THERE is both bad news and good news from the Paris talks. The bad news relates to the much talked about target for limiting temperature rise to 20C, with an aspiration to 1.50C. The problem is not with the target itself, but the assumptions about how we might meet it. Of the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, only one gets us to 20C, i.e. RPC 2.6, which assumes that we have installed a vast amount of biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) on a global scale. BECCS is a negative emissions technology (NET) whereby biomass feedstock is grown and burned to generate electricity, but the carbon is captured from the waste stream and stored. Experience with the impacts of liquid biofuels production on biodiversity and land use, particularly in the tropics, suggests that large-scale deployment of BECCS would have significant affects on food security, water resources and biodiversity that would be truly staggering.

There are other NET options. These include enhanced weathering, in which a mineral is spread on land to enhance the ability of soils to draw carbon out of the atmosphere; adding calcium or iron to the ocean to take carbon out of the air; and large-scale afforestation, among others. Some scientists are currently developing mechanical devices that would extract carbon from the ambient air, either to sequester it underground in a compressed form or convert it into carbonate rock. But we really don’t have any firm knowledge about whether these technologies will actually work, how reliable they will be in practice, or how secure carbon sequestration would be.

We also know little about the resource implications of deploying them at scale. Could we build this technological system in the timeframe that is actually going to have any substantial impact on climate by the middle of the century? In the absence of a stable carbon price, who is going to pay for all this? How would it be financed? What would be the opportunity costs in terms of diverting resources away from other climate and development imperatives? Will such technologies pose a moral hazard that would lead people to be complacent about efforts to pursue conventional mitigation? Do we have an adequate regulatory framework?

Consequently, there are lots of reasons to suppose this is going to be problematic. Yet, at the present moment, no government, no major research council or funding body is supporting a proper assessment of these technologies. They are just assumed in RPC 2.6. So, the bad news is that adopting a goal of 2oC, let alone 1.5oC without some kind of negative emissions technology, is to engage in magical thinking. Someone should either be funding serious research into these technologies or modellers should take these imaginary technologies out of the emissions scenarios and recognize that the 1.5oC target is much, much harder than has been recognized at Paris. That is the bad news.

 

There is also good news which, to put it bluntly, is that Paris finally drove a stake through the heart of the Kyoto Protocol. The world wasted 20 years because the Kyoto architecture was based on three misleading analogies. The first was the analogy with ozone depletion, which appeared to be a model of how to deal with anthropogenic releases of gases into the atmosphere. The ozone regime, with its framework convention and implementation protocols, was a distinctly top-down approach to dealing with CFCs. It worked for ozone, but the analogy with climate change was deeply flawed. CFCs were industrially produced artificial gases for which there were a small number of producers and a readily available technological substitute. These conditions do not apply to greenhouse gases.

The second analogy was the USEPA Sulphur Trading Programme. This was very successful at reducing sulphur dioxide (SO2) pollution by allowing polluting electric utilities to burn dirty coal by buying spare emission permits from utilities that were generating electricity more cleanly. But again, the analogy was flawed. SO2 was a single gas, regulating a single legal regime in a small market involving a handful of traders. Again this is not a good analogy for global trading in multiple greenhouse gases.

The third analogy was the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), from which the Kyoto architecture borrowed the idea of mutually verifiable staged reductions. But START was a treaty between just two governments to control nuclear weapons directly under their control. Again this was not a good analogy for dealing with climate change.

Subsequently, climate negotiations were an exercise in reductionism, whereby the complex issue of climate change was treated as an old-fashioned 1960s end-of-the-pipe pollution problem, but with national pipes. The challenge was simply to cap the amount of stuff coming out of these imaginary pipes. This is much too simplistic, particularly when we recognize that the world needs much more energy than it has at present. There are 1.6 billion people on the planet lacking basic energy access. Little wonder that the Kyoto approach was doomed from the start and finally abandoned in Paris.

 

The replacement framework that emerged from Paris is, however, uncannily familiar to those who were working on climate policy in the 1980s. At the time that the UNFCC was negotiated in 1992, the implementation mechanisms under discussion were ‘policies and measures’ and ‘pledge and review’. The idea then was to allow countries to develop their own policies based on their specific capabilities, resource endowments and developmental stages. They would then come together periodically to look collectively at what each country had achieved and how. The idea was that countries would learn from each other – things that work, things that did not work – by allowing for a wide range of experimentation by a variety of actors and policy mechanisms. This approach was displaced in Kyoto by the neoclassical-economic fantasy of global carbon pricing rectifying all of the problems associated with climate change.

 

Paris has returned climate policy to the pre-Kyoto track. The original idea of ‘policies and measures’ is now embodied in the ‘nationally determined contributions’; ‘pledge and review’ has been reintroduced as the proposed five-year review cycle. This has opened the door to a ‘polycentric’ approach to climate action, which recognizes the diversity of the endowments, capacities and development priorities of different countries. It substitutes positive local and near-term aspirations for the big carbon stick. There is an opportunity to reverse the standard logic that climate action will bring ancillary benefits and to argue that the best way to control greenhouse gas emissions is to pursue sustainable local development, improved air quality and energy modernization. These are goals which are good in their own right and which bring benefits to people where they are today, not benefits that are going to accrue to people far away in a far distant future. If they are done right, they also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This approach can create a discourse of opportunity rather than discourse of constraint. The polycentric approach also creates opportunities to address equity issues much more effectively than was possible under the previous architecture.

Another intriguing possible benefit recently suggested by the head of the UK Supreme Court, is that although emissions reductions in the Paris arrangements are not legally binding under international law, they can be made legally binding at national and local levels through state legislation, provincial laws and city bylaws. The pursuit of a legally binding agreement along Kyoto lines was always really meaningless because there was never going to be a proper and effective enforcement mechanism.

 

The polycentric approach also facilitates restructuring of mitigation as a technology challenge rather than end-of-the-pipe environmental problem. While the past decade has seen massive improvements in the costs of renewables, wind and solar energy remain intermittent sources and we don’t have very satisfactory ways of storing large amounts of energy in power grids, which is required to overcome this limitation. Distributed generation with household battery storage might work very nicely in suburban southern California but it is not going to be a solution for major urban conurbations like Delhi.

To deal with technology challenges like energy storage requires publicly funded research development, demonstration and deployment (RDD&D) to reduce risk to innovators. The success of unconventional gas-extraction technology demonstrates the importance of this as it was developed largely with US Department of Energy funding. But public funding on sustainable energy RDD&D is not nearly enough.

Countries spend significant amounts on research where they see a strategic benefit or imperative for them to do so. For example, it has been estimated that the US and China spend approximately US$ 80 billion a year on military R&D. A small carbon tax of US$ 5/ton could raise about $ 30 billion/year in the US and China and $ 80-150 billion a year globally, which is consistent with the kinds of sums that the International Energy Agency has argued should be spent on energy research. India already has a coal tax that is set around this level. These kinds of low level taxation specifically aimed at investment in technological innovation could be designed into the climate agreement internationally or implemented nationally, or by multilateral clubs that would not require waiting for a global consensus.

The energy modernization approach presents real opportunities for India and China that were completely absent from the Kyoto architecture. China, as we are already seeing, is leading the world in cutting the costs of wind and solar generation technologies. India has the opportunity to really take the global lead in the smart technologies, required for smart grids and smart cities and smart homes.

 

The polycentric approach adopted at Paris also opens the door for a stronger emphasis on adaptation. Adaptation has always been the poor cousin of mitigation. Because it has been framed as a cost of failed mitigation, adaptation has consistently received a small fraction of international funding. We should think about adaptation differently. Just as we should reformulate the energy technology challenge from being one of limiting emissions to being an energy modernization programme, we should reformulate adaptation to climate change as adaptation to climate variability.

Climate is already dangerous. It kills people all the time through extreme weather events. We can save lives and property and enhance human dignity today by making significant investments to protect people better from climate. Adaptation to climate variability, if done right, will also lay the foundations for adaptation to the climate change that we are unable to avoid through mitigation. Once again, the polycentric framework emerging from Paris provides a more promising basis for effective adaptation policies that are relevant to local and near-term needs at the same time as tackling climate change.