WAPO: Finel on Copenhagen
Check out today’s Planet Panel featuring ASP Sr. Fellow Bernard Finel in the Washington Post. The question du jour:
Almost every key question at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen comes down to how should rich and poor countries shoulder responsibility for climate change. What would be a way of reconciling these differences?
Highlights from Dr. Finel’s response:
The divide between rich and poor countries over climate change ultimately raises three fundamental concerns: morality, economics, and politics… As a matter of morality, the arguments of the poor countries are particularly powerful… But…rich nations did not set out to damage the environment, and furthermore the poor nations also bear some responsibility as a consequence of population growth and land-use issues… Assigning moral culpability is at best a side issue, and indeed one that threatens to derail the kinds of creative thinking that might yield a political breakthrough.
From an economic perspective, the challenge is the mistake of conceiving of the problem as a zero-sum game, where the rich countries are supposed to accept reduced economic growth while the poor countries are allowed the catch up… If greenhouse gas reductions by the industrialized world are simply off-set by economic growth in the developing world, we will have achieved nothing in terms of mitigating climate change… We need to develop schemes that accurately price carbon throughout the supply chain…to provide the market with accurate price signals that take into account the climate change consequences of various economic activities.
From a political perspective, then, the goal is to craft effective quid pro quos that reconcile the moral and economic arguments with what is politically possible…First, we need to create a mechanism to manage climate related intellectual property, a method that would allow innovators to profit but would nonetheless allow for rapid and inexpensive distribution of novel technology to the developing world…Second, the developed world should fund long-term, low-interest loans and grants for countries investing in green development…Third, the guiding principle for the expectations of climate change policies in the developing world ought to be “slower and smaller.” We need to acknowledge that they ought to be expected to do less and take longer to implement their commitments… Finally, we should be thinking in terms of a global cap-and-trade system, with at least some percentage of the licenses distributed according to population, but some also allocated according existing emissions. The goal would be to equalize the burden as much as possible… The principle, ultimately, ought to be to find ways not just to allocate the costs, but to share the benefits of future growth as long as it occurs in a way consistent with the health of the planet.
