Because the rules matter, and we can’t afford to lock in carbon market rules that undermine the integrity of the targets,” she says. “Agreement on these rules, as important as it is, should not be a barrier to action. We simply can’t afford delay.”

All of this and more is found in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” Listen to this latest discussion here.  You can find a complete transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

My conversation with Kelley Kizzier is the twelfth episode in the Environmental Insights series.  Previous episodes have featured conversations with:

“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

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