Awesome. This is a very cool topic!
The Copenhagen Accord reaffirmed that we can tolerate about a 2C increase in average global temperatures before we hit severe, possibly irrecoverable damage. (This number might be a bit, ah, optimistic...) The only thing that matters in determining our climate end state, as far as I'm aware, is the
total amount of carbon
1 we dump into the atmosphere. Our budget for this century is something like 2000 gigatons, with a range of +/- 500.
Unfortunately, emissions are rising, and that rise is accelerating. We need to peak emissions and start receding
before 2020 in order to have even the slimmest chance of hitting our carbon budget for the century. The odds of this happening are...effectively zero. No event in the short recorded history of industrial civilization, planned or otherwise, has managed to knock emissions back that fast. And the carbon budget doesn't account for the possibility of major feedback loops and knock-on effects.
So what the **** do we do about this? Is it completely too late? Can we convert coltan and palladium into solar fast enough to have the slightest effect? (Or is it gonna be all about ~plastic solar cells~?) Will fracking turn out to be, as some data seems to suggest, a worse CO2 emitter than coal plants? I dunno!
Lest it be all doom and gloom Paul Krugman* seems to think major climate change is economically actionable:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just came out with its preemptive strike against Obama administration regulations on power plants. What the Chamber wanted to do was show that the economic impact of the regulations would be devastating. And I was eager to see how they had fudged the numbers.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the diatribe. The Chamber evidently made a decision that it wanted to preserve credibility, so it outsourced the analysis. And while it tries to spin the results, what it actually found was that dramatic action on greenhouse gases would have surprisingly small economic costs.
The Chamber’s supposed scare headline is that regulations would cost the US economy $50.2 billion per year in constant dollars between now and 2030. That’s for a plan to reduce GHG emissions 40 percent from their 2005 level, so it’s for real action.
So, is $50 billion a lot? Let’s look at the CBO’s long-term projections. These say that average annual US real GDP over the period 2014-2030 will be $21.5 trillion. So the Chamber is telling us that we can achieve major reductions in greenhouse gases at a cost of 0.2 percent of GDP. That’s cheap!
True, the chamber also says that the regulations would cost 224,000 jobs in an average year. That’s bad economics: US employment is determined by the interaction between macroeconomic policy and the underlying tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, and there’s no good reason to think that environmental protection would reduce the number of jobs (as opposed to real wages). But even at face value that’s also a small number in a country with 140 million workers.
So, I was ready to come down hard on the Chamber’s bad economics; but what they’ve actually just shown is that even when they’re paying for the study, the economics of climate protection look quite easy.
*I haven't done any kind of credibility checking on Paul Krugman
And then there's the problem of the developing world. Oh, Indo-China, what are we to do?
Faced with a tradeoff between CO2 mitigation and the rapid deployment of energy infrastructure, policymakers have prioritized the latter (and its associated economic benefits) over the former. Lu Xuedu, Deputy Director General of the Chinese Office of Global Environmental Affairs, was explicit about this when he stated that "You cannot tell people who are struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emissions". Likewise, under the premise that an emission reduction target would hinder economic growth, Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh stated that "India will not accept any emission-reduction target - period". Understanding the wickedness of CO2 mitigation in developing countries - and the differences in opinion about what constitutes right or ethical policy - is crucial for moving forward with de-carbonization of energy sectors. As long as carbon-free energy sources remain more expensive, less reliable and riskier than fossil fuel incumbents, fossil fuel energy systems will continue to be more attractive to policymakers. Until clean technologies are able to provide developing countries with inexpensive, reliable and scalable energy, we can expect to see further expansion of fossil fuel energy
(full, quite good article
here)
So here's my question: what in the name of God do we do to resolve the Third World's quandary between (literal) local and global needs? Can anything effective be done to keep us on our carbon budget, or should we start moving towards a search for a climate-hardened model of civilization? Or is it possible that we'll find scalable low-emission solutions that will actually appeal to the developing world?
This is a classic tragedy of the commons. Individual rational actors may not be able to solve this at all, and attempts at collective solutions so far have been...very ineffective. Short of JC Denton bringing Helios online I'm not sure I see a clear solution. Am I too pessimistic?
1. I am totally neglecting other GHGs here, somebody might need to check my carbon privilege
