In this Wiener Conference Call, Robert Stavins shares his behind-the-scenes perspective on the 28th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held last December in Dubai. What happened? What didn’t? How does the meeting figure in context of the history of climate negotiations?
Wiener Conference Calls recognize Malcolm Wiener’s role in proposing and supporting this series as well as the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
- [Announcer] Welcome to the Wiener Conference Calls series featuring leading experts from Harvard Kennedy schools who answer questions from alumni and friends on public policy and current events.
- Okay, welcome. This is wonderful to have everyone here. I'm Ariadne Valsamis from the Office of Alumni Relations and Resource Development here at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this Wiener Conference Call. These calls are kindly sustained by Dr. Malcolm Wiener and his wife Carolyn, who support the Kennedy School in so many vital ways and we're deeply grateful to them. Before I introduce today's faculty expert, I wanna give a couple of housekeeping reminders. First of all, this call is being recorded and it will be posted on the Kennedy School's website. And if you'd like to turn on the feature that provides a real time transcription of the audio, you can look in the meetings control toolbar at the bottom of your Zoom screen and click on a little icon, I think it says CC or show captions. So that'll be helpful. And then if you would like to have the best view of our speaker, you can select speaker view at the top, I guess right of your Zoom screen. And so now it's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Robert Stavins, who is the AJ Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development at Harvard's Kennedy School. And he is also the director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements. His research on policy and economics has been deeply influential in the global dialogue addressing our climate crisis. And today he's gonna talk with us about the December, 2023 conference of the parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, fondly known as COP. And we are so fortunate that he's agreed to share his expertise today with the Kennedy School's alumni and friends. Professor Stavins over to you.
- Well, thank you very much Ariadne. And also let me add my thanks to Malcolm and Carolyn for everything they've done for the school. And it is given me the opportunity to see Carolyn again for the first time in 30 years since our last meeting in person at the school, which shows both how long we've both been involved. We were both, of course about 12 years old at the time, so that would explain it. So I'm going to make a presentation to you to start us off in which I'm going to share some slides if I might. And as you can see that my topic is what really happened at COP28 in Dubai. And I use that expression what really happened because I think that the perspective I'm gonna offer to you might be somewhat different than what you would've seen if you had read about it in most newspapers or listen to it on the radio or watch something about it on television. So COP 28 of course, took place in Dubai in the UAE in December of last year. The press hailed it in some cases as a great success. Other elements of the press said it was a distinct failure. And those comments in both cases were largely based on one sentence in what is the closing statement that referred to the future of fossil fuels, where there was an endorsement of quote transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems. And importantly, that was a compromise. The transitioning away was a compromise with some people wanted it to say phasing down or even phasing out fossil fuels. And that was essentially a combination then of the perspectives of various countries. And also it included in it a tripling of renewable energy capacity doubling of the annual rate of improvements in energy efficiency. And all of this compromised among countries patching together something resulted in broad approval, which is the purpose of that compromise. And that meant that the oil producing Middle East countries signed on, the industrialized countries signed on and developing countries signed on. The question is, did that signal this statement of transitioning away from fossil fuels? Did it signal a paradigm shift, which is what the COP 28 President, Al Jaber had called it? Or was it just a vacuous statement about future aspirations? Well, it's essentially a non-binding resolution about future ambitions. But on the other hand, statements and particularly press coverage of statements can have symbolic signaling value and can thereby be influential. So was COP28 a success or a failure, which was it? Well, most COPs are neither successes nor failures. The exception to that is when a new agreement is reached, that happened in 1997 in Kyoto Japan. It happened in 2015 in Paris. Otherwise, the COPs have much more in common with the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland than annual or periodic, I should say, negotiations of the World Trade Organization because the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos and the annual COPs of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are both very complex get togethers and both are based on fundamentally bottom up processes. So it's not as if the corporate CEOs get together in Davos and they negotiate among each other and decide what action their respective corporations can take and then go home to their boards of directors and tell the boards, this is what we've gotta do in order to implement the commitments I've made and not Davos. Well, of course that doesn't happen. The causality runs in precisely the opposite direction. And so too with the COPs in the case of climate change, the delegations from the 195 parties to the COP that is the countries plus the European Union, which is also has its own delegation. They're bringing to the COPs their domestic priorities based upon their national circumstances, including their national politics particularly in the case of the representative democracies. So each COP outcome is essentially the aggregation of those national perspectives and national views. I just have to move. There we go. I had to get something out of the way. So what actually does drive action around the world? In other words, cuts and greenhouse gas emissions is largely the combination of market realities and public policies. In turn, why do I mention market realities in the absence of policies? Well, a great example of that is of course in the United States where as a result of technological change in the oil and gas industry, namely horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing together known as fracking, resulted in the opening up of massive amounts of unconventional natural gas that it was not feasible, economically feasible to produce previously. And that opening up that tremendous increase in supply resulted in a tremendous fall in the price of natural gas on the market, which then caused a shift across the country, particularly in the coal, using parts of the country of substituting natural gas for coal in the generation of electricity. We essentially went from 60:40 to 40:60 and coal is being phased out in the United States largely because of natural gas, more recently because of public policies that we'll talk about. So that's just an example of how market realities technological change in the market have significant effects. More importantly, in many parts of the world, including prominently, the European Union are public policies and these are typically enacted at the national level sometimes as in the case of California at the subnational level or in the case of the European Union at the regional level. And these policies, again, something's blocking. There we go, these policies are linked with what happens at the annual COPs, but the direction of causation is just like what I described with Davos. It's fundamentally bottom up, not top down. So what happens in the International climate talks each year does not determine what's gonna happen in each of the countries. Rather what happens in each of the countries determines what happens in the international climate festivities. So what was the most important COP28 development? Well, I wanna recall first of all, go back a year to COP27, which took place in Sharm El Sheikh Egypt in November, 2022. And I said at the time that the most important development took place 6,000 miles away in Bali, Indonesia when US President Joe Biden and China President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali for a three hour meeting, which sort of signaled their return to cooperation on climate change. And that their statement of cooperation quickly trickled down to the leaders of the two negotiating teams, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, both of whom have now retired, but were long-term friends. And coming now to COP28, again, something similar happened because two weeks before COP28, what I would call the most important development for COP28, took place 8,000 miles away in Sunnylands, California, where the same two heads of state met. And this time they signaled in writing and the "Sunnylands Statement," which you can Google and find online their renewed cooperation on climate change. And that cooperation is essential for meaningful progress on climate change. Indeed, without the co-leadership of China and the United States on climate change, which we had during the Obama administration leading up to the Paris Agreement, we wouldn't have the Paris Climate Agreement. So ultimately, that may turn out to be more important than any individual accomplishments at COP 28 in Dubai. Now at this point, it can be helpful to reflect historically about the way in which these annual COPs have evolved over time, the UNFCC. This is the framework agreement from 1992, which launched the entire process from the Rio Earth Summit that this agreement, the framework Convention has something in it very unusual for an international agreement. It specifies that any non-governmental entity that's qualified regarding topics of the convention I.e in this case, climate change, can be represented at these annual conference of the parties as an official observer organization. So there is an explicit role for these observer organizations from civil society, from NGOs, from trade associations, from universities, and we've seen gradual changes in the relative importance and prominence of the core country delegations, the negotiators, vis-a-vis, the observers from civil society. So when I first got involved, now it's 17 years ago, my first COP, I would say, this is just a numerical judgment of something that's qualitative. That 90 to 95% of the meaningful action was in the negotiations with five to 10% from the participants from civil society. But by the time of COP28, 10% of the meaningful action was within the negotiations and 90% was among the official side events, unofficial presentations and sessions, meetings and interactions of all kinds among governments, governments with civil society and among various civil society groups. So the COP is to a large degree, a trade fair with entrepreneurs of all kinds promoting their products. I counted 11 different entrepreneurial organizations that were promoting different kinds of green cement production for example. So the COP is essentially a circus in which the main event has now been eclipsed with increasing frequency by what were previously thought of as the sideshows. Hence I think of the festivities in Dubai as Climate Expo 2023. And in the coming year in Baku, in this year in Baku, we will have Climate Expo '24. Now, I don't characterize it that way to be cynical or even skeptical because like Davos, the Climate Expo plays an important role. And a great example of this in Dubai were the events that took place among civil society and civil society with governments regarding a specific non CO2 greenhouse gas that I'm going to comment on. And that's methane, CH4. So methane did indeed receive greatly increased attention from civil society, from business associations, from NGOs. And a reminder for those of you who don't know, is that the radii of forcing per unit of methane is vastly greater than that of CO2, but it has a much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere. So over a hundred years, the radii of forcing per unit of methane is about 10, 20 times greater than CO2. But if you do your accounting over a 20 year time period, then it's 80 times as important. And the result of this is that methane emissions account for about 30% of the global warming that we've experienced on earth since pre-industrial time. And the estimate is about will account for about half this decade. So it can be very important. Interestingly, it can also be in the financial interest of oil and gas companies to reduce methane emissions because when you reduce leaks of methane from pumps and pipelines and wellheads, you're keeping more of a merchantable product in the pipeline. But there are other important sources of methane, the agriculture sector, both livestock and rice patties and then landfills. Now the reason that I focus on methane for our discussion today, and the reason that we focused on it from the Harvard project on climate agreements at the most recent COP in Dubai was because of an initiative that we have at Harvard, the Harvard Initiative to reduce global methane emissions. So we held four presentations and more importantly had more than 20 meetings with country delegations, with trade associations, with environmental NGOs. So this Harvard initiatives brings together 17 faculty members plus external collaborators, four departments in the faculty of arts and sciences, five professional schools, the disciplines of physics, chemistry, engineering, economics, political science, law, business and history. And our principle motivation for this is that by collaborating across research teams, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. And we do this by frequent interaction among researchers and building on synergies. For those of you who are familiar with the ways of Harvard operating, you'll recognize how unusual this is to be able to work across the university. And I'm delighted to say that we've been very successful in doing that. It's important to us to translate our research into useful materials, not just journal articles for other academics, which we do, but also into useful materials. And one of the ways we do this is that I insist that every research project, which is probably an article for a academic journal, whether it's a physics journal or a economics journal, that also we work with a science writer to convert it into a two to three page long policy brief that then is useful for policymakers, whether they're in government, in business or in NGOs. And their whole purpose here is that what we're interested in broadly in the new Salata Institute on Climate and Sustainability at Harvard, but also specifically in the methane initiative, is translating science into action. So in the first year of the three year initiative, we have 10 research and outreach projects. As I said, our initial focus is on the oil and gas sector in the USA, partly because that's, we're familiar with the USA and oil and gas is low hanging fruit for methane emissions reduction in the USA. But we are now in the process of diversifying into work on agricultural sources and landfills and working in other countries. So in terms of the prominence of methane at COP28, there were important developments just before and during it there are new regulations from the US EPA and the US had pledged a billion dollars to help poor countries reduce their methane emissions. China, the UAE and the USA together held a methane summit. There is also the global methane pledge, which is again outside of the negotiations, it's outside of the Paris Agreement, but it's a pledge to reduce in aggregate methane emissions by 30% by the year 2030. It started out three years ago with 50 participating countries, there are now 155 including prominently Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, which are major sources and others having now joined China is not yet a party. So that's an important deficit. And then there are other important institutions and partnerships. Some of these are ones which are multilateral organizations. Others are within oil and the gas industry. So for example, the OGCI, the last one there is very important in terms of working with satellite monitoring, which is now on the forefront. And a very important technical development for reducing methane emissions is locating the source of those emissions because that's been a huge problem over the past decades. Now there's still a a question here. All of these are pledges, some of them are actions, they're from private industry, from NGOs and from governments. Will they yield real emissions reductions? Well, that's something to still be observed. Now, there were some disappointments and some other progress at COP 28 that I'll finish up with two disappointments where that adaptation received a lot of attention in the written decision. In other words, discussion of it but not funding. And that may be because of diverted attention, what is referred to as the loss and damage fund has received. Now it's close to a billion dollars of contributions to that or pledges of contributions. It's still very small compared to what likely demand will be, which is in the trillions of dollars. There was some setbacks with regards to an aspect that I have worked on a great deal, a lot of research and a lot of outreach work, which is the part of the Paris Agreement that provides for carbon markets, which is Article six. And there were some issues there. In terms of the path ahead, one commentator, who is actually my former PhD student at Harvard, Nat Koehan now president of C2ES, he said that COP 28 was a coming out party for private sector climate action. And he wasn't referring just to methane, but more broadly. And as I said, there were hundreds of companies from diverse sectors showcasing climate friendly technologies, management practices, adaptation and finance. And as I said, 11 alone from green cement entrepreneurs. Now is that a negative or a positive development? I read a lot of commentaries in the press that they said all this participation by private industry including oil and gas sector was a negative. Others think it's a positive development. I have the latter view that it was positive since that's where the emissions reductions eventually have to take place. And then looking forward, COP28 completed the first of a series of five year cycles of taking stock of where we stand and then coming up with new nationally determined contributions, new quantitative, not quite pledges, but statements that'll be by COP 30 in Brazil. And so the process continues. Importantly, this is a marathon, it's not a sprint. In fact, it's a particular kind of marathon. It's a marathon which is also a relay race because if there is a measure of success at any one of the COPs, it's a matter of handing off the baton to the next one, which is gonna be in Baku, Azerbaijan. In November of this year, we will be there again working on methane and other topics with a Harvard team. And then the next year at COP30 in Brazil in 2025. So that just leads me to finish with these two words. I thank you very much and also before I go, I will leave to your attention sources of more information, the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, both of which I found it. And I still direct my own website, my blog. And I'm pleased to say that a few of you are followers of my blog and some of you are also followers of mine on Twitter. And I encourage you to join the distribution list or if that's a hassle, gee please, if we were in person, I would say give me a business card. So instead send me an email and I'll be delighted to communicate with you and to add you to the distribution list for any or all of these. So with that, I'll be pleased to turn it back to Rodney.
- Thank you so much. That was just wonderful. I have two, I have some housekeeping details and then a couple of questions to get to. First of all, I wanna say please, if you can turn your cameras on, that allows us to see each other and for Professor Steven not to speak to blank boxes, which is always better. Really appreciate that. We're trying a little bit of a new format here, which allows us for more interactions. So we wanna wanna do that as much as possible. And to that end, if you have a question, please use the virtual hand raising feature of Zoom and I'll call on you when it's time to unmute yourself. And you can also put questions in the chat. The chat is a little limited. It will only go right now I think to speakers and hosts. But please use that if you would prefer. And we will get your question up. And then finally, if you are asking a question, all of us would appreciate knowing your Kennedy school affiliation. And I wanna start with one point of clarification and then I have a question for you, professor Stavins. The point of clarification is, would you elaborate on what an adaptation is that oh is a phrase you used and I have a general knowledge, but I wonder if you could clarify.
- So what the Paris Agreement and International Action and most national policies are about is about mitigation. That is reducing emissions and addressing climate change by reducing emissions and thereby eventually reducing the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But even if we reduced emissions to zero tomorrow morning, every of the world, there is still going to be climate change. Climate change is already taking place given a hundred year half life of CO2, it's gonna continue to take place. And so therefore it's important to reduce the damages of climate change through various mechanisms that don't reduce the climate change itself, but reduce the human damages of it. And that's adaptation. So an example is building a sea wall in terms of sea level rise. In the case of agriculture in certain areas, changing to more drought resistant crops, greater insulation in homes. So those are adaptation measures, but there are certain impacts for which adaptation is not possible. And an example of that, the poster child is going to be for a small island state for which sea level rise is not simply a cost a loss of GDP, but is existential. And that's a third level. And that's become very prominent, which we didn't talk about in the presentation, but it's now very important in the negotiation going forward, which is referred to loss and damage. It's referred to damages that are gonna take place, that mitigation ain't gonna help with adaptation is not going to deal with, that's loss and damage.
- Thank you, that's very helpful. I wanna start things off in with a question that was pre-submitted. I believe the question comes from Karen Burns. Karen has an MPA in international development from 2001, and I think she may be on this call. Karen, some of your question was about how this COP differed from prior COPs and were there more or less commitments from countries and most importantly asking you professor, what do you think would make COPs more effective? I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that.
- Well, so I get in terms of the COPs themselves making them more effective, I would say that the most important development would not be within so much the COPs. It would be in our understanding of the COPs, that people expect too much from 'em. As I try to emphasize in the presentation. There are, however, in terms of international actions, things that could happen, which could either be part of the COPs could be next to it or could be instead of, and an example of that is what has come to be referred to as a climate club. And that would be rather than negotiating as 195 countries do now, instead the 20 countries in region, which account for, its counting the EU as one which account for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions that they might take actions themselves, unilaterally have an agreement among each other that they're going to put in place something like trade barriers essentially tariffs on imports of products coming from outside of that club. So they would take action and then if anyone wants to avoid the tariff, they would have to join the club by taking action themselves. So that's a very different approach and it's approach that the international negotiators do not look upon favorably, but that many people in academia and in NGOs and others think may in the long term be more promising. And I'll just say one other thing, it's possible, it's just possible that we're moving in that direction with a recent initiative out of Europe with what's called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.
- Thank you, I have another pre-submitted question. This one is also from someone on the call. So if Brian Woods Thomas would like to ask it himself, I will invite you to let us know, Brian has a mid-career MPA from 1990. And so Brian, are you able to do this or I'll go ahead and ask it and you'll pipe in if you wanna add more. Brian wanted to talk about the procedural rules in the UNFCC, which in his words literally require consensus across member states. He says this rule is extraordinarily limiting to the ability of discussions to move forward with substantive, let alone legally binding rules and wants to know if you see any realistic pathways to overcome this procedural challenge that also leads to disappointing outcomes.
- So it's true that because the UNFF CCC itself and the conferences of the parties never adopted explicitly a voting rule that the default voting rule that they inherited from the United Nations was the word consensus. And it's true, as Brian is implicitly suggesting, that for many years consensus was interpreted as we all agree, in other words, unanimity and indeed at a very important conference of the parties, which was COP 15 in 2009 in Copenhagen, which was supposed to develop what became eventually the Paris Agreement years later. There were objections from five countries. There was a one, there was an excellent agreement that was carried out by a small number of the big emitters, China, India, the United States, South Africa, Brazil, they got together in a room, came up with an agreement, put it before the plenary, but then a small group of countries objected. And they were unimportant countries in the sense of not major emitters. And this included Bolivia, Korea, Nicaragua, El Salvador. And you'll notice something they have in common. And the irony is that these countries objected to the undemocratic procedures that had been used from countries which are fundamentally undemocratic and also are opposed to the global economic order. And that was their point. They didn't really care about climate change policy one way or the other. They don't like the global economic order that's over my pay grade. I won't comment on that. And so, there were five objections, we're not gonna approve this. And so the head, the presiding officer he gave in, and this was Rasmussen who was then the prime minister of Denmark. And this was the second Rasmussen, not the first one who was very good, who became the head of NATO. And so that's what happened. One year later in Cancun, again a small group of countries, but also working with a larger group, come up again with a proposal, which was sort of the one from Copenhagen, taking it one further step forward, the same set of countries objected, undemocratic procedures We will not adopt this agreement. And there was a different presiding officer, of course this, in that case it would be from Mexico 'cause it was in Cancun and it was Patricia Espinoza who was the foreign minister of Mexico at the time, very talented woman. And she looked out at the hundreds of people in the plenary and she said, thank you for your observation and your criticism, which I take into account. And consensus and unanimity are not synonyms. The proposal on the table is adopted and she put down her gavel. That was the end, Brian, of what you described. So it is no longer the case. It is absolutely no longer the case in the annual conference of the parties. And it hasn't been since Cancun, which is now quite a few years back. That consensus means human anonymity. It means whatever is in the eyes of the beholder, namely whoever is the president of the conference, of the parties that year.
- Terrific, thank you so much. Andel Custer, we're gonna call on you next and then I have a question from Theresa in the chat and then I have Michael, just so we're queued up here. Andel, please ask your question and introduce yourself.
- Great. Hi Andel Koester, MPP 2011 currently just started a role with the New York Climate Exchange. I spent the last few years working a lot on offshore wind and other renew utility scale, offshore wind, excuse me, renewable energy development in the US in particular. And that industry has seen some real barriers in terms of cost overruns and supply chain challenges that have led to a lot of project cancellations and delays for both manufacturing and financing reasons. I'm curious to know to what degree those types of challenges are figuring in these international discussions and whether there are any solutions being discussed.
- Well, thank you for the question and I agree with the premise, but you know, those kinds of issues which vary country by country and vary industry by industry, sector by sector, are really not an element of the international discussion. Certainly not within the negotiating teams in terms of what they're doing. I mean, right now all they're focused on is essentially destroying Article six of the Paris Agreement. Other than that, everything is just sort of floating along. These various specific issues do come up, however, in the all these side arrangements, the side events, the different kinds of meetings, the discussions, and a big one, which is common in many countries and therefore has come up, which is linked with what you're discussing or what you ask about, but is not precisely the same, is the degree to which greater incorporation of renewables as a source of electricity, which is important not just in and of itself, but is absolutely necessary if we're gonna have greater reliance on EVs in the transportation sector. Of course, you need more electricity generation that a primary, that a significant barrier in many countries is the electricity grid itself. And that upgrades in the grid are going to be necessary. And that's something which I have seen a very significant amount of discussion about, for example, both Europe and the United States. This is a huge issue.
- That's terrific, thank you so much. I'm gonna do the chat question and then we'll go to Michael. The question is from Theresa Covero who has an MPA ID from 2004, MPA international development 2004. And Theresa wants to know, how does the geopolitical context impact the outcome of the different COPs in particular that of the next COP and the EU dependence on Russian energy?
- Well, so the war, the invasion by Russia has brought up two realities short term and a long term. In the short term, it meant less natural gas getting to Europe. And the result of that was somewhat of an increase in other sources of energy, including phasing down coal slower than it otherwise would've been. It's resulted in an increase in the market for liquified natural gas. Although currently the US administration, as some of you probably know, has a temporary postponement on licensing of new export facilities, but it's increased demand internationally for natural gas. But in the long term, it's quite possible though. It's thereby gonna have the effect of increasing demand, increasing technological developments for renewable sources of energy. And so has it affected the negotiations? You know, it probably has to some degree for particular countries, this has been very important for Germany, for example, and Germany feeds into the EU positions on everything. If we were at a decision point in the international negotiations, which we were prior to 2015 when we didn't have the Paris agreement or we were in 1996 before we had the Kyoto protocol, then it would probably be a significant factor. But in this point in time, those agreements are in place. And so it's more, the way in which this has an effect is in terms of individual national behavior of specific countries who are, because they're affected so differently by it. So for example, the EU and importer compared to the US an exporter of LNG.
- Thank you. Michael, I wanna give you a chance to ask your questions so you should be able to unmute yourself and.
- Yes, thank you. I'm a master in public policy from 1987, so it's was a while ago. One question I wanted to ask you just what your thoughts were with regards to voluntary carbon markets and their development and do you think that they can play a role with regards to hitting net zero targets and particularly some of the issues around additionality and permanence to the extent you have some thoughts on those? Appreciate it.
- Well, Michael, with every questioner up until you, I was tempted to say, I hope you took my class while you were at the Kennedy school since I joined the faculty in 1988, but unfortunately I don't have the benefit of being able to say that to you. But, and you raise a very important question, what are the role of voluntary carbon markets? So let me distinguish, you probably know this, but maybe not everyone does on the call, is that voluntary carbon markets is something very, very different than a cap and trade system, a tradable permit system. As we have in the European Union, we have in California, we have in New England and middle Atlantic states, there's a cap and then there is trading under the cap. A voluntary carbon market, as its name implies, is voluntary. Now why do people do things in voluntary carbon markets? Because if you do something in a voluntary carbon market, you generate what you could think of as an offset or a credit, and then you can sell that in these markets to an entity that does have compliance responsibilities. And they might have compliance responsibilities in a cap and trade system or a carbon tax system or a country or a jurisdiction where there is a performance standard, but there's some value of it and you could sell it into that. But there is a problem and you mentioned a key word and that's the word additionality, because with these systems, how do you generate a credit? Well, you generate a credit by doing something which you otherwise would not have done. I was going to tear down this forest to convert it to agricultural land or to a housing development, but now I've decided not to and it's 25 acres. So I want, I'm gonna figure out the CO2 that will be sequestered, that wouldn't have been if we had, we tore it down and then give me the money for that credit. The problem is that I might have, I maybe I was never gonna tear it down. So the comparison that's being made in order to generate the offset is with an unobservable and unobserved and fundamentally unobservable hypothetical what I would've done otherwise. And so if I would've done it anyway, and then I sell that credit into a system that has a compliance responsibility, then they escape whatever it is, let's say 10 tons of their compliance responsibility. So rather than it just being no net effect in the atmosphere, we're actually increasing emissions so that you can have a very perverse outcome. Now that I've given you, what is my perspective on these as an economist, that doesn't mean that all of them are terrible. So California, for example, is extremely strict about what offsets it allows in, if anything, they're probably correcting too far. So they require third party validation and for a very limited number of types of offset projects. And I think if you talk with others other than me, perfectly smart people and maybe smarter, they'll give you a much more positive assessment of offsets. You can consider it as good news or bad news that there is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and a tremendous number of entrepreneurs and they were filling the hallways in Dubai promoting voluntary carbon markets. And I'll put aside the judgment of whether that's good news or bad news.
- Well that's a, thank you so much. I'm gonna call on Gary Grim, a dear friend of the Kennedy School. And while Gary is unmuting, I wanna just remind people that you can find the, raise your hand feature under the reactions tab at the lower part of your zoom screen. And so just hit that if you have a question we would love to have you and Gary, please unmute yourself.
- Yes, Gary Graham, I'm a physicist, but I'm involved in the Shorenstein Center journalist resource. Is there anything journalists or reporters or the news media could do to help in this climate change in reporting on the conferences or anything else you can suggest?
- Well, thank you for that. It's obviously an extremely important question because the way most of us in the world, I assume something like 95% of people in the world, maybe a higher percentage we get our information is not by reading the scientists directly or the economist directly, but are reading the news media. Unfortunately, from my perspective, unfortunately it's no longer the major newspapers and television networks and the best radio, but now it's the internet where there's absolutely zero barrier to entry and no filters whatsoever. And so of course we are infected with a tremendous amount of very, very poor information. So other than putting in place public policies that essentially infringe upon freedom of the press so that we can get rid of all of that, which I assume is not going to happen. I think in the case of the international domain, I would go back to what I started with would be to get more informed opinions. Unfortunately, what I found and including with the best people from the press, so I talk regularly with people like Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman of the New York Times and others at "The Journal" and the NewsHour on PBS. There is a natural tendency of people in the press, the best ones to wanna get two sides of the story. And when you wanna get two, I can't tell you the number of times in which, so I was asked to go on the NewsHour. Some of this goes back to when it was the MacNeil Lear NewsHour, which not all of you will remember, but also much more recently in which they say, here's the topic we're gonna discuss, we're gonna discuss a gasoline tax in the United States. So what's the arguments in favor of that? You know, I give 'em the arguments and they say, okay, we'd like you to come on and talk about that. I say, well no, I'd like to tell you the good news and the bad news. There are also some arguments against the gasoline, higher gasoline tax in US. Said, no, we don't want you to do that. We'll get someone else to talk about the negatives. Well, the result of that too often is that in order to make sure that you have bracketed the truth, rather than going like this and you might miss it, you go wide and go to the flamethrowers on either side of the particular issue. And that's gonna be typically not academics. It's not gonna be people like me in a university. If you want the flamethrowers from climate skepticism to we're all gonna die tomorrow morning. If you wanna incorporate that, you go outside of the people that I'd consider most reliable. And that's safe. It does bracket the truth without a doubt, but it gives a bimodal distribution of reality to the listener. And I'm not sure that they get as much out of it. Now in order to narrow those brackets, it calls upon you, the journalists to do more. You've gotta have a lot of expertise, which is why actually Coral and Lisa, who I just mentioned from The Times, they're not like that. They're like this because they've developed a tremendous amount of expertise covering the topic. But when you come to the international negotiations once a year, well instead of the people that cover climate all year, it's everybody. All of a sudden it's one week before every reporter is writing something and naturally they're gonna go to the extremes. And that's unfortunate, but maybe what I've just described is infeasible, you should tell me.
- Well, I wanna switch to a question that we have that really picks up on that theme, which has been a through line from your whole talk about the importance of navigating the politics. And that is, if you looked ahead, given that you've just told us what happened, what really happened at COP28, COP29 is going to take place in Azerbaijan just a week after the US elections. And I wonder if you might talk about what kinds of uncertainties or shifting dynamics the COP participants might need to navigate in preparing for the conference and in particular about how the US election might or might not affect this.
- Well, this is what drives our allies crazy. It's what those who we don't cooperate with who we're certainly in antagonistic relationships, it pleases them. But our allies are very troubled and it's the US political system and the reality that we have tended to flip back and forth on administrations and on some issues that doesn't result in huge changes. But on climate policy that's resulted in huge changes. There is particular concern, and I'm not gonna come down, it's not my place in a meeting such as this where there may be, indeed, I hope there are diverse political perspectives to give my own political views, but just to recognize that our European allies are very, very worried about the possibility of a second Trump administration. And that's only partly because of climate. They're mainly worried quite rightly about the future of NATO and international trade, a whole set of issues. So governments are very worried, I'll tell you, just again, thinking historically, I remember when I went to the conference of the parties in 2016, which was one week after the November election, and Trump had just been elected, which as you may recall was a surprise that was not clear from the polling going into the election. It was in Marrakesh as I recall in Morocco. And I remember walking down the major aisles and the people, particularly the Europeans who tend to be a sizable number of the people at these conferences, they were walking, they looked like zombies. They were stunned and they were worried. And again about those other issues, international trade, the future of NATO, the importance of the North Atlantic Alliance in the broader sense as well as climate policy because Mr. Trump had made it clear, he had said he would pull the US out of the Paris agreement. So the same concerns will be there. For structural reasons it required four years before the US could actually leave the Paris agreement. So although Trump announced it in 2017, the US was not out of the Paris Agreement until the time of the 2020 election. So we were only out for two months and then rejoined with the Biden administration being sworn into office this time, there would be a delay of one year for structural reasons before the US could be outta the Paris agreement. The good news, however, and again, depending upon your perspective, this is either good news or bad news, but I'll give you the bad news first. The people that who support Trump, their view of the bureaucracy is the phrase deep state. And that they feel that the career bureaucrats who are in the US Environmental Protection Agency, in the State Department, who throughout the government, I'm not talking about the few thousand presidential appointees who were political appointees, some subject to senate confirmation. I'm talking about the career bureaucrats. This is the deep state and they are from administration to administration and from the view of Trump and his people, his supporters, they get in the way and they sabotage the political objectives of the White House and of the political leadership. And that's a legitimate perspective. Now the other perspective on that is that especially coming from the Kennedy School, that's who we train. I mean that's what I do for a living is create bureaucrats and really talented ones and knowledgeable ones like the people who are on this call, many of you. And that is what in France, for example, is celebrated. The fact that there is this marvelous professional bureaucracy that goes from administration to administration. So the result of that, again, historically is that I remember meeting in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 with negotiating teams from around the world and they would say to me, Trump is in office and he's a climate skeptic and he says he's pulling the US out of the agreement. But in fact, your team from the state department, they're great. We're still working with all of them. It's really productive. And from a certain perspective, that was fantastic and it's the way our system operates because of the dedicated people who were not at the political level in the departments of agencies, but from the perspective of the Trump administration, that was a huge negative. And one of their big objectives for a second administration is that that won't happen again. Because what they wanna do is to eliminate the civil service status many levels down into the departments and agencies. So I tried to be neutral on that. I hope I was somewhat neutral.
- Excellent, well it's just an such an interesting perspective of the many layers on which an economist interested in the environment has think and work. Well, I think we've come to the end of our time for this call. I wanna thank everybody who came to it and of course a very, very special thank you to Professor Robert Stavins. It's such a treat to have you with us and we really appreciate all of your wisdom that you shared today. So thank you all for attending. I wanna encourage you to come to the next Wiener conference call. Please check the website and your email for upcoming events either later this spring or in the fall. And we really look forward to seeing you. Thank you so much, goodbye everybody.
- Thank you all, bye-bye.