environmental politics Archives - Page 10 of 43 - An Economic View of the Environment

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

What Should We Make of China’s Announcement of a National CO2 Trading System?

On December 19, 2017, the government of China announced that it is commencing development of a nationwide CO₂ trading system, that when launched will become the world’s largest carbon trading system, annually covering about 3.5 billion tons of CO₂ emissions in China’s electric power sector. That approaches twice the size of what is currently the world’s largest carbon trading system, the European Union Emissions Trading System, which accounts for about 2 billion tons per year, and is nearly nine times the size of the largest U.S. system, the California AB-32 cap-and-trade system, which covers about 400 million tons of annual emissions.

The ultimate purpose of the newly announced Chinese trading system is to help the country meets its emissions and renewable energy targets which are part of its Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, in particular, peaking its CO₂ emissions by 2030, and achieving 20% of the country’s energy supply from renewables. Note that coal currently accounts for 65% of China’s electricity generation. Wind and solar capacity have been growing rapidly, but still account for only 4% and 1% of generation, respectively.

The Chinese carbon market will double the share of global CO₂emissions covered by worldwide carbon-pricing systems to almost 25 percent. For this and other reasons, the December announcement was greeted with excited praise from climate activists (but simultaneously with disregard and skepticism from conservative opponents of climate action). The most reasonable assessment, however, is between those two extremes, as I explain in this essay. That said, the December announcement by China of its plan to develop and launch a nationwide CO₂ trading system is an important landmark on the long road to addressing the threat of global climate change.

Some Brief History for Context

In 2011, China’s 12^th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) first included a statement about the government’s intention to develop – gradually – a nationwide carbon market. Subsequently, in 2013 and 2014, seven pilot emissions trading programs were launched in the cities of Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Tianjin, plus two provincial systems in Guangdong and Hubei. In total, these covered some 3,000 sources, with total annual CO₂ emissions of 1.4 billion tons. The designs of the systems were intentionally varied, to facilitate learning, and allowance prices ranged from $3 to $10 per ton of CO₂.

Then, in the lead-up to the Paris climate negotiations, on September 25, 2015, President Xi Jinping met at the White House with U.S. President Barack Obama, and announced that China would launch its nationwide CO₂ trading system in 2017, presumably covering electricity, iron and steel, chemicals, cement, and paper production.

The announcement last month was the culmination of this brief history, as China seeks to move ahead with its “pledges” under the Paris Agreement, at the same time as the Trump administration in the United States intends to withdraw altogether from the Agreement (in November, 2020, the soonest that such withdrawal can take place under the rules of the Agreement).

What’s Known about the Chinese Carbon Trading System

China’s December announcement that it is commencing development of a nationwide CO₂ trading system, beginning with the electric power sector only, provided few details. Apparently, the system is intended to eventually include electricity, building materials, iron and steel, non-ferrous metal processing, petroleum refining, chemicals, pulp and paper, and aviation, but will start with the electricity sector alone. Like most operating systems in the world, it will regulate only CO₂, not other greenhouse gases (GHGs), which in China’s case means potentially addressing more than 80% of its total GHG emissions.

The system will not be a cap-and-trade system per se (unlike the CO₂ trading systems in Europe and California, for example), because there will not be an administratively set mass-based cap of some quantity of emissions. Rather, the trading system will be rate-based, meaning that it will be in terms of emissions per unit of electricity output. This is also called a tradable performance standard, whereby the government sets a performance standard (a benchmark emissions rate per unit of output), sources receive permits (allowances) based on their electricity output and their benchmark, and sources are allowed to trade. Such tradable performance standards have been used previously in a variety of contexts, including the U.S. EPA leaded gasoline phasedown in the 1990s, U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to regulate motor-vehicle fuel efficiency, the Obama Administration’s Renewable Fuel Standard, and California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

One objective of using this approach is to insulate – or at least cushion – the (electricity) sector and the larger economy from “carbon market shock.” By regulating the emissions rate (per unit of product output), rather than emissions per se, the rate-based approach may help mitigate the political worry about constraining economic growth, but does so by essentially rewarding (subsidizing) higher levels of output. This relative inefficiency of China’s rate-based system, compared with a mass-based cap-and-trade approach is highlighted in a new paper by Lawrence Goulder (Stanford University) and Richard Morgenstern (Resources for the Future) and one by William Pizer (Duke University)and Xiliang Zhang (Tsinghua University). (There is a parallel impact and concern – in cap-and-trade systems – with an output-based updating allocation, which can address competitiveness impacts but also introduces inefficiencies by subsidizing dirty production. This mechanism – which affects only energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries – was proposed in the Waxman-Markey climate legislation and is employed in California’s system.)

The rate-based approach is intended to have a smaller impact on marginal production costs than the mass-based cap-and-trade approach, and thereby is likely to have a smaller impact on the price of products (whether electricity or manufactured goods). This is the motivation for using this approach in an output-based updating allocation, as described above, and it carries with it the parallel disadvantage of insulating consumers from (some of) the social costs of their consumption decisions. The problem is exacerbated in the case of China’s evolving system because the performance standards (emission benchmarks) are set not only by sector, but by various categories of electricity production within the sector. As some categories are, in effect, subsidized by other categories, the cost-effectiveness of the overall system declines. There is a lack of incentive for the carbon market to move energy consumption from coal to natural gas, for example, because of the multi-benchmark approach.

Finally, it appears that allowances will be allocated without charge, at least in the early stages of the program, which has been typical of emissions trading systems in other parts of the world, and may lessen political resistance while also sacrificing potential efficiency gains associated with auctioning allowances and recycling revenues.

What’s Unknown about the Chinese Carbon Trading System

Among the key design elements that are unknown as of now (at least to me) are the following:

(1) What will the total allocation of allowances initially be and how will it change (presumably decrease) over time? Apparently the overall “cap” will be set by adding up the expected emissions of compliance entities, based on their historical emissions. Then, allocations will be reduced, presumably based on technology performance benchmarks.

(2) When will trading commence?

(3) What share of allowances will be distributed for free, and how many – if any – will be auctioned (and how will any auctions operate)?

(4) What provisions will there be for monitoring and enforcement, and will there be fines or other penalties for non-compliance?

(5) How will the system interact with other Chinese climate policies? This is an important question, because so-called “complementary policies” that seek to regulate sources under the cap of a cap-and-trade system can lead to perverse outcomes, as in the European Union and California.

(6) What is the time-path for expanding the scope of the system to include more sectors, and what sectors will be added?

(7) When and how, if at all, will China seek to link its system with carbon-pricing and other climate policies in other parts of the world?

Given all of these open questions plus the limited sectoral scope of the announced system, it is reasonable to ask: what should we make of all this?

How Significant was the Chinese Announcement?

The announcement, despite all the caveats, was a significant step along the road of climate change policy developments, because the Chinese system will eventually be very important, because of its magnitude and because of the importance of China in CO₂ emissions and climate change policy. However, the announcement was not a launch per se, but a statement about a forthcoming launch.

More broadly, the announcement and the eventual launch of the system will have significant effects on other governments around the world – regional, national, and sub-national. Some will be encouraged to launch or maintain their own carbon trading systems, and to increase the ambition of their systems. Why do I say this?

A frequently stated fear of adopting climate policies, including carbon pricing, is the competitiveness effects of those policies, due to emission, economic, and employment leakage. This is more a political issue than a real economic one, but it is nevertheless important. Since the greatest fear in this realm is that domestic factories will relocate to China, that concern will be greatly reduced – or at least it should be – when and if China has put in place a serious climate policy, whether through carbon markets or otherwise.

China is moving slowly and cautiously, which is wise. Not long ago, they were considering launching a system that would initially cover 7,000 companies in several sectors, but the 2017 announcement is of a system that covers 1,700 companies in the electricity sector alone. Of course, it is still important, given that the electricity sector (with its large coal and natural gas plants) accounts for fully a third of China’s CO₂ emissions.

During the next two years, the Chinese government – apparently through its National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), which will administer the trading system – will begin by developing systems for data reporting, registration, & trading – gathering and verifying plant-level emissions data. This will facilitate the establishment of baselines for allocations of allowances. Beyond this, a wide range of rules will need to be established. Following some tests, the actual spot market may launch in 2020 (the same year the Paris Climate Agreement essentially replaces the Kyoto Protocol).

The Path Ahead

As inevitably seems to be the case, the best assessment of this new policy lies somewhere between the extremes. The December announcement by China was neither as exciting as some of the applause from climate activists might suggest, nor was the announcement as meaningless as conservatives have claimed.

Rather, cautious optimism seems to be in order. China is serious about climate change, and is thinking long-term. The country appears to be methodically working to develop a meaningful carbon trading system. What is important now is developing a robust system that can be effective, expanded in scope, and gradually made more stringent. Among the greatest challenges will be achieving the cooperation of the provincial governments, not to mention the compliance of the regulated entities.

Development of the system has begun, with the real launch of trading likely to take place in 2020, which is a key year for Chinese climate policy for other reasons, as well. In that year, China will release its next Five-Year Plan, and it will submit its updated Nationally Determined Contribution to the UNFCCC under the Paris Agreement. What will the United States be doing that year? Not much, just electing a President!