The world’s atmosphere is like the fish in Minnesota’s public waters. Both are common pool resources.
History and economic theory teach us that common pool resources tend to be overused — even destroyed — when societies do not develop effective means to control how much any one person or firm or nation uses.
In Minnesota, we have a Department of Natural Resources, a branch of state government instituted through the democratic process that is charged with regulating access to fish and game so as to protect the public interest.
There is no analogous organization to protect the global atmosphere because there is no world government.
In the absence of a global government body with some range of enforcement powers, the best alternative is if nations voluntarily can agree to implement measures that would protect resources, such as the oceans and atmosphere, that are not the property of any one nation but that affect the well-being of every person on the planet.
The Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse-gas emissions is such a voluntary agreement, albeit an imperfect one.
The United States has rejected it, but in the wake of the recent Johannesburg summit, enough of the other major nations of the world have ratified it so that it will go into effect.
Our nation’s unwillingness to participate does not result in the United States being punished by some entity, though it does bring our nation — or the Bush administration — widespread opprobrium.
Domestic critics of the Bush administration need to realize that the fault needs to be shared.
The Clinton administration participated in the five years of negotiations after the 1992 Rio Summit that produced Kyoto. The Clinton administration signed the accord, knowing the U.S. Senate was not likely to ratify it.
The administration also never bothered to submit the agreement for ratification in the more than three years between the signing and the time Clinton left office.
When newly inaugurated George W. Bush declared the agreement dead, one could argue he was merely being realistic and not hypocritical. Whether the Senate leader is Republican Trent Lott or Democrat Tom Daschle, the Kyoto treaty had no chance of passage.
Bush should be faulted, however, for failing to propose alternative actions the United States could take to make progress toward the goals of Kyoto even if we are unwilling to agree to its details. The petulant “we don’t like this, and we are not going to do it” stance of the administration is wasting a lot of good will among our allies that we are likely to miss deeply at some time in the future.
So what should be done? University of Maryland economist Thomas Schelling offers excellent suggestions in an article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs.
Schelling points out that the National Academy of Sciences published a study in 1991 — Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming — that identifies a number of steps that the United States could take to begin the process of emission reduction. These actions would result in little or no economic cost.
Schelling also argues that we need to invest more public funds in research on ways to reduce greenhouse emissions without sacrificing living standards and without necessarily wiping out whole industries such as coal mining.
At present, we burn coal but there are several ways to use the energy in coal without combusting it. We need to perfect those technologies and find the most effective ways to implement them.
Some of the cheapest ways to reduce total global emissions may lie in subsidizing technological change in developing countries. President Bush objected to Kyoto because it did not require developing countries such as China to do enough.
The developing countries disagree, noting that most of the gasses already in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, came from fossil-fuel burning in the industrialized countries during the past 200 years.
Fairness, they argue, means that those who have already contributed more to the problem should take greater steps toward solutions.
But the single cheapest way to reduce emissions may be to build pipelines to bring cheap Russian natural gas to the industrial north of China so that the relatively cleaner fuel can be substituted for Chinese coal.
If the wealthy nations would agree to pay for such infrastructure, they would achieve a greater reduction per dollar spent than in nearly any alternative action within their own borders.
In the midst of all the exaggerated rhetoric for and against the Kyoto Protocol that we heard in connection with the recent Johannesburg summit,
Professor Schelling shows that there is a common-sense middle ground on the subject.
If only his article had found an audience in the Bush administration and among the more radical environmental groups.
© 2002 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.