Nairobi and the World’s Next Steps to Cut Greenhouse Emissions

A Weathervane Commentary

With the November 6 –17 United Nations Framework on Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, the next tentative steps toward action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have begun to be visible.

The Kyoto Protocol will continue to limit the emissions of the 35 industrial countries -- mostly Europeans plus Japan -- who have already joined it, but other countries are unlikely to join. The bigger countries are fearful of the effects of limits on their economic growth, and for the next several years, their climate policies are apparently going to be cautious experiments with the cost of restraint and the introduction of new technology. These experiments are very likely to be held strictly within national borders, avoiding international commitments like Kyoto.

At Nairobi, the great overhanging issue was the need to get the two countries with the highest emissions, the United States and China, to start work seriously on reductions. In the setting of the world conference, neither has been willing to show any initiative. But especially in the United States, the pressure to get moving is rapidly rising. Much of it is coming from the states -- several of which have begun their own mandatory programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions -- and it’s being augmented by a flood of reports and findings, especially from Europe.

"The world is not on course for a sustainable energy future," the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, warned in June in a major report on the technologies that could provide a solution.

The government of the United Kingdom published a report in late October, a week before the Nairobi conference began, observing that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is increasing much faster than even recent forecasts had indicated. Written by the economist Sir Nicholas Stern, it said that weak action over the next decade or two would make it impossible to stabilize the accumulation even at a level of 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other gases -- "and this level is already associated with significant risks."

While curbing emissions would be expensive, the report concluded, the benefits would massively outweigh the costs.

As the Nairobi conference began in early November, the IEA released its latest World Energy Outlook with figures on the acceleration of worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of the greenhouse gases. It had been widely assumed that China’s emissions would overtake those of the United States by 2020, but the IEA’s data indicate that it will happen within the next three years.

All three reports pound hard on three basic points: that warming is taking place faster than most scientists expected, that the process carries an increasing risk of severe economic damage, and that slowing it down is possible but requires prompt action by the governments of the big countries.

In the politics of the climate, the world is divided into three blocs. Concern is greatest, and support for immediate government action is strongest, in Europe. In the other two blocs, the United States and the developing countries, governments fear that any attempt to reduce energy use and the emissions that arise from burning fossil fuels will slow the development of their economies

The three reports from the UK and the IEA can be read as efforts by Europeans to persuade American, Chinese, and Indian politicians that the costs of delay will be far greater than the investments needed to cut emissions.

The world’s principal instrument, so far, to curb emissions is the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that legally limits the amounts of carbon dioxide and several other gases that 35 member countries can eject into the atmosphere. It is possible that the 35 will tighten their limits as Kyoto goes into its next phase in 2013. But the United States has refused to join the treaty, and it does not put limits on developing countries like China.

That doesn’t mean that nothing will happen. In the United States, the possibility of national limits unrelated to Kyoto is increasingly strong. In late September, the state of California enacted legislation to cut its emissions sharply by 2020. A coalition of Northeastern states is embarked on a similar plan. In Congress, several pending bills would apply limits nationwide without getting into the complexities of an international treaty like Kyoto.

In the global equation, the factor most difficult to forecast is Chinese policy. As the big developing countries rapidly expand their consumption of energy, some economists, including Stern, have suggested that the rich countries help them with the costs of higher efficiency and lower emissions. But that generous idea runs into the paradox of the U.S.-Chinese economic relationship.

Americans have far higher incomes, on average, than the Chinese. But China has foreign currency reserves that are now in the range of a trillion dollars, while the United States is an international debtor on an even larger scale. The U.S. Congress is unlikely to approve any legislation that would augment the flow of capital to China.

Even in the absence of foreign aid for clean energy development, China has good reasons to worry about the damage that rapid climate change could inflict. Its scientists are well aware of the implications of rising sea levels for its coastal cities, or a changing pattern of precipitation for its agricultural production. But for the present, at least, the imperatives of economic growth seem to dominate.

Neither the United States nor China seems inclined to commit itself to worldwide goals in climate policy until it has a much clearer sense of the costs, the technologies available, and the consequences for its people’s standards of living.

A conference like Nairobi performs an invaluable service in providing a focus for worldwide concerns and a forum for new studies and ideas. It is a place where diplomats can talk and, perhaps, move some of their ideas forward.

But most of the hard labor of the next few years is likely to lie at the national level as, country by country, governments carefully weigh of the risks indicated by the torrent of new scientific data and try to estimate the costs of deploying unfamiliar technologies on a world scale.

"Much more work is required, by scientists and economists, to tackle the analytical challenges and resolve some of the uncertainties across a broad front," Stern writes in the British report. "But it is already very clear that the economics risks of inaction in the face of climate change are very severe."