Tag: Europe

The Future of European Climate Change Policy

In my previous blog post, on January 14th, I offered my personal views regarding “International Climate Change Policy & Action in the Biden Administration.”  Today, I’m pleased to turn to a parallel assessment of future European climate change policy by Ottmar Edenhofer, a greatly-accomplished German economist, admired by academics, as well as leaders in government, industry, and non-governmental organizations.

Professor Edenhofer’s presentation, “The European Green Deal – Reform or Regulatory Tsunami?” and our subsequent discussion is the most recent webinar in our series, Conversations on Climate Change and Energy Policy, sponsored by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (HPCA).  As you know, in this webinar series we feature leading authorities on climate change policy, whether from academia, the private sector, NGOs, or government.  A video recording (and transcript) of the entire webinar is available here.

Ottmar Edenhofer is Professor of Economics at the Technical University of Berlin, the Founding Director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, and Co-Director and Chief Economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.  He has been a major contributor to scholarship on the economics of energy and climate change, and served as Co-Chair of Working Group III of Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, where I had the pleasure of working under his leadership.  He is a key advisor of the German Government, as well as the European Union.  He holds a Ph.D. in economics and a B.A. degree in philosophy (a pairing of degrees which –  I’m delighted to say – he and I share).

In his presentation and the discussion that follows, Ottmar Edenhofer offers a frank assessment of the European Green Deal’s potential to significantly address the impacts of global climate change. 

“It’s a very good time to talk about the European Green Deal because now the prospects that United States and Europe could work closer together on climate change or climate policy and energy policy are very good,” Ottmar notes, referring to the change in U.S. administrations and recent remarks by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reaffirming the European Union’s (EU’s) intent to reduce its target for emission reductions from 40 percent to 55 percent by the year 2030 and to achieve net carbon neutrality by the year 2050.

Calling it a “huge task,” Edenhofer outlines the actions that would need to occur to achieve such ambitious goals, including enhanced efforts to decarbonize the power sector, accelerated electrification for end-users, increased investments in bio-energy and semi-synthetic fuels, and advancements in carbon dioxide removal technologies. Using the EU’s climate policy impact assessment as a framework, he walks us through three different policy scenarios, ranging from one that relies heavily on regulation to one structured primarily around carbon pricing.

Characterizing the heavily regulatory approach as a “high-risk scenario,” he instead promotes the idea of an “intermediate step” in a which a mix of policy measures and carbon pricing are deployed to move toward the goal of a 55-percent carbon emissions reduction, and toward a longer-term strategy of using carbon pricing alone as the primary driver in CO2 reduction efforts.

“The crucial question therefore is, how can we design this intermediate step, and this is really the most important debate around this reform proposal,” he says, noting that several issues would need to be addressed.  “The intermediate step has to address the distributional issues and guarantee the stability and manage the political economy challenge between the sectors.”

Professor Edenhofer suggests that the intermediate step that may gain the political support necessary to succeed would be one that would allow for two separate emissions trading systems – one for the energy and industry sector, and the other for transportation and buildings.

“Meanwhile we could define gateways between these two systems. “Creating such gateways might have a two-fold effect – the first one is that market participants already anticipate that there are gateways and they anticipate these enterprise expectations, and this could lead to a convergence of the different prices across the sectors. And secondly, this is a starting point to manage the division of labor among the sectors, and this could be a credible pathway toward a carbon-price scenario when we have one ETS with one credible CO2 price scenario.”

In his presentation, Edenhofer also acknowledges the role that fiscal federalism could play in affecting the future direction of climate policy in Europe. While arguing that carbon pricing could generate roughly 800 billion euros between now and 2050, he notes that the funding base would shrink over time as emissions decrease, and therefore would not serve as a stable revenue source.  He has answers for this challenge as well.

After his presentation, Professor Edenhofer responds to questions from the virtual audience of more than 200 people. One question focuses on the impact of the new Biden-Harris Administration in Washington on global efforts to address climate change.

“The good thing is they are back in the Paris Agreement.  The announcement alone that the U.S. is committed has already helped.”

All of this and much more can be seen and heard in the full webinar here.  I hope you will check it out.

Previous webinars in this series – Conversations on Climate Change and Energy Policy – have featured Meghan O’Sullivan’s thoughts on Geopolitics and Upheaval in Oil Markets, Jake Werksman’s assessment of the European Union’s Green New Deal, Rachel Kyte’s examination of “Using the Pandemic Recovery to Spur the Clean Transition,” Joseph Stiglitz’s reflections on “Carbon Pricing, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and Green Economic Recovery,” Joe Aldy describing “Lessons from Experience for Greening an Economic Stimulus,” and Jason Bordoff commenting on “Prospects for Energy and Climate Change Policy under the New U.S. Administration.”

The next bi-monthly HPCA Conversation on Climate Change and Energy Policy will take place in March.  You can register in advance for that event at the HPCA website.

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Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

As we approach the beginning of the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen in December, international negotiations are focused on developing a climate policy framework for the post-2012 period, when the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period will have ended.  In addition to negotiations under the UNFCCC, other intergovernmental outlets, including the G8(+5) and the Major Economies Forum, are trying to reach common ground among the world’s major emitters of greenhouse gases.  To date, these efforts have not produced a politically, economically, and environmentally viable structure for a future climate agreement.

In the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements (a global effort which now includes 35 research initiatives in Australia, China, Europe, India, Japan, and the United States), we continue to investigate promising post-2012 international policy architectures, as part of our on-going effort to help the countries of the world identify the key design elements of a post-2012 architecture that is scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic.

One approach we have recently examined is a “portfolio of domestic commitments,” an approach which could be effective, but more flexible and politically palatable than other international arrangements.  Under such a scheme, nations would agree to honor commitments to greenhouse gas emission reductions laid out in their own domestic laws and regulations.  A portfolio of commitments might emerge from a global meeting such as the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, or a smaller number of major economies could negotiate an agreement among themselves, and then invite other countries to join.

Despite the obvious differences between such a system and the conventional “targets and time tables” approach embodied in the Kyoto Protocol, negotiators should not dismiss this new approach out of hand.  There are several ways to construct a portfolio of domestic commitments, and negotiators have numerous levers available to tailor an agreement to meet their political, economic, and environmental goals.  In a recent Harvard Project Viewpoint, I outlined some basic features of a portfolio approach, highlighted a few major issues and concerns, and discussed the potential feasibility of this approach.

The Portfolio of Domestic Commitments Approach

The core of a portfolio of domestic commitments is agreement among a set of member countries to conform to the climate change mitigation requirements specified by their respective domestic laws, regulations, and official planning documents (the last being domestically binding in centrally planned economies).  The portfolio approach gives member countries free rein to dictate the precise form their domestic commitments will take, whether those be greenhouse gas cap-and-trade systems, carbon taxes, intensity targets, performance or technology standards, or other instruments.  A portfolio agreement should be highly credible, given that it is grounded in domestic commitments, binding in and enforceable by law previously made by the very governments signing on to the international agreement.

Domestic commitments might take the form of specified greenhouse gas emission targets or the form of particular actions that could be taken to reduce emissions, both envisioned in the Bali Action Plan as “nationally-appropriate mitigation actions” (NAMAs).  A target-based approach has the advantage of being transparent and relatively simple to aggregate across countries to reach a global target.  On the other hand, action-oriented goals can be more concrete and may be easier for many governments to implement in the short term.  There is no reason why both targets and actions could not be pursued simultaneously.  Coexistence of multiple approaches is not uncommon in environmental policy.

Ongoing commitments for several years into the future are necessary to stabilize and eventually reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to combat climate change.  Under a portfolio approach, these domestic commitments could be represented in a table of national schedules attached to an agreement.  Australia has proposed a model agreement that includes such schedules. The schedules would signal a continuing commitment to the international community, and their inclusion in an international agreement would provide a disincentive for member nations to deviate from them in the future.

Countries would not be limited to acting unilaterally to meet their domestic commitments.  They could choose to submit joint goals or targets — for example, on a regional level — or link with other countries through a multinational carbon trading regime to reduce costs.  (Such linkage is the subject of another Harvard Project paper — by Judson Jaffe and myself.)  The portfolio approach would not be a bar to international cooperation.

A primary consideration for a portfolio agreement is the well-established principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.”  This principle acknowledges that responsibility is shared for solving the climate change challenge, but suggests that historical differences in contribution to the problem and economic and technical disparities be reflected in varying national commitments.  A portfolio of domestic commitments may be particularly well-suited to implement this principle because it allows for countries to make commitments along a continuum of stringency, rather than dividing nations into two groups as did the Kyoto Protocol.  The placement of each country upon the continuum would depend on an array of political, economic, and environmental concerns.  (On this, see recent Harvard Project papers by Jeffrey Frankel and Valentina Bosetti, and by Sheila Olmstead and myself.)

Key Issues for Negotiators

Negotiators will inevitably need to tackle a number of key issues in crafting a portfolio agreement, three of which we highlight here.  The first is the extent to which domestic commitments could be relaxed in later years to reflect changed circumstances.  The second is the formal status such an agreement would have under international law.  Third is the necessity to monitor conformance to domestic commitments.

Rigidity of Commitments

One approach would be for a portfolio agreement to log domestic commitments and allow countries to relax those commitments in response to changes in political or economic climate or advances in the understanding of the threat of climate change.  In essence, such an agreement would function as a depository for current domestic legislation, serving the dual roles of information-gathering and diplomatic recognition of shared commitment to the climate problem.  It is difficult to imagine countries registering objections to such an agreement, given that they would not be binding themselves to future commitments.

For precisely this reason, however, climate negotiators may wish to stay the hand of future governments by barring relaxation or abandonment of preexisting climate commitments.  In other words, the agreement could set minimum commitments on a country-specific basis.  Amendments would be allowed only if they maintained or strengthened domestic commitments to climate change mitigation.  Such a precommitment strategy is not generally included in domestic legislation or plans, and it is likely to require careful wording and additional domestic legislation to become effective in some countries.

There is surely the possibility of domestic commitments being ignored by future leaders, but note that this concern is not unique to the portfolio approach.  All climate policy architectures — indeed, all international agreements — face this problem, and the question is whether the precommitment challenge is greater under this approach than it would be under others.  One possible compromise position would be to allow revision of domestic commitments, but only at specified intervals, in order to account for dramatic shifts in economic or environmental situations and expectations.

Type of Legal Instrument

Another key issue is the official legal status of a portfolio of domestic commitments.  There are a number of possible structures for such an agreement, each with different implications under international law.  A treaty is the most formal option and would be the most binding on participating nations.  Treaty law is relatively well-developed, as compared with the law governing other international instruments, and the law of treaties provides a framework for enforcement and dispute resolution.  But treaties are difficult to craft and face the perils of national ratification.

Outside of a treaty, there are various other instruments of international law that could be used in the portfolio approach.  For example, in the United States, congressional-executive and sole-executive agreements can be entered into by the President and do not require the approval of two-thirds of the Senate, as do treaties.  (See, for example, Nigel Purvis’s work on executive agreements.)   Other “soft law” instruments, such as explicitly nonbinding agreements, political declarations, and U.N. declarations, are fallback options which merit consideration for implementing a portfolio approach.  Ultimately, negotiators will choose the best instrument, based on how open countries are to the agreement and what obligations the agreement imposes.

Monitoring and MRV

Throughout the industrialized countries — and increasingly in the emerging economies — domestic environmental regulations include internal mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement.  A portfolio agreement could rely on countries to be prompted by international pressure to enforce their commitments, or an agreement could take a more active role.  The agreement could, for example, put in place an international monitoring body, license domestic entities in each country to monitor national commitments, or suggest model codes for enforcement.  International assistance may be necessary to aid countries lagging in technical or administrative capacity to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and enforce domestic policies.  More broadly, the agreement would need to define—to the extent possible—uniform measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) procedures and assure that all countries could implement these procedures.

Feasibility of a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

A portfolio of domestic commitments has several advantages as the foundation of a future international climate policy architecture.  The agreement could be flexible enough to allow countries to implement the mitigation instruments of their choice and link those instruments with domestic instruments in other nations if they so chose.  It could also allow for countries to accede at various times, thus giving them adequate time to prepare to participate.  (See David Victor’s Harvard Project paper on climate accession deals.)   This approach could also be an ideal vehicle for implementing the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, since member countries would not need to be lumped together into rigid tiers of commitment (as they are under the dichotomous Annex I approach of the Kyoto Protocol).

Perhaps most crucial is the political feasibility of the portfolio approach.  In recent months, several major economies have expressed willingness to consider a climate policy architecture along these lines, including Australia, India, and the United States.  For this reason alone, the portfolio approach merits serious consideration, despite the significant hurdles to negotiating an effective portfolio agreement.

The concerns regarding this approach to a future global climate policy architecture are significant, but so are its potential advantages.  In general, there are real challenges to developing any post-2012 international climate policy architecture that is scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic.  The challenges facing this approach are no greater – and may be less – than those facing other means of addressing the threat of global climate change.

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