Harvard Project on Climate Agreements at COP-24

Along with my Harvard colleagues, David Keith, Robert Stowe, and Jason Chapman, I will be at the Twenty-Fourth Conference of the Parties (COP-24) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Katowice, Poland, leading our delegation from the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (HPCA), December 10-13, 2018.

In addition to holding a series of bilateral meetings with various national delegations, the Harvard Project will participate in (at least) five events.  Two of these are panel sessions organized by HPCA, while the three others are panel sessions organized by national delegations.  My team and I will be at COP-24 in Katowice during the week of December 10, 2018.  COP-24 attendees who wish to meet with the Harvard Project during the conference should send an email Jason Chapman, Project Manager (jason_chapman@hks.harvard.edu).

Five Events in Brief

A Dialogue on Promoting China and US Climate Action
Robert Stavins, Panelist
Hosted by the Counsellors’ Office of the State Council (China) and World Resources Institute
Monday, December 10; 15:30 – 17:00
Location:  China Pavilion

Elaborating and Implementing Article 6 of the Paris Agreement
Hosted by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements and the Enel Foundation
Tuesday, December 11, 2018;  15:00 – 16:30
Location:  Side Event Room “Wisla”

Governance of Solar Geoengineering Deployment
Hosted by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements
Wednesday, December 12, 2018;  11:00 – 12:30
Location:  Pavilion of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)

Enhancing Capacity of Developing Countries to Address Climate Change: Issues and Opportunities
Robert Stavins, Keynote Speaker
Hosted by Korea University, Global Green Growth Institute, and others
Wednesday, December 12, 2018;  15:00 – 18:00
Location:  Korea Pavilion

Sixth Global Climate Change Think Tank Forum: Global Climate Governance and a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind
Robert Stavins, Keynote Speaker
Hosted by the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation (China)
Wednesday, December 12, 2018;  17:30 – 19:00
Location:  China Pavilion

Two Harvard Project Events in Detail

Elaborating and Implementing Article 6 of the Paris Agreement
Hosted by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements and the Enel Foundation
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
15:00 – 16:30
Location:  Side Event Room “Wisla”

Participants:

Kelley Kizzier
Co-Chair, Article 6 negotiations
UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice

Michael Mehling
Deputy Director, Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Daniele Agostini
Head of Low Carbon and European Energy Policies at Enel
Enel Group

Robert Stavins
A. J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development, Harvard Kennedy School
Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

Other participant(s) to be determined

Abstract:

Speakers will consider progress in elaborating Article 6 and what remains to be done, with reference to the potential of Article 6 to enhance ambition. Discussion will be based on practical experience with market mechanisms, academic research, and a close reading of the Paris-Agreement negotiations. The discussion will be based in part on a background paper by Michael Mehling.

Governance of Solar Geoengineering Deployment
Hosted by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
11:00 – 12:30
Location:  Pavilion of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)

Participants:

Daniel Bodansky
Regents’ Professor
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University

David Keith
Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Faculty Director, Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program

Robert Stavins
A. J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development, Harvard Kennedy School
Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

Other participant(s) to be determined

Abstract:

“Solar geoengineering” (SG) refers to technologies that help reduce radiative forcing and cool the planet. Governing SG deployment poses some unique challenges, in part driven by the incentive structure associated with SG, its risks and uncertainties, and its interaction with mitigation. Panelists will discuss these challenges and the potential role of SG in addressing climate change – relative to mitigation and adaptation. The panel is based in part on a research workshop held at Harvard Kennedy School in September 2018, which I wrote about in my previous entry at this blog.

The Path Ahead

After COP-24, I hope to post an essay at this blog assessing the progress (or lack thereof) made in Katowice.  In the meantime, if you will be at COP-24, and would like to meet with the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, please contact Jason Chapman (jason_chapman@hks.harvard.edu).

Share

Controversial, But Important: The Governance of Solar Geoengineering Deployment

In September, the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements hosted a research workshop on an important topic regarding a controversial approach to addressing the threat of global climate change – “Governance of the Deployment of Solar Geoengineering”.  We benefitted from collaboration and support for the workshop from Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program (HSGRP).  Participants included 26 leading academic researchers addressing the workshop’s topic – as well as leading scholars who had considered the governance of other international regimes that might provide lessons and insights for solar geoengineering governance.  You can find the agenda and participant list (combined in a single document) here, as well as most of the presentations from the workshop.

Motivation for Examining this Topic

We based the workshop on the premise that some types of solar geoengineering (SG) will be associated with incentive structures that are actually the inverse of those associated with efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Obviously, the latter is a global commons problem, which requires cooperation at the highest jurisdictional level (international cooperation) in order to advance significant mitigation.

But, in contrast, certain types of SG can – in principle – be implemented effectively at relatively low financial cost – low enough to be borne by small states or even non-state entities acting on their own. The impacts of such action, however, might be substantial, at regional or even global scales. These could include the intended beneficial impacts – decreased global average surface temperature – plus other, potentially adverse side effects. Given the incentive structure associated with SG, its potentially substantial impacts, and the uncertainty (of various kinds) surrounding it, the governance of SG deployment will be challenging, to say the least.

Questions Addressed by the Workshop

The workshop began with overviews of research on SG governance from three disciplinary perspectives – social sciences broadly (including economics, political science, and international relations); legal scholarship; and, finally, further insights from economic theory.

Subsequent sessions addressed the following key questions, which arise, in part, from the incentive structure of SG governance:

(1)  Who ought to and/or will specify criteria for SG deployment, and who ought to and/or is likely to decide when criteria are satisfied?

(2)  What will or should these criteria be? They may include: regulatory criteria developed by policy makers; criteria specified by “agents”/actors who might engage in SG deployment; and physical, engineering, social, economic, ethical, and other dimensions.

(3)  How should/will decisions about deployment be made; what decision-making process should/will be utilized?

(4)  What institutions, either existing or new, are appropriate as decision-making venues? What will or should be the legal framework of such institutions?

(5) How might SG complement and/or undermine national, regional, and multilateral institutions and policy to mitigate or adapt to climate change – and, more broadly, to manage climate risks?

(6)  SG is both a hedge against uncertain but potentially catastrophic risks of (or, alternatively, damages from) climate change – and has its own associated risks, known and unknown. How can we better understand these uncertainties and incorporate them into useful decision-making processes?

(7)  How might we best define a research agenda for the governance of SG deployment?

Finally, a panel of international-relations scholars discussed a set of international regimes – including nuclear arms control and cyber security – that may provide lessons for and insights into SG governance.

The Path Ahead

We did not attempt to provide definitive answers to these questions, but to advance understanding of this set of issues and move the research community some steps further toward better understanding of options for the governance of SG deployment.

Each participant in the workshop is preparing a brief on an aspect of the topic of their interest.  These briefs are designed to be readily accessible by practitioners – policy makers, climate negotiators, and leaders in the business and NGO communities.  The entire volume will be released by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements in February 2019.  Watch this blog for an announcement of the release early in the new year.

Share

Reflections on Economics and Policy Making in the Environmental Domain

This past week, I was privileged to participate in a workshop, “Climate Science in a Time of Political Disruption,” sponsored by the Harvard Program on Science, Technology and Society.  The workshop began with a keynote address by former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy, now Professor of Practice at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.  Following Gina McCarthy’s down-to-earth but quite inspiring remarks (with her usual Yankee humor adding spice to the proceedings), the others on the panel were asked to comment on the topic at hand.  The panelists included Joe Goffman, Executive Director of the Environmental Law Program at Harvard Law School; Peter Huybers, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences; Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School; Lucas Stanczyk, Assistant Professor of Philosophy; and myself.

Given the subject of the workshop, most of the panelists focused their comments on the current political scene and the current U.S. administration’s apparent disdain for climate science.  I took a broader, somewhat historical view, and as the only economist on the panel, I commented on the relationship of economic research to policy making.  I did this via reflections on experiences I’ve had over the past three decades.  I tried to make three points:  first, economic research results can be used as a light bulb or a rock, and either can be effective; second, it is important to move quickly when windows of opportunity open in the policy world to implement research ideas; and third, politics matter, and should not be ignored.

  1. Research Results Can be Used as a Light Bulb or a Rock

I cannot speak for the natural sciences, but it is clearly the case that economic evidence can be used either as a “light bulb” – to illuminate an issue and possibly persuade policy makers of the wisdom of a particular course of action – or as a “rock,” that is, as ammunition to support a policy maker’s predisposed position.  Is this cynical?  I think not, because such economic ammunition can help win a policy battle.  I was just reminded by Paul Krugman in his New York Times column of a somewhat less charitable metaphor, where he characterized some politicians as using economists “the way a drunkard uses a lamppost:  for support, not illumination.”

Related to this reality was a session I chaired in 2001 at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association – a roundtable of former chairs and members of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), including George Eads (Charles River Associates), the late William Niskanen (then of the Cato Institute), William Nordhaus (Yale University), and Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University).  A repeated theme from this set of economists was the reality that CEA typically had more influence by helping others in the Executive Office of the President in their efforts to stop bad ideas than by itself promoting good ideas.

  1. When Windows of Opportunity Open, Move Quickly

Two examples stand out for me of the importance of moving quickly when windows of opportunity open in the policy world to implement research ideas.  One is the work I carried out in the late 1980s under the sponsorship of the late Republican Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania and former Democratic Senator Timothy Wirth of Colorado in the form of research that led to a report, “Project 88:  Harnessing Market Forces to Protect the Environment.”  One of the proposals in the report was to address the then politically prominent problem of acid rain with what is now called a cap-and-trade system.  This idea resonated with the incoming administration of President George H. W. Bush, particularly with the Counsel to the President, Boyden Gray.  In parallel with work being carried out by Joe Goffman and Dan Dudek (both then at the Environmental Defense Fund), I followed up the Project 88 report with numerous White House and other Washington meetings (commuting weekly from my Harvard perch), which eventually contributed to the Bush Administration’s proposal (to an initially resistant Democratic Congress) of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, including its path-breaking sulfur dioxide allowance trading program.

The other example I mentioned to highlight the importance of moving quickly when windows of opportunity open in the policy world is associated with the negotiations carried out annually under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  At the seventeenth Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in Durban, South Africa, in 2011, the delegates agreed to the “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action,” which broke with nearly twenty years of UNFCCC policy by mandating a new approach in which all countries, not just the richest nations, would participate in addressing the need for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions.  The key challenge for climate negotiators was how to meet this new mandate while still observing the fundamental UNFCCC principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” which had previously been interpreted to mean that rich countries alone would shoulder the burden of reducing emissions.

At the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, we recognized that negotiators around the world were suddenly open to outside-the-box thinking.  Indeed, in Science magazine, my colleague, Joe Aldy, and I wrote an article, “Climate Negotiators Create an Opportunity for Scholars.”  Over the following months (and years) we worked hard to help key negotiating countries develop a new policy architecture that could meet the challenge before them.  The result was a hybrid approach that combined elements of top-down architecture with a healthy dose of bottom-up “pledge-and-review,” which led eventually, of course, to the Paris Agreement of 2015.

  1. Politics Matter

For the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), I served as Coordinating Lead Author (with Dr. Zou Ji of China) of the chapter on “International Cooperation:  Agreements and Instruments.”  I was surprised to find that the process was highly politicized – in two distinct ways.  First, whereas I had assumed that the Lead Authors (LAs) serving on our writing team were there only to represent their respective scientific expertise (in economics, legal scholarship, international relations, etc.), some of the LAs seemed to represent the interests of their respective countries.

Second, I was very naive about the final step of the process, when the governments of the world are asked to approve the IPCC’s Summary for Policy Makers line by line.  The controversy associated with our chapter on international climate agreements resulted in that entire section of the SPM being eviscerated of all meaningful substance at the Government Approval Sessions for Working Group III (WG III) in Berlin in April, 2014.  I was disappointed and dismayed by the process and its outcome.

Fortunately, I learned from that experience and my attitude (and behavior) was quite different just six months later, when I found myself in Copenhagen for what was essentially the final stage of the entire five-year enterprise of research, writing, and government approval of the various reports of IPCC AR5, namely the government approval sessions for the Synthesis Report (SYR), which summarizes and synthesizes the key findings from all three Working Group reports.  I had learned my lesson.  Rather than disdaining the politics of the occasion, I embraced it and spent the week in Copenhagen in careful negotiations with the key national governments, the result of which was that all of the essential text on international cooperation and agreements was preserved in the Synthesis Report.

Ironically, by recognizing, accepting, and indeed participating in the fundamentally political aspects of the IPCC government approval process, I was able to keep the report of research from itself being politicized.

Summing Up

So, the three points I made regarding the relationship between economic research and policy making at last week’s Harvard workshop were these:  first, economic research results can be used as a light bulb or a rock, and either or both can be effective; second, it is important to move quickly when windows of opportunity open in the policy world to implement research ideas; and third, politics matter, and should not be ignored.

I left it to others at the workshop – and I leave it to readers of this essay – to judge whether any of this applies more broadly to “Climate Science in a Time of Political Disruption.”

Share