99 Luftballons

In honor of the new START agreement:

The Wikileaks Iraq Video

It's horrific. And required viewing:



I don't anything to add, but I think James Fallows takes the right approach on how to react to atrocities like this:

There will be lot of those "real questions" to consider, from rules of engagement to the apparent cover up of the footage. But the threshold point I meant to start with is this: The very high likelihood of such "tragedies" occurring is a very strong reason not to get into wars of this sort.

By "of this sort" I mean: twilight-zone urban warfare, not to mention "discretionary" or "preventive" wars, and situations in which a heavily armed-and-amored occupying force of foreigners tries uneasily to mix with a population overwhelmingly of a different race and religion and language. For their own survival, the occupiers need to be hyper-suspicious and ever alert -- even though today's prevalent Counter Insurgency doctrine ("COIN") warns of the self-defeating consequences of behaving this way. (Indeed, a mounting debate about the COIN approach in Afghanistan is whether the effort not to seem distant from the local population is exposing US soldiers to too much risk.) It is a situation with enormous potential for miscalculation, misunderstanding, and tragedy. And therefore one to avoid if you have any choice at all.

China and Per Capita Emissions, Cont.

A while back, I blogged about the difference between China's per capita carbon emissions as a country and those of its most industrialized regions. At the time, I wondered if there was any data for comparing the per capita emissions of cities around the world, or at least between Chinese and Western cities. As it happens, some people have actually done the work on this: a NBER paper (via Richard Brubaker) by a group of Chinese and American researchers, including Ed Glaeser, aims to determine the per household carbon footprint for China's largest cities. It turns out to be fairly complicated: While there's a general relationship between income and emissions levels, it can vary widely. Beijing, for example, is ranked 72nd, but Shanghai 30th -- a difference the study attributes primarily to the use of central home heating. In other words, while some emissions growth is inevitable as a consequence of economic growth, it's by no means inevitable that growth means taking the highest-emissions path. As the authors put it toward the end:

In this paper, we find that some of the patterns of carbon emissions within China replicate findings that hold in the United States and elsewhere. If economic growth takes place in compact, public transit friendly, cool summer, warm winter cities, then the aggregate carbon emissions will increase less than if economic growth takes place in "car dependent" cities featuring hot summers and cold winters and where electricity is produced using coal fired power plants.

The paper also makes some comparison of the per household emissions in Chinese and Americans; unfortunately, Glaeser and company have yet to release the American data, though we do get the tantalizing line that "Even in the dirtiest city (Daqing), a standardized household produces only one-fifth of that in America’s greenest city (San Diego)." For now, the best information we have is Brookings' research on the per capita carbon footprints of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, though obviously the differences in the things being measured make an apples-to-apples comparison using that study and the NBER study impossible.

After Copenhagen

On the recently concluded Copenhagen climate change agreement -- such as it is -- you can look at it three ways:

1. It's kicking the can down the road. The agreement, with all its placeholders and blank spaces -- most egregiously, the appendix meant to list individual country commitments -- will only have meaning once further negotiations try to breath life into it. It's good that we now have some hard numbers for mitigation/adaptation aid for poor countries ($30 billion by 2012 and $100 billion by 2020), but there's still the niggling questions of who exactly is raising the money, how the money will be distributed, and how to assure that the money is spent properly. Then there's the whole question of verifying emissions goals, especially in China; as John Lee argues, it's an extremely sensitive issue for the Chinese government, which has little interest in reporting accurate statistics for anything, much less carbon emissions.¹

2. It's a game changer. The folks at the Center for American Progress have been eternal optimists when it comes to climate negotiations, and they've been quick to point out the upside to the Copenhagen agreement. Andrew Light, for example, points out that with the agreement, President Obama has begun to chart a new path for climate negotiations away from the UN process, which has become something of a farce -- seeing noted human rights champion Sudan, for example, withhold its support for the Copenhagen agreement while comparing it to the Holocaust was especially galling. And indeed, a lot of smart people (e.g., Michael Levi) have been pronouncing the UN process dead; from now on, the action on climate change will be at the G-20 or other small venues. It won't be as conceptually neat at the UN process, but it could get things going much quicker.

3. It's a disaster. This is, essentially, the Bill McKibben response. Not only has Obama signed off on a patently inadequate agreement, but it has jettisoned the UN process to boot (see above). Most of the countries at most risk of climate-induced disaster aren't major emitters, and now they are being excluded from negotiations that could, in some cases, determine their future survival. What China and the US work out may be acceptable for them, in terms of limiting climate change; but it may not be acceptable for, say, the Marshall Islands. Moreover, given that global temperature increases could become irreversible unless we begin to reduce emissions soon, does it really make sense to dick around with half measures?

I've listed these outlooks in the order in which I adhere to them: That is, I see the Copenhagen agreement as a potential way to make real progress in climate change negotiations, but it needs to be elaborated on substantially, and it needs to be done soon. Other people, of course, may order these outlooks differently, or add new ones.

¹ Case in point: The last time China did a greenhouse gas inventory -- its only inventory, in fact -- was in 1994.

Conservatives for Industrial Policy

John Quiggin has a good commentary on Australia's embattled Liberal Party. They have gone all out in opposition to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's proposed cap-and-trade system -- even to the point of ousting their leader, Malcolm Turnbull, for his accommodationist stance -- but also seem to recognize that denialism on climate change will make them even more unpopular than they are already. Thus, they seem to be embracing policies that, whatever their merits, have little to do with free market ideology:

Rather, [Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey] suggests 'To respond to these problems the Government should take an up front role investing in and developing Australia's only significant and predictable renewable energy resource which is to be found in the tides of the Kimberley.'

Tuckey also proposes extensive public investment in High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines, noting that 'China will not have an ETS. It will invest in Hydro, Nuclear and other renewable energy. Its Government is already building an extensive HVDC network.'

[...]

Having denounced the government's emissions trading scheme as a massive new tax, [Tony Abbott, the new Liberal leader] can scarcely embrace the main alternative, a carbon tax. On the other hand, he has committed himself to achieving the emissions reductions promised by Labor.

In these circumstances, the Chinese approach endorsed by Wilson Tuckey is probably the only feasible option. It is, perhaps, surprising that, having elected its most conservative leader ever, the Liberal Party may have to turn to the Communist Party of China for policy guidance. But politics makes strange bedfellows.

The dynamic reminds me of American conservatives who denounce cap-and-trade as being overly intrusive, but think nothing of calling for massive government investment in clean energy, with the money coming from... well, it's never specified, but it's presumably not as awful as taxing pollution, which any economist will tell you is the most cost-effective and least intrusive (in terms of regulations) way to reduce emissions. Some Democrats, too, seem to have adopted this attitude.

In any case, I think a green industrial policy isn't such a bad idea -- not my first choice, but acceptable -- but it's odd to see right-leaning folks embrace this type of government intervention as the more market-friendly alternative.

UPDATE: TPM has a good primer for Americans on the Australian climate change debate.

The Chimera That Is Chimerica

I'm currently reading Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It. It's interesting, in that it starts out as a fairly standard history of post-Maoist China, then abruptly turns into a disquisition on the inadequacy of traditional economic statistics in an age of transnational capitalism and production chains that span continents. Think of it as a gearshift book.

It's also interesting as a kind of non-fiction prequel to Firefly/Serenity, which posits a world in which Chinese and American cultures have intermingled: White characters curse in Mandarin, and so forth. But of course China and America haven't even arrived yet at a consensus about the nature of their relationship, much less begun cross-breeding their civilizations. You could argue, as Karabell does, that Chimerica as a bi-national self-conception is not so different than the sense of continental identity that animates the EU, which was also far-fetched when first proposed. Yet the physical and linguistic proximity, &c. of most European nations makes agglomeration a much more feasible task than in the case of Chimerica -- and even the EU is still disturbingly fragile, as the case of Greece demonstrates.

For the present, Chimerica is mainly the partnership of Chinese labor and American capital, as well as that of Chinese savers and American borrowers. As the late unpleasantness has shown, this isn't a very sustainable dynamic.¹ The question is, how do we build on the current relationship in order to find more mutually beneficial terms of cooperation? In part, it's a matter of how the Chinese and the Americans conceive of themselves, and of each other. The current trade imbalance is viewed by many as a bad thing, not least because many Americans find it distasteful that any foreign country, let alone China, has so much potential influence over the US. (And the feeling seems to be mutual, if Chris Hayes is correct.) Getting past that discomfort means viewing interdependence as something to be desired rather than to be avoided, if only as a steppingstone to better things. America will be a better country for allowing China (and India, Brazil, et al) to assume a more prominent role in world affairs, rather than trying to maintain a stranglehold on hegemony.

But it's also worth asking how this interdependence -- which certainly has benefited the Chinese -- benefits Americans, especially those who aren't members of the investor class. It's hard to see, for example, a world in which American labor competes with Chinese labor on an apples-to-apples basis; at the least, the dollar would need to depreciate by a lot and the renminbi would need to appreciate by a lot. But how do we get there with the minimal amount of dislocation? It doesn't seem like anyone has a good answer for that.

¹ See, for example, Tyler Cowen's column on a possible bubble in Chinese manufacturing, and what its bursting could mean for the US.

Paris. Notre Dame Cathedral Tower. Chimeras and Man originally uploaded to Flickr by Cornell University Library.

Notes on a Scandal

The controversy (see also here and here) over the stolen¹ emails of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has been tragically amusing: Amusing because of the way denialists have been huffing and puffing over something which, even in the most generous interpretation, doesn't alter the overwhelming nature of the evidence for climate change²; and tragic because that same huffing and puffing will likely further muddy the discourse on climate change in this country, which is saying something.

If you want a real scandal, however, check this out:

Large sums promised to developing countries to help them tackle climate change cannot be accounted for, a BBC investigation has found.

Rich countries pledged $410m (£247m) a year in a 2001 declaration - but it is now unclear whether the money was paid.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has accused industrialised countries of failing to keep their promise.

The EU says the money was paid out in bilateral deals, but admits it cannot provide data to prove it.

This could be really damaging -- trust between rich and poor countries is strained as it is, and the failure of the rich countries to account for the money pledged could potentially blow things up at Copenhagen, where establishing rich country aid for poor countries is a major point of contention. This is also why having a legally binding climate change treaty of some kind is so important: When you're dealing with financial transfers on the order of €100 billion a year (as the EU proposed recently), you need to have mechanisms in place to ensure that the money is going where it's intended.

¹ Let's not lend to the people who broke into the CRU's email system any of the lovable moxie associated with the term "hacker," shall we? This was theft, pure and simple.
² Though the underlying science is not affected, I agree with George Monbiot that CRU officials haven't been handling the controversy all that well.

(Some) Progress in Macedonia

Some good news in Greco-Macedonian relations:

Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov Wednesday sent an invitation to his Greek counterpart Karolos Papoulias to visit Macedonia, a move seen as a positive step towards resolution of the long standing name spat between the two neighbors.

The rapprochement gets a boost from the fact that the European Commission recently recommended that Macedonia begin the process of applying for EU membership, though no start date has been given. I was worried that the nationalist government in Skopje would continue to be intransigent after the last election, but perhaps the obvious benefits of joining the EU are trumping other priorities. Of course, it's not clear at all that there's been any progress on the name dispute with Greece -- short of changing the name from "Republic of Macedonia," I don't know what else Skopje could offer the Greeks to mollify them.

A Global Environmental Organization?

As proposed by Edward Gresser in the latest issue of Democracy:

Rather than require each country to be the arbiter of all the others’ compliance by default, the solution must be to create an institution to do the job. The goal should be to ensure that the Copenhagen negotiations generate not only an effective and fair emissions-reduction agreement, but also an institutional structure that can make sure it is implemented—and in doing so bring environmental policy into line with security, trade, labor, and finance, as a field in which institutions and rules ease policymaking and improve its enforcement. In other words, we need a global institution modeled on the sort of organizations that have served the world for the last 65 years: The UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO.

It's an excellent idea, especially given the myriad enforcement problems associated with any future climate change treaty, including the ones I mentioned yesterday. Gresser is wise, however, not to assume that a GEO will solve every international environmental problem, but it could ease the process by which countries deal with them.

One other virtue of a GEO, separate from the other major international institutions, is that it could help win some legitimacy in the eyes of developing countries for vigorously reducing carbon emissions on their part. Consider a second-best alternative to a GEO, namely adding environmental policy to the portfolio of existing successful institutions -- the WTO would handle climate-related trade policy, the World Bank would help with financing clean energy technology and adaptation programs (moreso than it already does, at least), etc. Developing countries, however, tend to have a strong distrust of those bodies, which they consider to be disposed against their interests; would they accept WTO rulings upholding carbon tariffs, say? This is already playing out in the negotiations in Bangkok over a new climate fund for developing countries: The US had wanted, among other things, for the fund to be administered by the World Bank, which was flatly opposed by the developing country bloc. The US seems to be softening its position on this, however, but the debate shows how important it is for developing countries to feel that international institutions are on their side.

Of course, Gresser's GEO applies not only to climate change, but to all the existing environmental treaties, where enforcement has been, for the most part, abysmal. Even apart from climate change, I think it would be worthwhile to get some proper enforcement mechanisms in place for those treaties.

More on China

1. Joe Romm tracks down what appears to be the basis for Lord Stern's argument about China and its per capita emissions: A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled "Sharing Global CO2 Emission Reductions Among One Billion High Emitters":

We present a framework for allocating a global carbon reduction target among nations, in which the concept of “common but differentiated responsibilities” refers to the emissions of individuals instead of nations. We use the income distribution of a country to estimate how its fossil fuel CO2 emissions are distributed among its citizens, from which we build up a global CO2 distribution. We then propose a simple rule to derive a universal cap on global individual emissions and find corresponding limits on national aggregate emissions from this cap. All of the world’s high CO2-emitting individuals are treated the same, regardless of where they live. Any future global emission goal (target and time frame) can be converted into national reduction targets, which are determined by “Business as Usual” projections of national carbon emissions and in-country income distributions. For example, reducing projected global emissions in 2030 by 13 GtCO2 would require the engagement of 1.13 billion high emitters, roughly equally distributed in 4 regions: the U.S., the OECD minus the U.S., China, and the non-OECD minus China. We also modify our methodology to place a floor on emissions of the world’s lowest CO2 emitters and demonstrate that climate mitigation and alleviation of extreme poverty are largely decoupled.

We tend to see the idea of per capita emissions used by developing countries as a way of showing how much more carbon-intensive is the lifestyle of the average Westerner, but this paper turns that on its head: if per capita emissions are what matters, then we should target the highest-polluting populations, regardless of where in the world they live.

2. To clarify my last post on this subject, I certainly think China deserves more credit for its efforts on clean energy than it's received thus far. But I agree with Christina Larson that China is benefiting on the world stage from the US being mostly MIA on the climate crisis for the last decade; getting a climate bill through the Senate will, if nothing else, remove the US as the big villain and force all countries to look more seriously at they are doing to address climate change.

3. It would be interesting to compare different regions or cities around the world by their per capita emissions, but the data doesn't seem to be readily available. Anybody know where to look?

China and Per Capita Emissions

Nicholas Stern recently made waves by arguing that, while China as a country has a low level of per capita carbon emissions, the picture changes when you look at emissions at the provincial level:

[T]he British author of an acclaimed review on climate change told students in Beijing’s People’s University that 13 Chinese provinces, regions and cities had higher per capita emissions than France. Six also overtook Britain.

“There are many parts of China where emissions intensity and emissions per capita are looking much like some of the richer countries in Europe,” he said in a speech that laid out his predictions on global warming.

I had that in mind as I was reading the speeches that President Obama and President Hu Jintao of China gave at the UN climate change summit yesterday. While neither one gave many specifics about how their respective countries plan to address climate change, they were clearly staking opposite points on the question of developing countries and carbon emissions. Obama, while acknowledging that developed countries must take the lead on climate change, no doubt ruffled some Chinese feathers by including the PRC in that group.

Here's the key graf:

We must also energize our efforts to put other developing nations – especially the poorest and most vulnerable – on a path to sustainable growth. These nations do not have the same resources to combat climate change as countries like the United States or China do, but they have the most immediate stake in a solution. For these are the nations that are already living with the unfolding effects of a warming planet – famine and drought; disappearing coastal villages and the conflict that arises from scarce resources. Their future is no longer a choice between a growing economy and a cleaner planet, because their survival depends on both. It will do little good to alleviate poverty if you can no longer harvest your crops or find drinkable water.

Hu, for his part, reiterated the standard Chinese position of aggressively pursuing clean energy development and reducing energy intensity, while refusing to agree to mandatory reductions in carbon emissions. Once again, we see the Chinese appeal to common but differentiated responsibility in defining the terms of the climate debate -- with the implication that China rightfully belongs in the group of countries with fewer responsibilities.

Lord Stern's argument about per capita emissions in China, however, reminds us that a country-level perspective on responsibility for mitigating climate change may give an inaccurate picture of where things stand. That is, China wants to present itself as a developing country, free from obligations to reduce carbon emissions and deserving of aid from developed countries to develop cleaner sources of energy. But the parts of China that have been growing the most are the parts that now have per capita carbon emissions that match those of developed countries.

On the other hand, it's not clear how much value that insight has, at least as far as international negotiations on climate change are concerned. I actually wrote about sub-national climate change policies in grad school, and one thing I took away from that experience was that there's good reason sub-national political units (states, provinces, cities, etc.) are excluded from conducting foreign policy: Focusing on them tends to be a distraction. How far could the US get, say, by pointing out that parts of China have higher per capita emissions than Britain or France? Not very, I would think. There are currently multi-state climate agreements covering nearly half of the country, yet that doesn't get the US off the hook for developing a national climate change policy.

Ultimately, how one takes Lord Stern's argument depends on whether one favors a carrots approach or a sticks approach to dealing with China. The former will appreciate China's continued need for economic development, praise its fairly considerable efforts so far on developing a clean energy economy, and encourage it to move further in that direction; the latter will try to cajole China into taking more seriously its contribution to the climate crisis, and maybe even do something drastic, like impose a carbon tariff, to bring them into line. At the moment, I admit I find myself torn between the two approaches.

Climate Security, Continued

I highly recommend Geoffrey Dabelko's op-ed on the use and abuse of the concept of climate security. His first recommendation is particularly worth reading:

Don't oversell the link between climate change and violent conflict or terrorism. Climate change is expected to exacerbate conditions that can contribute to intra-state conflict, serving as a so-called "threat multiplier." But characterizing climate change as producing a new type of conflict is both wrong and counterproductive. For example, simply labeling the genocide in Darfur a "climate war" ignores political and economic motivations for the fighting--and unintentionally could let the criminal regime in Khartoum off the hook.

This reminds me of an excellent paper a while back that argued that we need to flip around our thinking of the causality of climate change: Instead of saying, "Climate change will lead to x," we should say, "y is happening, and the impacts of climate change could induce y to become x." That way of thinking makes climate change more comprehensible to people in various areas of expertise, and will help make adapting to climate change, to the extent that we need to do so, an easier task.

The fourth recommendation is also illuminating:

Don't forget that climate mitigation efforts can introduce social conflict. Since confronting climate change can have unanticipated consequences, mitigation efforts must be "conflict-proofed" to avoid unwittingly creating new inequities and instigating new conflict. For example, demand for biofuels has increased the use of U.S. agricultural land for "growing energy." But it has also helped spur rising food prices and, subsequently, riots in Mexico. On the other side of the world, accelerated deforestation in Indonesia for palm oil plantations has fueled social conflict over forest resources by exacerbating existing tensions between companies and local people.

I would probably also include any potential carbon trade wars in that framework.

Climate Security

I've often joked that in Washington, if you attach the word "security" to anything, it automatically becomes important. Thus we have our climate change and energy bills given names like the Energy Independence and Security Act or the American Clean Energy and Security Act. But in fact, framing the climate crisis as a security issue is both substantively grounded and appears to have some promise as a way to persuade fence-sitters in Congress on climate legislation, as this NYT editorial argues.

In one sense, this should be intuitive: If you subject the earth's climate to unprecedented levels of stress, the results (e.g., drought, flooding, infectious disease) will be bad for governments around the world, and especially bad for governments that are weak, unstable, or corrupt, and thus ill-equipped to handle these problems. For example, on top of all the other problems Pakistan is facing, it's also dealing with a growing water crisis -- one that will likely intensify as the glaciers in the Himalayas disappear. Even stable governments could fall apart if the scale of the calamity is big enough: If the ocean rises over the dikes of the Netherlands, the country could go from a modern industrialized democracy to a failed state in the blink of an eye.

The main point of contention, I think, has less to do with the strength of the link between climate change and national security, and more with defining what constitutes "national security," regardless of what connection it has to climate change. We just lived through an era in which the term was defined almost exclusively in terms of what could be accomplished in terms of men with guns and bombs, and needless to say, it was a disaster.* Even if we define national security in broader terms, however -- promoting stable governance, respect for human rights, etc. -- we must still recognize that for all of our wealth, we're not omnipotent: if there's one thing we've learned since 9/11, it's that we have much less leverage over other countries, even very poor countries, than we think we do. There seems to be very little the US can do about failed states like Somalia or repressive states like Burma, short of armed force -- which, as I just mentioned, often creates more problems than it solves.

Why focus on this? Because I think this points to the need to have the question of "climate security" embedded in the larger ethical framework that has grown up around climate change (e.g., that old standby, common but differentiated responsibility). It's well established, at least for many, that the developed world should take primary responsibility for dealing with the effects of climate change, especially in the developing world. Usually this means some kind of technology transfer or financial assistance, but I think it also should mean helping governments in vulnerable parts of the world become more resilient in the face of climate-related upheavals. This is where the recommendations in Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion, for example, could be useful. And of course, it also means the developed countries should make reducing carbon emissions a top priority.

* The Obama administration is turning this mindset around, of course, yet it still persists: The Obama policy on Afghanistan, for example, seems to emphasize putting more troops on the ground, but not on defining realistic, achievable goals for what can accomplished in terms of a US occupation. See Matt Yglesias for more on this.

Thoughts on The Hurt Locker

I saw the movie a little over a week ago, and I still have it rolling around in my head. Spoilers to follow.

***

One thing about this movie that unsettled me was watching characters who were members of my generation in a war zone. Of course, I know a good number of people who have served or are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the movie reminded me that these wars, like Vietnam was for the Baby Boomers, will be an enduring feature of my generation, in ways we haven't yet acknowledged.

I disagree with this assessment from n+1, which asserts that The Hurt Locker is a pro-war film. Certainly the focus on the men of Bravo company excludes all other perspectives, and to the extent that we do see other perspectives, they aren't presented sympathetically: The Ralph Fiennes-led band of contractors suck Bravo company in a shooting match, the touchy-feely colonel doesn't know what to do when out on patrol, home life for Staff Sgt. James is drudgery, etc. But I would hazard that the tone of the movie, in its own way, exemplifies what the Iraq War has become: With the original case for war having evaporated by the time they're deployed, the men of Bravo company struggle to carry out their mission, with no goal higher than getting out of there -- or in Staff Sgt. James' case, the thrill of defusing bombs. The Hurt Locker is pro-war in the sense that it doesn't portray war as utter futility; but then, I think any attempt to tell a true war story (in Tim O'Brien's sense) could be labeled as pro-war, even as it refuses to sentimentalize about it. O'Brien himself put it best:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.

In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.

I will be very disappointed if The Hurt Locker doesn't get a slew of Oscar nominations -- at the least, for Best Actor and Best Director. Jeremy Renner is excellent as displaying all the contradictions in Staff Sgt. James' character; and Kathryn Bigelow does an extremely good job at creating a near-constant state of tension, even when nothing's happening. I expected to come out of the theater with my senses assaulted by war violence; instead I came out with only a weird sense of dread. In a way, that was more disturbing.

The Case for "Vardarska Makedonija"

I missed this Foreign Policy article on the Macedonian name dispute, but it's a good read. Among other things, it argues that Macedonia (or the FYROM, more specifically) should adopt a name that won't be a source of international tension:

Imagine how Californians would feel if Baja California wanted to be called simply "California"? Or how Swedes would react if Norway changed its name to "Scandinavia"? The U.N.'s designated mediator has floated various possible names for FYROM, and Greece has recently indicated it would accept "The Republic of Northern Macedonia." But such a solution implies there is a "Southern Macedonia" in Greece inhabited by the same people, as in North and South Korea. But this is not the case linguistically or ethnically. A more sensible solution would be "Vardarska Makedonija," named for the river that flows through the region, which respects the dignity and identity of Greece's northern neighbor but also distinguishes it from the northern Greek province.

It would be one thing if it were just the name that was in dispute between Macedonia and Greece. But if it's true that the Macedonian government is appropriating Hellenistic history and imagery as its own, and claiming that the Macedonian region of Greece has some connection to the country of Macedonia other than the name*, then I think the UN and the US (which unilaterally recognized the "Republic of Macedonia" in exchange for the country entering the Iraq War -- thanks again, Bush Administration!) need to persuade the Macedonians to soften their stance on this issue.

Also check out the response to this article from the Macedonian ambassador to the US.

* Ethnically, Macedonians are closer to Serbs and other Slavs than they are to Greeks. While there is a large Slavic-speaking community in the northern Greek province of Macedonia, they identify themselves as Greek rather than Macedonian. For more, this Wikipedia article on the Macedonian ethnic group is worth reading.

Carbon Tariffs

So a last-minute amendment to the Waxman-Markey bill passed last Friday would require the President, by 2020, to impose a tariff on imports from countries that do not regulate their greenhouse gas emissions. Such a provision has long been controversial (see Tyler Cowen's objection, for one), but as we get closer to actually enacting climate change regulation in this country, I think a carbon tariff needs to be seriously considered.

To begin with, Paul Krugman flags some potentially game-changing news on this front:

There was some question about how the WTO would handle cap-and-trade — whether it would accept the need for carbon tariffs, if some countries (cough China cough) drag their feet, or whether it would adopt a purist free-trade rule. The answer seems to be in — the WTO is going to treat cap-and-trade the same way it treats VATs, with border taxes allowed if they can be seen as reducing distortions.

If you believe, as I do, that international negotiations over climate change can be modeled as an iterated form of the prisoner's dilemma, then a key tool for getting the major polluting countries to cooperate on reducing carbon emissions has to include both positive and negative incentives for compliance — with carbon tariffs being, obviously, a form of the latter. So the WTO ruling is, at first glance, good news.

Having said that, just because something is permissible does not mean that it is necessarily advisable. Even with the WTO's blessing, a trade war with China could easily break out if the US slaps a border tax on carbon-intensive imports. And it's not only US-China relations that we should worry about: Imagine if Waxman-Markey were to fail, support for climate change regulation collapses à la health care reform in 1994, and the EU decides to punish our recalcitrance with a carbon tariff on American exports. It'd be like the just-averted Roquefort War earlier this year, but not nearly as funny.

Some other thoughts:

• Returning to the WTO ruling, a key consideration about a carbon tariff will be one of intent: Is it meant, as Krugman suggests above (and elaborates on here), to merely prevent unfairly privileging carbon-intensive goods — in the same way that a border tax in countries with a VAT prevents unfairly privileging foreign-made goods? Or is it meant to punish non-cooperation, according to the prisoner's dilemma framework? That will likely come down to the size of the tariff: To be simply anti-distortionary, it would have to be set at a rate that restores the trade status quo prior to the implementation of climate change regulation. Of course, that implies that it would have be constantly adjusted to account for non-climate-related changes in the balance of trade. Whether that can be done, and whether the process of setting and adjusting a carbon tariff rate can avoid being abused (as a back-door to protectionism, say), is an open question.


• It goes without saying that a carbon tariff shouldn't be a measure of first resort. It would be best for the US and China to agree on a path to developing a cleaner energy regime, rather than coercing each other into doing so. I'm no China expert, but it seems that a trade war could be as bad for the Chinese as it would be for Americans: They depend on us buying their exports as much as we depend on them buying our Treasury bills.


• Following on that point, one major objection to a carbon tariff (see Cowen again) is that we cannot credibly threaten to use it. That is, one rationale for a carbon tariff is that it would function as a kind of nuclear option for climate change negotiators — a peaceable solution is more likely if the possibility of a destructive trade war looms in the background. Indeed, according to Brad Plumer at the TNR link above, the threat of a US carbon tariff may be prodding the Chinese to the bargaining table. The problem, however, is that, given the trade dynamic with China I just mentioned, can we really risk provoking a fiscal crisis over even something as portentous as climate change? The Chinese face a similar predicament, of course; despite some rumblings about moving away from dependence on the dollar, it's unlikely they can afford to do it — at least in the near term. Getting our trade deficit down to a manageable level will be just as difficult, if not more so.

Frank on Offsets

Robert Frank's op-ed on carbon offsets in the NYT (and his follow-up blog post) were really disappointing. He's an excellent economist, but his defense of offsets skirts the most important questions surrounding their use, instead focusing on comparatively trivial aspects.

Most of his argument is addressed to those who think, like the proprietors of cheatneutral.com, that buying offsets is essentially a way for people in wealthy countries to shirk their responsibility to reduce their output of carbon emissions. To an extent, this is true: the principle of common but differentiated responsibility dictates that we in the developed world need to take the lead in heading off the rise in global warming pollution — even if China, India, et al. are poised to overtake us this century (indeed, China is already there). But, as Frank rightly notes, it doesn't matter whether a ton of CO₂ is released in Shanghai or in San Francisco; so it makes sense to look for the most cost-effective means of reducing emissions — and often this means promoting clean energy projects in developing countries instead of in developed countries.

But as Brad Plumer points out, the real problem with offsets isn't one of morality or distribution of responsibility, but of simple logistics: To date, offsets providers have done a rather poor job at quality control, i.e., making sure that offsets are funding actual emissions reductions, not wasting money on projects that would have happened anyway. Frank mentions in passing that more stringent standards are gaining ground; however, there's reason to believe that better standards could act as a bottleneck for the expansion of the offsets market.

Then there's the question of whether offset programs, as currently designed, are an effective way to fund emissions reductions in the first place. It may make more sense to do something like just giving money to developing countries to finance clean energy development, as Daniel Hall notes here and here. After all, what developing countries, in general, are looking for is a clear path to economic development; which, they fear, restrictions on carbon emissions would hamper.

Is China Ready for a Climate Deal?

There’s been a lot of theatrics over Waxman-Markey in this country. But in a sense, it’s really a sideshow: If we don’t get the major developing countries — China in particular — to commit to reducing their carbon emissions, any effort to prevent catastrophic warming of the planet will be futile. That’s why negotiations between the US and China on reducing emissions are probably the most important thing shaping our planet’s future right now.

So what, exactly, is going on? Hard to say. The good news is, it seems China and the US are in talks about what to do about climate change, and that a mutual agreement to reduce emissions before the Copenhagen conference is a possibility. The bad news is, according to the Wall Street Journal, is that we may not want to hear what Beijing has to say:

China just upped the ante in its demands of what the West should do—calling for ridiculously ambitious emissions reductions over the next decade as a pre-condition for joining the club. The Waxman-Markey bill in its original form would have fallen well short of Chinese demands; in the compromise version, near-term emissions cuts are even more modest.

Specifically, China is asking for developed countries to reduce carbon emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. To put that in perspective, the European Union has pledged to reduce their emissions by 20% in that time frame, and 30% if the rest of the developed world joins them. And Waxman-Markey? Well, according to the World Resources Institute, the cap-and-trade system would only reduce US emissions by one percent. Even if you add in the other provisions of the bill, it would bump the level of reductions up to 23 percent, at best.

So why is China making such a demand? To begin with, look at the phrasing in their press release:

A shared vision for long-term cooperative action is to enable the full, effective and sustained implementation of the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] to achieve its ultimate objective. Such a vision should be guided by the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and the principle of equity. Since the UNFCCC has clearly defined the ultimate objective to address climate change, the overriding task for the international community is to implement concrete actions. The goal for long-term cooperative action should be a comprehensive one, consisting of sustainable development, mitigation, adaptation, financing and technology. In terms of mitigation, developed countries as a whole shall, as their mid-term targets, reduce their GHG emissions by at least 40% below their 1990 level by 2020.

That phrase, "common but differentiated responsibilities," is the linchpin to both the argument that the developed world should make drastic cuts in their emissions and that developing countries, including China, should not be legally bound to make any reductions at all. Basically, while all countries have a responsibility to protect the environment, developed countries — in view of their much greater wealth and that much of their wealth was gained through exploitation of developing countries’ resources — should do more to halt environmental degradation than the rest. This is especially the case with climate change, as the carbon emissions of Western countries over the last century are to blame for most of the warming that this planet has experienced to date. It is, of course, incredible to think that developing countries should place constraints on their fossil fuel consumption when developed countries won’t do the same; moreover, given that developing countries are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, it stands to reason that developed countries should do what they can to prevent undue harm as a result. This includes not only cutting their own carbon emissions to avoid devastating levels of warming, but also financial assistance to developing countries to both develop clean sources of energy and adapt as much as possible to that climate change which is unavoidable at this point.

Now, it would be one thing for, say, Vietnam to make this argument; it’s a poor country, at risk of losing much of their farmland to global warming-induced sea level rise, and should not be denied the chance to develop their economy because of the actions of Westerners. But the argument begins to fall apart when applied to an economic behemoth like China, which, frankly, is now as much as part of the climate problem as the West. True, on a per capita basis, the Chinese are still fairly poor, on par with Albanians, but at some point it makes no sense to group all developing countries under the same rubric. Unfortunately, the international climate regime still only divides the world into developing and developed countries; creating a third category for prosperous, but still developing, countries, with a level of responsibilities in between those of the poorest and the richest countries, would bring things more into line with reality.

That said, the US needs to do more than what is proposed under Waxman-Markey; although, as mentioned above, the whole bill would result in roughly the same carbon emissions reductions as what the EU has promised. And indeed, the EU needs as much prodding on this matter as we do. By the same token, however, so do the Chinese.

#2 The Great Wall of China originally uploaded to Flickr by emms76.

Waxman-Markey: Better than Nothing

Count me on the side of Krugman, Romm, and Roberts in supporting Waxman-Markey, even in its current watered-down version (and which just recently passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee). Of course, it would be better, as a matter of distributive justice, if the permits in the cap-and-trade system were all auctioned off and the revenue rebated back to individuals.* And of course, it would be better if the use of carbon offsets were kept to a bare minimum. That said, the fact that W-M establishes a price on global warming pollution for the first time in American history is something to be celebrated; and the clean energy provisions that make up the majority of the bill will do a lot to move our economy away from reliance on fossil fuels.

Despite all that, there’s no denying that W-M has been watered down, to the detriment of trying to keep the planet from warming to dangerous levels. And given that W-M, as written, would have rather meager effects on planetary warming (Jim Manzi, for one, claims it would only reduce global average temperatures by 0.1º C by 2100), what is the virtue of enacting it? The answer, I think, is twofold: the US would have a stronger position going into negotiations with China and the other major developing countries at the Copenhagen conference in December; and by putting in place the basic mechanisms for reducing carbon emissions now, they can more easily be strengthened, tweaked, etc., down the road. Of course, it’s impossible to say if W-M will actually help accomplish these goals — Suppose the Chinese balk in agreeing to reduce their emissions? Suppose the Republicans regain power while still committed to denialism about climate change? — but it seems to me that progress will not be made by waiting around for a perfect bill. Indeed, I think that once the US commits to reducing carbon emissions, the scare stories that dominate much of the climate change debate in this country will lose much of their force, and making stronger reductions won’t seem so impossible to many. Now if only W-M survives in its current form though the other House committees, a floor vote, and the Senate…

* Though see this report which argues that the allocation scheme of W-M will prevent utilities from reaping windfall profits, as they did in Europe during the first phase of its cap-and-trade system.

UNCLOS vs. The Senate

Via Scott Paul, some encouraging news on the Law of the Sea Convention (or UNCLOS):

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) is crafting a strategy to ratify the long-stalled Law of the Sea Treaty this year -- a move that ocean and foreign policy experts say is increasingly important as climate change reshapes the Arctic.

Kerry said this week that he is working to find time for a hearing and votes on the treaty, which governs navigation, fishing, economic development and environmental standards on the open seas.

UNCLOS has been in Senatorial limbo for about 15 years, so it's encouraging to hear that Sen. Kerry is leading a charge to finally ratify it. On the other hand, it seemed like the treaty had a good shot back in 2007, and in 2004 -- my understanding is that it had the votes for ratification even back then. And yet, nothing has happened. I could understand why the Republicans sat on the issue when they had the majority, given their captivity to the far right and its hatred of multilateralism. But why, with the Democrats in charge, there's been no movement whatever on the treaty, is a mystery.

On the other hand, it may not be such a mystery, given how the Senate works. Norm Ornstein recently wrote about how the abuse of the Senate's rules has made even overwhelmingly popular legislation nearly impossible to pass. I don't know if this has been the case, but I suspect that fear of someone like James Inhofe bringing Senate business to a halt has been a major factor in the lack of action on UNCLOS. The Greenwire article mentions that finding time on the Senate calendar is a big question for moving ratification forward; but it seems to me that the Senate leadership could find the time if they wanted to have a vote. In other words, I fear that ratification opponents care a lot more about stopping it than supporters do about passing it. Again, this is speculation on my part -- one other factor could be that the Republican Senators who have said they support ratification might cave under right-wing pressure. Fortunately, this time around ratification requires only eight GOP votes, at least.