Countries’ willingness to read international agreements and, more importantly, to comply with commitments they make, depends almost entirely on domestic political considerations.
That is why you should not expect too much from the Copenhagen climate summit, despite whatever triumphal communiqués emerge at the end. International initiatives like this succeed only if multiple countries can not only agree upon a goal but also agree on how to achieve it. This simply hasn’t happened, at least not yet.
There are two fundamental reasons why. The first involves the United States. Unlike in most other industrialized nations, U.S. citizens remain divided on whether climate change is really occurring. Indeed, the proportion that is skeptical is growing rather than shrinking. And even among those who do see it as fact rather than hoax, many do not support emission-control measures that would either increase taxes or the prices of goods and services.
This is not a lack of consensus, but rather a fundamental division that is not likely to be solved in the foreseeable future. For significant portions of both camps, it has become a matter of faith rather than reason. And the Republican Party is increasingly moving toward betting its future on climate change as a false hypothesis that can cause great economic harm, if not an outright hoax.
People in other nations, rich and poor, know that if Republicans regain the White House in 2012 or even 2016 or if they gain control or even a blocking minority in Congress in upcoming elections, the United States may well renounce any commitments made in Copenhagen. The more others expect the United States to renege, the more hesitant they will be themselves to actually adopt emissions reduction measures that might be expensive or socially disruptive
Such underachievement may happen here and elsewhere, regardless of electoral outcomes. Very few of the signatories to the Kyoto Agreement achieved the reductions they promised.
The more important problem, however, is the fundamental abyss between the views of the United States and other wealthy nations on one side and those of the important newly industrializing nations on the other as to what constitutes a fair approach to emissions reductions.
The wealthy nations, particularly those in which manufacturing plays a diminishing role and where natural gas is displacing coal, see percentage reductions from existing levels that are near-equal for all countries as the fairest approach.
Indeed, in our country, politicians and the media seem to see this as the only approach. Statements by leaders of China, India and Brazil to the contrary are depicted as crazy ravings.
Those three countries, along with other nations where fossil fuel use is important and growing, see things differently.
Chinese emissions now top those of the United States. But China’s population is more than four times as large as ours. They don’t see anything fair in requiring low-income people who cause one-fourth as many emissions on a per-capita basis to cut back by percentages equal to those of far richer people.
For India, per-capita emissions are one-fifteenth those of the United States.
Any decrease in the rate of economic growth or increase in consumer prices has greater impact on people in poor countries meeting the necessities of life than it does in the wealthy industrialized nations.
Just as there is not yet much willingness in the United States to spend tax dollars or raise product prices to reduce emissions, there will be exceedingly little willingness to do the same in countries where per-capita incomes are one-fifth or one-twentieth of U.S. or European Union levels.
Any current or imaginable future government of China or India is not going to tell its citizens they need to stint to lessen the load on Americans, Japanese, Canadians or Germans.
Brazil burns little coal and its total carbon emissions are one-sixteenth that of the United States, with a population two-thirds as large. The issue for Brazil is maintaining original vegetation in the Amazon Basin.
When President Luis Ignacio da Silva asserts that his country should be compensated by other nations if, for the benefit of the rest of the world, they want Brazil to stop clearing forests, he is not making an unreasonable demand in the eyes of Brazilian voters.
To them, and to many Chinese and Indians, the idea that they should abstain from the path that helped North America and Europe enjoy two centuries of fossil-based economic growth — and that they should do so without compensation — is ludicrous. And they are not going to back elected officials who support such policies.
So despite much high-flown rhetoric, don’t expect the Copenhagen agreements to result in tangible changes in greenhouse-gas emissions, for the simple reason that there is insufficient political support for it in several nations that matter a great deal.
© 2009 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.