mastheade3 link
About   Articles   Reports   Blog   Briefs   Experts

Blog

Spotlight Durban: Climate Action on Multiple Scales

by Paul Baer • December 7, 2011 @ 10:00 am

The U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP17) is taking place in Durban, South Africa. The Spotlight Durban series, a joint series by Real Climate Economics  and Triple Crisis, invites experts to comment on the negotiations and the prospects for real progress  addressing climate change in the months and years ahead.

From November 28th through December 9th, the world’s nations are meeting again to discuss solutions to the urgent threat of rising  greenhouse gas emissions, this time in Durban, South Africa. This meeting, the Seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has been much less widely anticipated than the meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, two years ago. At that time, expectations were high, President Obama had just taken office, and for the first time ever literally dozens of heads of state were scheduled to attend a climate convention. Yet the result – a non-binding agreement called the “Copenhagen Accord” – was widely disappointing, and since then, the prospects for strengthening that agreement have only grown more remote. Indeed, even the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol (which the US did not ratify) is in serious doubt at this point.

One of the optimistic aspects of the Copenhagen Accord was the enshrinement of a commitment – of sorts – to trying to keep global temperature increase to less than two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average (compared to a roughly 0.8ºC increase to date). Yet while within the mainstream scientific community this level is seen as anything but “safe”, the “realist” view of the negotiations is that even this level of ambition is nearly out of reach – a conclusion that is consistent with the recently released World Energy Outlook 2011, published by the International Energy Agency. Worse, it is plain to expert observers that the North-South conflict that has long been a primary obstacle to global cooperation is if anything growing worse, even as the traditional lines between developed and developing countries continue to blur. Given this reality, and the evident distraction of political elites in the US and Europe with domestic (or at least regional) economic problems, it is easy to argue that we might as well give up on the UNFCCC as a useful forum, and focus on “cultivating our gardens”, as it were, at local scales. (more…)

Tags: ,


House Committee Hears Pessimistic View of Climate Economics

by Paul Baer • April 1, 2011 @ 9:23 am

Paul  Baer is writing in response to the recent hearing by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on climate science and policy. The hearing featured the testimony of only one economist, David Montgomery, who has long expressed pessimisim about the economic impacts of climate policy in previous testimony and publications. This is Baer’s reaction to Montgomery’s testimony.

Why is  the Conventional Wisdom of Climate Economics So Pessimistic?

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a hearing yesterday on climate change science, economics and policy. It was fascinating to listen to, and will no doubt provide much rich food for thought and discussion (for starters see Andy Revkin, or Chris Mooney, or Steve McIntyre for a skeptic’s view). The witnesses included two climate scientists (Kerry Emmanuel and John Christy), a physicist turned climate researcher (Richard Muller), a corporate lawyer (Peter Glaser), a business school expert on forecasting (J. Scott Armstrong), and a respected economist (David Montgomery). Several of the witnesses are quite well known, and each is worth a story, or several. However, I will focus here only on Montgomery and his testimony.

Montgomery, now an independent consultant, was one of the principals for many years of Charles River Associates, an economics consultancy that is generally business friendly; he is frequently published in the peer reviewed literature, and has taught at prestigious universities. He and some of his former colleagues at CRA specialize in climate-economy models, and have consistently produced policy analyses that are relatively pessimistic about the economic costs and benefits of GHG mitigation. His testimony yesterday did not focus on his own modeling results but essentially suggested – by criticizing more optimistic studies in various ways – that any direct regulation of CO2 emissions by the EPA could only be economically harmful. He in fact relied more on economic theory and historical example than on specific modeling results in making his arguments. As a consequence a rebuttal is necessarily an exercise in describing and criticizing the theoretical and empirical assumptions he makes. (more…)

Tags: ,


Powered by WordPress

-->