A gale is lashing orthodox climate policy. This week an article was published in the journal Nature that should shake the certainty of anyone who assumes the Kyoto-Âprotocol approach is the sensible way to go.
Three climate experts offer some inconvenient truths. Roger Pielke, Tom Wigley and Christopher Green show it is even more urgent than we thought to abandon the failed Kyoto strategy and move quickly to policies that might actually reduce carbon emissions.
Any workable strategy has to include India and China: Kyoto did not. As they rapidly industrialise and reduce poverty, their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will rise steeply — by as much as 13% a year for the period from 2000 to 2010 in the case of China.
The Nature piece is titled “Dangerous assumptions”. Most dangerous of all is the assumption built into all the scenarios that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published, which means that the technological challenge is at least twice as big as people believe.
The IPCC has assumed that about three-quarters of the emissions reduction required to stabilise CO2 levels will occur “spontaneously”. It is well documented that after an initial upswing, the “energy intensity” of industrial societies — the amount of energy they use to make money — tends to decline impressively and continuously. When this happens, lower CO2 emissions come along as a free rider.
“Dangerous assumptions” shows that, globally, this is no longer the case. Principally because of the rapid industrialisation of India and China, reduction in energy intensity has levelled out or reversed in recent years. The global economy is not decarbonising — it is recarbonising. If the free rider of decarbonisation is not available, the challenge to move quickly to a radically different type of climate policy is all the greater.
What would a materially effective policy do? It would break the link between poverty reduction and carbon emission, recognising that the developing world needs to consume — and will consume — more energy, not less. It would recognise that attempting to control human created carbon emissions by setting binding output targets and relying on artificial carbon markets and dodgy offsets, as Kyoto does, has not and will not work.
Such a policy would shift to input and concentrate on radical improvements in the production and use of energy. The shape of the future agenda might reside in Japan. Supported by other Pacific powers, it is leading a profound shift to an emphasis on radical reductions in energy intensity. This concentrates initially on the most energy-intensive sectors, with ambitious plans for technology to help China and India reduce the effect of their coal burning, which will be an inescapable feature of the next 30 years. CO2 targets, which evidence shows do not work as mandatory drivers of policy, can still be helpful guides.
This strategy will be a centrepiece of July’s meeting of the G8 near Hokkaido in Japan. The vital importance of the tree-shaking analysis in Nature is that it gives reasons for anybody who takes climate policy seriously — and not just as a surrogate for playing other sorts of political games — to welcome and follow these Japanese guides, travelling the hard but necessary road from Kyoto to Hokkaido. — Â