Next Generation Energy

Unfortunately, history is of little help here. The only precedents in international negotiations are the Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion and the more recent Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants. Neither treaty required signatories to make anything like the fundamental transition that will be required to bring down fossil-fuel emissions to safe levels fast enough to make a difference.

So the Center for a New American Security, a national-security think tank in Washington D.C., recently turned to the next best thing: simulating the future in the form of a climate change negotiations "war game." From Nature's coverage of the event:

Under the scenario, set in 2015, greenhouse-gas emissions are rising, and the latest climate models paint a grim picture of the future if business were to continue as usual. Extreme weather, including droughts, storms and floods, is on the rise. The United Nations is calling for international cooperation on emissions reductions, adaptation, disaster relief and shortages of crucial resources such as food and water.

...

After lengthy negotiations, the United States and the Europe Union agreed to a 30% reduction in emissions by 2025. They also agreed to finance a portion of the emissions reductions by the developing world. But China refused to accept any specific emissions targets. India committed itself to reductions, but only with a number of contingencies. In a sad mirror of reality, the participants departed after three days without the comprehensive agreement many had been hoping for.

And one of the participants, Eileen Claussen of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says real negotiations would probably be even less fruitful, predicting that "India would be unlikely to agree so quickly to an emissions-reduction proposal."

It seems unlikely that any package of technology assistance incentives we can reasonably afford to offer will be enough to convince China to stop building coal-fired plants so long as we are building them, too. And Russia isn't going to close down its oil fields so long as we're talking about drilling more wells ourselves. It all boils down to leadership. Making matter worse, new research by Carnegie Mellon University's Christopher L. Weber, suggests that the Walmarts of the West are responsible for "fully one-third of China's greenhouse gas emissions" in the form of exports. Pot, meet kettle.

As Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn point out in their U.S.-centric book "Earth: the Sequel, The race to reinvent energy and stop global warming:

Developing nations racing to modernize cannot be expected to act if the largest and richest emitter will not. Some argue that the United States should not make a move until China and India do. But the United States has never followed China's lead in foreign policy — nor should it do so now.

That may seem like pandering to simplistic patriotism, but maybe that's what we need. If the spirit of international cooperation isn't up to the task — and I humbly suggest that only a disaster of global dimensions will upset the cart enough to invoke the spirit — then perhaps we have to fall back on instruments of national identity.

The next line in Krupp and Horn's book is provocative:

If Congress creates what will likely become the world's largest carbon market, however, and offers other nations the chance to participate in that market if they, too, cap and cut emissions, that will provide a powerful lure for them to join us ...

That sounds like a carrot, but read closely and what we're really talking about is the stick of trade barriers. You only get to trade with us if you climb aboard the climate change bandwagon.

This is precisely the future scenario laid out almost 20 years ago by James Burke in his speculative documentary on climate change from the perspective of 2050. After the Warming was made in 1989, and it got a surprising amount of the climate science, and the ensuing politics, bang on. In the end, predicts Burke and his producers, there were some holdouts in the developing world, but when they were shut out of the global marketplace, they changed their ways. (By then, of course, it was too late. The thermohaline conveyor was shutting down and the several climate tipping points had been left in the dust. But that's just for dramatic effect. I hope.)

This path would seem to go against the grain of the past couple of decades during which international trade barriers have been coming down. But the notion that globalism has run its course is not a particularly radical one. One of the sharper observers of international affairs, John Ralston Saul, made the point three years ago in The Collapse of Globalism.

Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to be nice. James Hansen makes some compelling arguments for a kind of middle road in which we don't bother to try to stop anyone from using their oil right now, but focus almost exclusively on getting everyone to agree to a moratorium and phase-out of coal-fired power plants. That would buy enough time to implement the other technological changes necessary to keep CO2 concentrations below 450 parts per million and eventually bring them back down to the neighborhood of 350 ppm.

I would like to think that his plan has merit. But given the resistance in America to that idea — Hansen's been making his case for months now, but nobody close to what we would call political power has embraced it, certainly not the presidential candidates — what are the chances China would agree to shut down the hundreds of coal-fired plants they've just built over the last year alone?

Not without a stick they won't.