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Why Rules Nations Agreed Would Guide Their Responses to Climate Change Have Not Gotten Traction. The US Has Ignored Adam Smith’s Warning That Some Merchants Will Ruthlessly Scheme Against the Public Interest

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In June 1992, 154 nations agreed to  the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Like all international treaty agreements, before an international treaty is finalized, nations must grapple with numerous treaty principles that are developed through negotiation to deal with issues that will  likely arise in a treaty’s application to policy.  Since the 1992 climate treaty was enacted, opponents of government action on climate change have largely framed their opposition to government climate policies on the basis of scientific uncertainty about GHG caused warming and excessive cost of implementing the treaty.  Key ethical principles that were enacted in the 1992 UNFCCC relevant to the uncertainty and excessive cost arguments included the “precautionary principle,” the “no harm” principle, and under the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement nations base their GHG emissions reduction targets on “equity.” Another rule which has been agreed to by most governments which undermines the excessive cost arguments are government duties to protect human rights.

At the recently concluded Egyptian COP27, UNESCO invited speakers including myself to reflect on ethical issues that will arise in any government’s consideration of geoengineering as a solution to climate change. This program also considered why ethical principles that have been agreed to under international law have not gotten traction in national implementation of the climate treaty.

This entry is a summary of my explanation of why ethical principles which have  been agreed upon to guide national responses to climate action have not gotten traction in national responses to climate charge including the United States.

Because entities whose economic interests are threatened by implementation of a treaty created to protect civil society from threats that cant be adequately dealt with at the local level often resist compliance with ethical/l principles adopted by the international community, UNESCO has expressed interest in getting traction for ethics in international efforts to create and implement treaties to protect civil society from threats that cant be solved at the national level. My conclusions about why ethics did not get traction are largely based upon my experience inside the US federal and Pennsylvania state governments as these governments struggled to adopt policies to reduce GHG emissions.

The consensus scientific view of climate change is usually understood to be that initially articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (About IPCC 2021). IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Program to enable governments to assess the scientific, technical, and socio-economic information relevant to climate change, its potential impacts, and options for adaptation and mitigation (IPCC 2010). The IPCC does not do original research but synthesizes and summarizes the extant peer-reviewed climate science to make recommendations to governments and policymakers about needed climate policies, (IPCC 2010a).

Any government who is a member of WHO or UNEP may be a member of the IPCC with current membership at hundred 195 countries. (About IPCC 2021) Therefore countries who have sometimes opposed international action on climate change on scientific grounds, including the United States and Saudi Arabia, for instance , have the same power as governments that have traditionally strongly supported  national action on climate change such as most of the governments in the European Union and many of the nations most vulnerable to climate impacts such as sea lea level rise or flooding such as small island developing states already being threatened by sea level rise.

This entry explains why ethical principles that all nations who are signatories to the 1992 Climate treaty agreed would guide their response to national climate policies have not gotten traction in national responses to climate change. I have encouraged UNESCO to continue to consult with others on this important question.

In addition to the ethical issues discussed in this paper, a new Routledge Handbook on Applied Climate Ethics which is being edited by myself and Katherine Kintzel Gwiazdon, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Law, has identified 40 ethical issues that arise in climate change policy formation. We believe it is important to help citizens understand that these issues raise ethical questions and therefore can’t be effectively dealt with by only debating  about facts. This is so because if nations take positions on these issues based only on their self-interest they will likely harm others.

Anyone interested in getting a copy of the Handbook, please so indicate in your response to this article.

Adam Smith who convinced civil society of the value of free markets also warned civil society that merchants would sometimes ruthlessly scheme against the public interest. The central purpose of the fossil fuel funded disinformation campaign was to undermine civil society’s faith in mainstream climate science. 

Most Americans including myself until recently did not know that Adam Smith who has been widely celebrated for convincing civil society of the benefits from the invisible hand of free markets also warned that merchants would sometimes ruthlessly scheme against the public interest. See,   Adam Smith and the Conspiracy of the Merchants – Research Portal, King’s College, London (kcl.ac.uk) 

Given that the IPCC’s assessment reports must be unanimously approved by the member countries including countries who have for most of the history of international climate change negotiations have opposed strong international responses to climate change, one can conclude that there has been a broad consensus about the IPCC’s scientific conclusions among nations of the world.

When the founding  nations of 1992 climate treaty agreed to the climate treaty,  anticipating some climate science issues would  remain somewhat uncertain at least initially, all nations unanimously agreed to the inclusion of the “precautionary principle.” This principle not only prohibits nations from using scientific uncertainty as an excuse for failing to comply with their obligations under  the climate treaty, it requires governments to use precautionary science to describe dangerous risks that cant be described quantitatively for practical reasons.

While serving as Program Manager for United Nations organizations in the EPA in 1997 under the Clinton administration, I was asked by the US State Department to co-chair  with a colleague  from the energy department a negotiation taking place in the UN Commission on Sustainable Development which was considering whether nations would agree that the “balance of the evidence suggests a discernible human cause of climate change.” At the conclusion of these negotiations in 1997 every country in the world that was seated in the UN CSD at that time which was approximately 160 countries, agreed with this statement including Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries.  This statement had already been agreed to by all nation’s IPCC scientists in 1995. These countries included nations that had historically sometimes opposed international action on climate change including United States and OPEC countries such as Saudi Arabia. This statement was consistently strengthened over the next 15 years in IPCC meetings so that in 2013 all nations who were members of IPCC agreed with the conclusion that: “Human emitted GHG are extremely-likely, at least a 95% chance, responsible for than half of the Earth’s temperature increase since 1953. Yet   many US politicians at the federal and state level continued to claim that human induced climate change was a hoax.

ipcc_version_confidence (1)

Counterpoints, 2020

 

This chart depicts that IPCC’s conclusions about human causation of climate change increased in confidence in every report over the 25 years with the last report claiming that human cause of climate change was virtually certain, meaning at least a 95% probability.

The reason for the universal international agreement among nations that humans are responsible for the climate change the world is experiencing is that the evidence of human causation is extraordinarily compelling despite the fact that the Earth has experienced warming and cooling cycles during Earth’s history in responses to natural forces. The confidence of human causation is very high because scientists:

(1) can predict how the Earth will warm up differently if a layer of GHGs in the atmosphere warms the Earth compared to how the planet warms if the natural forces that have caused warming in the Earth’s historical heating and cooling cycles, these differences are referred to as “human fingerprints;”

(2) have compared the temperature forcing of human GHGs to forcing of the natural causes of climate variations in “attribution studies,” and have concluded that only the forcing from human sources can explain the recent rise in global temperatures;

(3) have known precisely since the mid-1880s the amount of forcing a molecule of CO2  generates in watts per square meter;

(4) have known that the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere is from fossil fuel combustion because of its chemical isotope.

(5} determined that the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere is directly proportional to the timing and amount of fossil fuel combustion around the world;

(6) tested these lines of evidence rigorously in computer model experiments since the 1960s,

(7) these models have not only accurately predicted future warming, they have been run backward and accurately described past temperature regimes .

The way the upper and lower atmosphere heats up is one of ten lines of evidence referred to as a “ fingerprint” that support human causation of experienced warming. For instance, if a layer of GHGs is causing the observed warming, the lower atmosphere warms as the upper atmosphere cools. If variations in the sun’s energy reaching Earth are causing the warming, the upper and lower atmosphere warm at a similar rate. These and other human fingerprints have been tested and these tests have concluded that atmospheric GHG from human activities are causing the warming.

{Simple Climate 2011)

The global confidence in human causation of warming is derived not only from the fingerprint evidence but also scientific tests designed to compare whether the warming being experienced on Earth can be attributed to those natural forces which are known to have driven historical changes in climate such as regular changes in the sun’s energy reaching the Earth. This kind of study is called an “attribution” study. The above chart compares the warming expected from human activities in red, to the warming expected by natural forcing in blue, to the actual observed warming in black. Thus, this comparison is very strong evidence for attributing recent warming to human caused forcing.

The scientific confidence in the consensus view of climate change is also extraordinary strong because, in 1988, the World Health Organization and the UN Environment Program created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose mission is to synthesize the peer-reviewed climate science and socio-economic literature on climate change and make recommendations to the international community. Approximately every five years, starting in 1990, thousands of scientists, most of whom have been recommended by member governments for their scientific expertise, produce comprehensive three volume IPCC  reports. The IPCC does not do research, it synthesizes the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

IPCC has issued  Reports every year since 1990. The reports are produced in three different working groups. WGI synthesizes the physical climate science literature. WGII synthesizes the science on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, and WGIII focuses on mitigation. This writer was a contributing author to a new IPCC Chapter in Working Group III in the IPCC 5th assessment on ethics and sustainability and for the 6th Assessment Report Working Group II.

In “The Denial Countermovement”  sociologists Riley Dunlap and Araon McCright describe how some fossil fuel companies, corporations that depend on fossil fuel, business organizations, and free-market fundamentalist foundations have successfully prevented government action on climate change by funding the climate change disinformation campaign which they explain sought to undermine the public’s confidence in mainstream climate science (Dunlap, R., & McCright, A., 2015. p. 300).

This website has described the morally reprehensible nature of the climate change disinformation campaign originally documented by sociologists. See, D. Brown, Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity? | Donald Brown | The Guardian. 

Despite the  current almost universal agreement among nations that climate change is human-caused and very dangerous, many US politicians frequently have and continue to argue that human-induced climate change is a hoax. As of March of 2021, there were 139 elected officials in the United States Congress who deny the scientific consensus on human caused climate change. (CAP, 2021). These members received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the coil,, oil, and gas industries.  (CAP, 2021) And so many US federal legislators who have taken a skeptical position on climate change have received money from fossil fuel interests. 

While working for the Clinton administration, i had an opportunity to witness how the fossil fuel industry frustrated the efforts of a US administration that sought to reduce US ghg emissions. An example, while I was working as the US  Program Manager to UN Organizations during the Clinton administration while the US was considering ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, during this time, the Global Climate Coalition, an international lobbying group of businesses who opposed action to reduce GHG emissions was waging an intense national campaign in opposition to the US ratification of the Kyoto Deal.

Also while Kyoto deal was in its final stages Senators Robert Byrd and Chuck Hagel were moving a petition through the US Senate which stated that the US should not sign an agreement that included new US commitments that mandated new US commitments unless developing country parties agreed to new commitments within the same time frame. The Byrd-Hegel passed the US Senate unanimously on in July 1997,  95 to nothing. Although the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Deal in November 1998, the success of the Byrd-Hegel petition made it obvious that any attempt to ratify it would be futile. 

The perceived  alleged unfairness of the Kyoto Protocol is one of many examples of the need to get traction for the accepted definition of “equity,” a term which nations agreed would guide a nation’s determination of its fair share of global emissions reductions needed to achieve global reduction needed to achieve legally required reductions.  On the meaning of “equity”   IPCC said;

There is a basic set of shared ethical premises and precedents that apply to the climate problem that can help put bounds on plausible interpretations of “equity” In the burden sharing context.      Even in the absence of a formal globally agreed burden sharing such are important in expectations of what may be reasonably required of different actors. (IPCC, 2014, ARR5, pg 317)

IPCC went on to say that:

In these equity principles can be understood to comprise four key dimensions: responsibility, capacity, equality and the right to sustainable development (IPCC, 2014, AR5, WG3, CH 4, pg 317)

Notice total emissions in tons alone is not an acceptable criteria for determining equity. The failure to get some traction for the IPCC definition of “equity” has predictably been an invitation to opponents of climate change policies to scheme against the public interest.  For interest, President Trump justified his US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on the basis it was unfair to the US. Yet the Paris Agreement allowed nations to determine what equity required of them.   Also predictably those opposed to climate change policies frequently opposed proposed US targets on the basis that China had not adopted a target of the same  or greater magnitude claiming that China is a larger in terms of tons.  These opponents of US emissions targets appeared to be unaware that the US historical emissions and per capita emissions are greater than China’s and per capita and historical emissions are recognized under the IPCC as valid considerations for determining equity making the US under the concept of equity more responsible for percentage reductions than China,

 

State and subnational governments

In the United States, state governments control a significant amount of the nation’s GHG emissions. The following chart depicts that 10 US States are responsible for half US ghg emissions.

Ecosystem Marketplace

Each level of government controls some activities that produce ghg emissions that other levels don’t control. For instance, US states exercise control over some aspects of land use, some forms of public transportation, building codes, and electric power generation that the federal government doesn’t control. Thus,  there is a need for all levels of government to adopt climate policies if a national government is going to achieve its ghg reduction obligations.

In this author’s experience  most US residents of subnational governments are rarely  aware that emissions from the subnational government are contributing to raising atmospheric GHG concentrations globally and therefore by their failure to reduce the GHG emissions from the subnational government to zero, they are contributing to harms around the world such as those that are causing refugees.

This author served for a few years as lead staff responsibility on climate issues in the Office of Chief Council for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources Pa DER after he returned to PA DER from EPA in June of 1998.

Shortly after I returned the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection I briefed the DEP Secretary that the science of climate change was very strong and the world needed all levels of governments including states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  The secretary, authorized me and a deputy secretary to begin a conversation with fossil fuel interests to get their ideas about how we might proceed. Several weeks later we met with a representative of the coal industry who brought a representative of the coal miners union. As we explained that we would like to begin a conversation with fossil fuel interests on what the state could productively do to reduce PA GHG emissions, we didnt get far into the conversation when the representative of the coal industry said don’t you dare begin this. This is none of your business. This meeting took place on a Thursday and when I returned to the office on Monday I was informed by Deputy Sec. that the state had been notified that the coal industry had activated members of the Pennsylvania Senate Coal Caucus who promised that if DER even began the a process to lower Pa GHG emissions, the PA senators would seek to cut the DEP budget. And so I was told the plan to organize a conference had been postponed indefinitely.

One of my initial assignments for Pa DER on climate change was to monitor a cap and trade program that was under development among ten northeastern states. This state regional climate change program was referred to as the regional greenhouse gas inventory or RGGI. The states began RGGI negotiations in 2003 at the prompting of the New York governor George Pataki. After attending several RGGI negotiations and reporting back to PA DER management, it became clear that there was no appetite at that time in Pennsylvania for a greenhouse gas cap and trade program because it was explained to me by state officials that “Pennsylvania was a coal state.”  Although Pennsylvania finally joined RGGI in April of 2022, it  is still an open question whether regulations that Pennsylvania will need to implement RGGI and achieve GHG emissions reduction goals recently announced by Governor Wolf will survive the regulatory process which provides numerous opportunities for the fossil fuel industry to  block regulations. In addition, the almost 20 year delay in reducing Pa GHG emissions has made the problem worse for reasons that those who don’t understand certain features of climate change  that make it different than other domestic environmental problems wont initially understand. See,

Seven Features of Climate Change That Citizens and the Media Need to Understand To Critically Evaluate a Government’s Response to This Existential Threat and the Arguments of Opponents of Climate Policies.

During hearings in the Pennsylvania legislature over the next decade on potential state legislation that would reduce Pa GHG emissions, hearings were increasingly dominated by testimony of climate skeptics who sometimes spread odious disinformation. See D. Brown 2019, Climate Change Disinformation Comes to Pennsylvania.

Making matters worse because most of hearings were in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives run by a legislator who was a very vocal climate change skeptic the hearings were not a forum for serious considerations of the merits of both sides of the issues in contention. And the legislative hearings that  I attended there was no considerations of the immense harms from Pennsylvania GHG emissions to the rest of the world nor serious counter arguments to the skeptics claims challenging the scientific consensus position articulated by IPCC.   This phenomenon is evidence that the climate change disinformation campaign has worked among a large percentage of US citizens and legislators. One extraordinary example of this is the failure to consider why the consensus view that has been adopted by all IPCC nations in regard to warming caused by human activities has failed to take hold. This is evidence that the odious climate change disinformation campaign achieved some of its goals.

I  ended my presentation to the UNESCO Egyptian event, with the claim that the failure to get traction for the ethical rules that nations agreed would guide the government’s response to climate change was because the fossil fuel disinformation campaign has largely worked. The ruthless scheming of the fossil fuel funded disinformation campaign was the major reason why some governments have been failing to reduce GHG emissions as required by law and ethical principles.

Although this is particularly a problem in the US, research that I and several colleagues from Australia an New Zealand working  with colleagues from around the world examined policies in 14 countries concluded that this is a problem in some other countries and in some of  these countries the disinformation campaign tactics originally  developed in the US were used to weaken the nation’s responses to climate change. (Brown, Taylor, eds, 2015, Ethics and Climate Change, A Study of National Commitments, IUCN))

Because I was on record for strongly critically examining US climate policy through an ethical lens, I was surprised when the G. W. Bush State Department in 2009 invited me to make a presentation on climate ethics to the Scottish legislature as they were debating a national GHG emissions target.

When I arrived at the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh, the debate was already underway with one parliamentarian arguing that Scotland should set a tough target because Scotland owed it to the rest of the world. This was an argument I never heard in the US but an argument which I believed was ethically required and practically needed. It is also required by the “no harm” principle which all countries agreed to in the Preamble of the 1992  Climate Convention. (UNFCCC, 1992, Preamble)

Shortly thereafter Scotland set a target of net zero GHG emissions by 2045.

Donald A. Brown

 

References,

Brown. D., Taylor P. eds.  2015, ,Ethics and Climate Change, A Study of National Commitments, IUCN

(COP 2021 ) Center for American Progress, Climate Deniers in Congress.center for 117

 We welcome comments on this material

 

 

 

Six Things That Citizens Around the World Urgently Need to Know About Climate Change In Light of Several Recent Scientific Reports

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This article identifies and explains six things that most citizens around the world, although particularly those in developed countries, need to understand about climate change in light of the most recent climate change science. These six things are:

  1. The enormous magnitude of GHG emissions reductions needed to prevent catastrophic warming.
  2. The speed of GHG emissions reductions needed to prevent catastrophic warming.
  3. No nation may either legally or morally use national self-interest alone as justification for their failure to fully meet their obligation under the UNFCCC.
  4. No nation may either legally or morally use scientific uncertainty as justification for their failure to fully meet their obligations under the UNFCCC.
  5. Developed countries must legally, morally, and practically more aggressively reduce their GHG emissions than developing countries
  6. Developed countries must legally, morally, and practically help finance mitigation and adaptation programs in poor developing countries.

The need for broad understanding among civil society of these issues follows from several recent scientific reports on climate change. For instance, on October 8, 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a Special Report on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures.  This landmark report, along with several additional recent scientific studies published in the last few months including a paper published by the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences on July 21, 2018, Trajectories of  the Earth System in the Anthropocene by Steffen et.al., and a paper published in mid-August of this year in Nature Communications by Anthony et. al., 21st-Century Modeled Permafrost Carbon Emissions Accelerated by Abrupt Thaw Beneath, lead to the conclusion that the international community is facing an urgent existential crisis that threatens life on Earth. Preventing this catastrophe requires the entire international community at all levels of government (national, state, regional, and local) to engage immediately in an unprecedented effort to rapidly reduce GHG emissions to net zero in the next few decades.

Although the October IPCC report on 1.5 degrees C warming received some significant notice in the US media, the recent US elections on November 6th in which climate change played only a very minor role at best, demonstrates a startling lack of understanding about the enormity and urgency of the climate threat facing the international community. Because of the immense ramp-up of programs and efforts needed to reduce the staggering threat of climate change depends on broad understanding of the scale of the problem facing the human race, and given the apparent ignorance of most citizens about the magnitude and urgency of the climate change crisis and other issues discussed in this paper, concerned citizens need to mount an aggressive educational program to inform civil society about aspects of the climate change threat that appear to be poorly understood. These issues include the following:

1. The Immense Magnitude of GHG Reductions Urgently Needed to Prevent Catastrophic Warming

The IPCC Special Report concludes that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.  This is so because to limit warming to 1.5 C, CO2 emissions would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050 according to the IPCC Special Report. This means if global CO2 emissions have not fallen to net zero levels by 2050, any remaining emissions would need to balanced by removing CO2 from the air.

The Steffen et. al. paper also describes how the positive feedbacks depicted in the following graphic, once triggered could initiate other feedbacks creating a cascade of positive feedbacks, each of which could speed up the warming which is already causing great harm and suffering around the world. The paper claims this mechanism could make life on much of the Earth uninhabitable which could lead to social collapse on the global scale and ultimately to warming increases that human reductions of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions alone would not prevent additional warming until the global system reached a new temperature equilibrium at much higher temperatures than the human race has ever experienced. In other words, cascading positive feedbacks in the climate system could result in humans losing control over reducing disastrous warming.

The Steffen et.al paper also explains how human-induced warming of slightly over 1.0 degrees C is already rapidly approaching levels that may trigger positive climate feedbacks which could greatly accelerate the warming already plaguing the world by causing record floods, deadly heat waves, droughts, increasing tropical diseases, forest fires, more intense and damaging storms, sea level rise, coral bleaching, acidification of oceans, all of which are contributing to increasing the number of refugees which are destabilizing governments around the world.

The Anthony et.al paper also explains that, contrary to common assumptions previously made by many in the international community that positive feedbacks in the climate system that could cause abrupt temperature increases would not likely be triggered if warming could be limited to below 20 C above pre-industrial levels, positive feedbacks could be initiated between current temperatures which have risen slightly above 1.10 C and 20 C. Moreover, the additional warming caused by these feedbacks could initiate other feedbacks creating a cascade of positive feedbacks, each of which could speed up the warming which is already causing great harm and suffering around the world, phenomena which threaten life on earth.

For these reasons, citizens around the world need to understand the urgent need to reduce GHG emissions to net zero as soon as possible.

2. The Speed of GHG Reductions Needed to Prevent Catastrophic Warming.

Every day that nations fail to reduce their GHG emissions to levels required of them to achieve a warming limit goal such as 2 degrees C makes the problem worse because the carbon budgets for the whole world that must constrain global emissions to achieve any warming limit goal shrink as emissions continue. Therefore, the speed that nations reduce their GHG emissions reductions is as important as the magnitude of the reductions identified by any national GHG reduction commitment. For this reason, any national commitment on climate change should not only identify the amount of GHG emissions that will be reduced by a certain date, but also the reduction pathway by which these reductions will be achieved.

The following illustration depicts two different GHG reduction pathways for reaching zero emissions by 2050. Although the curve on the top achieves zero GHG emissions at the same time as the curve on the bottom, total emissions during the period are much greater following the emissions reductions pathway under the top curve compared to total emissions under the bottom curve because the lower curve pathway more quickly reduces emissions. Citizens need to understand that waiting to reduce GHG emissions makes the problem worse because waiting consumes more of any shrinking carbon budget that must constrain global emissions to achieve any warming limit goal.

3. No Nation may either Legally or Morally use National Self-interest Alone as Justification for Their Failure to Fully Meet Their Obligations under the UNFCCC.

Because GHG emissions from every country mix rapidly in the atmosphere, all nations’ emissions are contributing to rising atmospheric GHG concentrations thus harming people and ecological systems on which life depends all over the world. The above illustration depicts that the atmosphere is analogous to a bathtub in that it has limited volume and that all nations emitting GHGs are raising atmospheric concentration of GHGs to its current concentration of approximately 407 ppm CO2 (the second line from the bottom in the above bathtub) which level is already causing enormous harm in many vulnerable countries while threatening the entire world if the atmospheric GHG concentration is raised to levels which trip positive feedbacks discussed above (represented by the upper line in the above bathtub). Thus high-emitting countries such as the US may not formulate their climate change policies on the basis of costs and benefits to itself alone. Particularly those nations that are emitting high levels of GHGs must acknowledge and respond to the devastating climate change harms they are already contributing to in other countries and particularly harms to poor people and nations that are most vulnerable to climate change impacts.  Thus in the United States, for instance, the Trump administration’s justification for withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement on the basis of “putting US interests first ” is ethically indefensible and tragic because of the damage the Trump climate change policy will cause outside the United States.

The following illustration depicts nations emitting high levels of GHG in red in the top half of the illustration while those countries most vulnerable to climate change impacts are indicated in red in the bottom half of the illustration.

For this reason, as a matter of law, given that nations under the UNFCCC agreed to stabilize GHG concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. (UNFCCC, Art. 2), a nation may not fail to reduce its GHG emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions based on the cost to it because it has ethical and legal duties to other nations not to harm them.

4.  Scientific Uncertainty is Not a Legally or Morally Defensible Justification for Not Adopting Aggressive Climate Change Policy Responses.

Although opponents of climate change policies have justified their opposition on the basis of scientific uncertainty, and despite the fact that the most prestigious scientific organizations have expressly stated their conclusions about the enormous threat of climate change with increasingly higher levels of scientific probability for over 40 years, scientific uncertainty is not a justifiable response for any nation’s unwillingness to adopt climate change policies as a matter of law or morally.

Under international law, including the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC,  Art. 3.3) which states in relevant part “where there  are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty may not be used as a reason for postponing such measures,” and the “no harm principle”, a principle of customary international law recognized in the Preamble to the UNFCCC, nations may not legally use scientific uncertainty as an excuse for failing to take action to prevent dangerous climate change.

Also as we explained previously in 2008 in The Ethical Duty to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Face of Scientific Uncertainty, nations also have had a strong moral responsibility to take action to reduce the threat of climate change once it was scientifically understood that GHG emissions could cause serious harms even if the harms had not been proven with high degrees of scientific certainty.

Given, that numerous reputable scientific organizations beginning in the late 1970s,  including the US National Academies of Sciences, (See Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy) and five reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change beginning in 1990 (See IPCC report timeline)  have concluded with increasing levels of certainty that human activities are dangerously threatening people and ecological systems on which life depends, nations have been on strong notice for over four decades that human activities responsible for GHG emissions are dangerous to the human community, thus nations have been on notice about the dangers of climate change for over 40 years and therefore may not legally or morally use scientific uncertainty as an excuse for failing to adopt climate change policies that will reduce their GHG emissions to levels required of them to prevent dangerous climate change.

5. High Emitting Developed Countries, Including the United States, Must Reduce GHG Emissions More Aggressively than Other Countries as a Matter of Law and Practically to Prevent Dangerous Climate Change.

Hiigh-emitting nations have a legal duty under the UNFCCC to reduce their GHG emissions faster than lower emitting nations because they agreed to:

[P]rotect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof. (UNFCCC, 1992, Art 3.1)

These principles were re-committed to in the Paris Agreement , Art 2.2 which  provides that:

This Agreement will be implemented to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances.

Thus under law, hiigh emitting nations, such as the US, have a legal duty under the concept of “equity” to reduce its GHG emissions more rapidly than most other nations.  Although there is reasonable disagreement among nations about what “equity” requires of them,  formulate its ghg emissions reduction target on the basis of equity is not only required by its legal obligations under the UNFCCC, practically the US and other high emitting nations must reduce their GHG emissions by much greater amounts and faster than poor developing nations because if they don’t the poorer nations will have to reduce their GHG emissions almost immediately to near zero CO2 so that global emissions don’t exceed the carbon budget available to prevent a warming limit such as 2 degrees C from being exceeded,

  • There is a basic set of shared ethical principles and precedents that apply to the climate problem…[and] such principles… can put bounds on the plausible interpretation of equity in the burden sharing context…[and] are important in establishing what may be reasonably required of different actors.  (IPCC, 2014, AR5, WG III, Ch. 4, pg .317 )

The IPCC went on to say:

  •  these equity principles can be understood to comprise four key dimensions: responsibility, capacity, equality and the right to sustainable development (IPCC, , AR5, WG III, Ch 4, p. 318).

As a matter of law, therefore, high-emitting countries such as the United States must reduce its GHG emissions to safe levels based on equity at faster levels than other countries as any reasonable interpretation of equity would require the US to make much larger and more rapid GHG reductions than almost all other nations given that the United States (under the concept of responsibility) emitted 5,011,687 metric kilotons (kt) of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2016, second only to China’s 10,432,741 kt CO2. (Netherlands Environmental Agency), also under the concept of responsibility the United States has emitted a greater amount of cumulative CO2 emissions, that is 29.3% of global CO2 emissions between 1850 and 2002, while China emitted 7.6% during the same period, (WRI, Cumulative Emissions) making the US much more responsible for raising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to the current level of approximately 406 ppm than any country.  Also, under the concept of equality given the US is responsible for 15.56 metric tons per capita CO2 emissions which is more than twice as much as China’s 7.45 metric tons per capita in 2016 (World Bank), as a matter of equity the US must reduce its GHG emissions much more rapidly and steeply than almost all countries.

The following illustration demonstrates why high-emitting nations must also practically reduce emissions more aggressively than other nations because it can be seen that if the high emitting nations such as China, the EU, and USA, depicted near the bottom of the illustration, don’t reduce GHG emissions muchfaster than the rest of the world, and if the international community is going to be restrained by the emissions reduction pathway needed to achieve a warming limit goal, such as the 2 degee C pathway depicted in the illustration, then there is quickly nothing left for the rest of the world. Therefore, high-emitting nations must more aggressively reduce their emissions than lower emitting nations not only as a matter of law but also to retain any hope for the international community to achieve warming limit goals agreed to in the Paris Agreement of as close as possible to 1.5 degrees C but no greater than 2 degrees C.

6. Developed Nations Have a Legal and Moral Duty to Provide Financial Resources to Assist Developing Nartions with both Mitigation and Adaptation Programs and this Financial Assistance is also Practically Indespensible to Prevent Climate-induced Harms in all Countries.

Under the UNFCCC, developed country Parties agreed to provide financial resources to assist developing country Parties in implementing the objectives of the Convention (UNFCCC, Article 4, §3). The Paris Agreement also provides that the developed countries shall provide financial resources to assist developing country Parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation in continuation of their existing obligations under the Convention. (Paris Agreement, Art, 9.1)

Financial support of developing nation’s mitigation obligations under the UNFCCC  mitigations is not only legally required under the UNFCCC but also practically important because large-scale investments are required to significantly reduce emissions and dangerous climate change will not likely be avoided unless developing nations reduce their GHG emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions. Financial support for developing nations by developed nations is also both legally and ethically required to meet the adaptation needs of developing countries, as significant financial resources are needed by many vulnerable countries to adapt to the adverse climate change.

Climate impacts, such as sea-level rise and more frequent droughts and floods, are already having devastating effects on communities and individuals in developing countries. These impacts on developing countries are already affecting developed nations because, for instance, between 2008 and 2011, approximately 87 million people were displaced due to extreme weather events which is causing a mass migration of refugees which is destabilizing many developed nations, particularly in Europe.(Climate Change in Developing Countries, Government of Canada)  According to the World Health Organization, climate change is expected to contribute to approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress.(World Health Organization, Climate and Health) .

Developing countries are the most impacted by climate change. This is due to many factors, including the economic importance of climate-sensitive sectors for these countries (e.g. agriculture) and the limited financial and human capacity to respond to the impacts of climate change. (Climate Change in Developing Countries, Government of Canada). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that by 2030, up to 122 million more people could be forced into extreme poverty due to the effects of climate change—many of them women. (Conflicts Fueled by Climate Change, The Guardian.)

Because climate change is already destabilizing developed countries due to refugees who are fleeing vulnerable areas of poor developing nations that have become inhabitable due to climate change-induced droughts, floods, loss of drinking water, and rising seas, if developed nations do not help finance climate change adaptation programs in developing countries, they will experience growing conflict and stress caused by vulnerable people and refugees in developing countries who are both creating conflicts in their countries and in developed countries they have or are seeking to enter. . 

Image result for climate change refugees

The following illustration depicts the number of  refugees who are fleeing or who have fled climate change.

Image result for climate change refugees

Conflicts Fueled by Climate Change, The Guardian.

For this reason, developed country financing assistance for emissions reduction and adaptation programs in developing countries is not only legally required but practically necessary to reduce climate change-induced problems and conflicts in developed countries.

By;

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence and Professor

Widener University Commonwealth Law School

dabrown57@gmail.com

 

What Americans Urgently Need to Understand About Climate Change In Light of an Alarming New Report Published By US Academy of Sciences

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On July 31, 2018, a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which should create a shiver of fear in all humans everywhere. The paper, Trajectories in the Earth System in the Anthropocene by Steffen et..al., explains how human-induced warming is rapidly approaching levels that may trigger positive climate feedbacks which could greatly accelerate the warming already plaguing the world by causing record floods, deadly heat waves and droughts, increasing tropical diseases, forest fires, more intense and damaging storms, sea level rise, coral bleaching, acidification of oceans, all of which are contributing to increasing the number of refugees which are destabilizing governments around the world.

The Steffen et. al. paper also describes how the positive feedbacks depicted in the following graphic, once triggered could initiate other feedbacks creating a cascade of positive feedbacks, each of which could speed up the warming which is already causing great harm and suffering around the world. The paper claims this mechanism could make life on much of the Earth uninhabitable which could lead to social collapse on the global scale and ultimately to warming increases that human reductions of greenhouse gases (ghg) emissions alone would not prevent until the global system reached a new temperature equilibrium at much higher temperatures than the human race has ever experienced. In other words, cascading positive feedbacks in the climate system could result in humans losing control over reducing disastrous warming.

Image result for global map of tipping cascades

Steffen et. al,, supra pg. 4.

If this is not scary enough, the Steffen et. al. paper concluded some of these feedbacks could be triggered between 1 degree C to 3 degrees C, suggesting that the “risk of tipping cascades could be significant at a 2 degree C rise (Steffen at al p.7), the upper warming limit goal of the Paris Agreement which President Trump has announced the United States will withdraw from.

Given that even if temperature increases already baked into the system don’t trigger positive feedbacks until global temperatures rise by 2 degrees C and given the enormous challenge facing the world to achieve the 2 degrees C warming limit goal agreed to by the international community in Paris in 2015 requires the international community to achieve net zero CO2 emissions by 2070 (UNEP, Emissions Gap, 2016), the international community needs to immediately join forces to achieve extraordinarily ambitious international cooperation almost immediately to achieve the 2 degree C warming limit goal. However, given that the 2 degree C warming limit goal agreed to in Paris was selected because it was believed that if warming increases could be limited to 2 degrees C, triggering dangerous climate system positive feedbacks was unlikely, the conclusions of the Steffen et al paper that positive feedbacks could be triggered below 2 degrees C additional warming must be interpreted as a justification for a call for an unprecedented urgent global cooperative effort to reduce carbon emissions and increase carbon sinks as rapidly as humanly possible.

Given that human-induced climate change is now widely understood to be an existential threat to life on Earth unless all nations rapidly reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) to net zero as fast as possible, Americans urgently need to understand certain features of the problem which have been infrequently mentioned in the US national climate change conversation including the following: 

  • There is growing evidence that even if global ghg emissions could be reduced to near zero rapidly, there is enough carbon already in the atmosphere that limiting warming to the then 2 degrees C warming limit goal by the end of this Century has only a 5% chance (Mooney, 2017).
  • Every day that nations fail to reduce their GHG emissions to levels required of them to achieve a warming limit goal such as 2 degrees C makes the problem worse because budgets available for the whole world that must constrain global emissions to achieve any warming limit goal shrink as emissions continue. Therefore, the speed that nations reduce their GHG emissions reductions is as important as the magnitude of reductions identified by any national GHG reduction commitment. For this reason, any national commitment on climate change should not only identify the amount of ghg emissions that will be reduced by a certain date, but the reduction pathway by which these reductions will be achieved,
  • For reasons stated in the Seffen et.al. paper, climate change is an existential threat to life on Earth that requires the international community to rapidly take extraordinarily aggressive coordinated steps not only sufficient to prevent global temperatures from rising no than more than 2 degrees C, the upper warming limit agreed to by the international community in the 2015 Paris Agreement, but to minimize any additional warming as quickly as possible,
  • Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which the US ratified in 1992, the US has a legal duty under the concept of “equity” to reduce its GHG emissions more rapidly than most other nations, and although there is reasonable disagreement among nations about what “equity” requires of them, any reasonable interpretation of equity would require the US to make much larger and more rapid GHG reductions than almost all other nations given that the United States emitted 5,011,687 metric kilo tons (kt) of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2016, second only to China’s 10,432,741 kt CO2. (Netherlands Environmental Agency). The US also has an equitable duty to more aggressively reduce its emissions than most other countries because it has emitted a greater amount of cumulative CO2 emissions, that is 29.3% of global CO2 emissions between 1850 and 2002, while China emitted 7.6% during the same period, (WRI, Cumulative Emissions) making the US much more responsible for raising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to the current level of 406 ppm than any country.  Also given the US is responsible for 15.56 metric tons per capita CO2 emissions which is more than twice as much as China’s 7.45 metric tons per capita in 2016 (World Bank), as a matter of equity the US must reduce its GHG emissions much more rapidly and steeply than almost all countries,
  • The US duty to formulate its ghg emissions reduction target on the basis of equity is not only required by its legal obligations under the UNFCCC, practically the US and other high emitting nations must reduce their GHG emissions by much greater amounts and faster than poor developing nations because if they don’t the poorer nations will have to reduce their GHG emissions almost immediately to near zero CO2 so that global emissions don’t exceed the carbon budget available to prevent a warming limit such as 2 degrees C from being exceeded,
  • Any US policy response to climate change such as a carbon tax must be structured to reduce US ghg emissions to levels and speeds required of the US to achieve its responsibilities to the rest of the world to prevent dangerous climate change. Thus, if the US were to pass a carbon tax, the imposition of a tax must either reduce US GHG emissions to the level and the speed required of it by its obligations or be supplemented by other policy responses such as, for instance, mandatory conversions of electric power generation from fossil fuel combustion to renewable energy by a date certain or mandatory requirements for electric vehicles,
  • Because GHG emissions from every country mix rapidly in the atmosphere, all nations emissions are contributing to rising atmospheric GHG concentrations thus harming people and ecological systems on which life depends all over the world. Thus, the US may not formulate its climate change policies only on the basis of costs and benefits to itself alone, it must acknowledge and respond to the devastating climate change harms the United States is already contributing to that are being experienced around the world and particularly by poor people and nations that are most vulnerable to climate change impacts. For this reason, the Trump administration’s justification for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on the basis of “putting US interests first” is deeply morally indefensible and tragic because of the damage it will likely cause to the world,
  • Because of the rapid speed required of the US to reduce its ghg emissions to net zero carbon emissions, the US urgently needs to put ghg emissions reductions on the equivalent of a wartime footing by not only adopting policy responses that can achieve ghg emission reduction goals required of it, but also by investing in research and development in new technologies that can facilitate and achieve the its ghg emission reduction obligations and increase carbon sinks that could reduce the rise in atmospheric ghg concentrations,
  • The United States needs to develop a strategy to achieve these objectives in the next two years and begin implementing the strategy immediately as quickly as possible.

By:

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence and Professor

Widener University Commonwealth Law School

dabrown57@gmail.com

 

 

 

New Paper: Step By Step Procedures that Nations Should Follow to Determine, Explain, and Evaluate their GHG Reduction Commitments Under the Paris Agreement

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A.Urgent Need For Greater Understanding Among Nations and Civil Society of How Nations Should Formulate and ExplainTheir NDCs under the Paris Agreement.

Research conducted by Widener University Commonwealth Law School and the University of Auckland concluded not surprisingly that when 24 governments identified greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets they ignored their legal duties to set a national target on the basis of preventing dangerous anthropogenic climate change, equity, and common but differentiated responsibilities in light of national circumstances under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. In all cases, this research concluded that nations inappropriately took national economic self-interest into account in establishing their GHG reduction target. (Nationclimatejustice.org) while not clearly explaining how their GHG reduction targets were formulated on the basis of what was required of nations under law. This conclusion was not surprising to the researchers. But what was very surprising was that the vast majority of NGOs in these countries appeared not to understand how a nation should quantitatively formulate a target in light of its nondiscretionary and discretionary duties under the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. Without an understanding of how a nation should formulate and explain its GHG emissions reduction target, nations and civil society will not be able to effectively evaluate a nation’s NDC.

It is this writer’s view that the widespread ignorance around the world about how a nation should set a GHG target is attributable to the fact that although nations have been setting GHG targets for many years, only recently have they had to expressly respond to the Paris Agreement’s warming limit goals and to in so doing take the equity requirements of the Paris Agreement seriously while at the same time being clear and transparent in how they responded to there  obligations under the Paris Agreement. Up until recently, a nation could set a GHG target without considering how much of a shrinking carbon budget that remains to achieve a warming limit goal the nation was going to allocate to itself on the basis of equity. Very few nations, if any, have expressly formulated their national GHG reduction targets on the basis of a carbon budget that remained to achieve a warming limit goal.

Because the Paris Agreement’s success depends on nations being clear and transparent in explaining how they formulated their Nationally Determined Contributions  (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, yet there is widespread ignorance around the world on how nations should formulate their NDCs to comply with their obligations under the Paris deal, there is an urgent need to help nations and civil society around the world understand how a nation should formulate its NDC to comply with their obligations under the Paris Agreement.

B. A New Paper Explains How Nations Should Formulate and Justify their NDCs under Paris Agreement

To meet this need, a new paper describes 4 steps in detail that all governments should follow to comply with their legal obligations under the Paris Agreement as well as the information that nations should  include with their NDCs about how they formulated their NDCs, which information is necessary to comply with the clarity and transparency  requirements of the Paris Agreement.

The paper is: A Four-Step Process for Formulating and Evaluating Legal Commitments Under the Paris Agreement. Donald A Brown, Hugh Breakey, Peter Burdon, Brendan Mackey, Prue Taylor, Carbon & Climate Law Review, Vol 12, (2018) Issue 2, Pags 98 – 108, https://doi.org/10.21552/cclr/2018/2/

The four steps are:

(1) Select a global warming limit to be achieved by the GHG emissions reduction target. The description of this step also explains the need of nations to explain why it chose a warming limit goal greater than the 1.5 degree C goal but no less than 2.0 degree warming limit goal.

(2) Identify a global carbon budget consistent with achieving the global warming limit at an acceptable probability. The paper includes a description of how a nation should identify a carbon budget to achieve a warming limit goal and other considerations relevant to identifying a carbon budget on which the GHG reduction target will be based.

(3) Determine the national fair share of the global carbon budget based upon equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. This section of the paper does not resolve all controversies about how to interpret equity under the Paris Agreement, although it does identify principles identified by IPCC that nations should follow in applying equity to guide their GHG reduction target and information that nations should include with their NDC that explains how they applied discretion in determining what equity requires of the nation.

(4) Specify the annual rate of national GHG emissions Reductions on the pathway to net zero emissions.This section explains that because different amounts of shrinking carbon budgets will be consumed by how long it takes a nation to achieve a quantitative GHG emissions reduction amount, nations need to explain the nation’s reduction pathway over time to determine how much of a global budget available for the whole world the nation is allocating to itself.

The paper also explains why expressly following these steps is necessary to ensure that a nation’s NDC is sufficiently transparent to allow the Paris Agreement’s “stocktake” and “transparency mechanism” processes achieve their goal of increasing national ambition if necessary to achive the Paris Agreement’s warming limit goals.

In addition to describing the steps nations should follow in formulating their NDC, the paper includes a chart which summarizes information that should be supplied with their NDC when it transmits the NDC to UNFCCC, information necessary to make the Paris Agreement’s transparency requirementts work and information necessary to evaluate the adequacy of the NDC under the Paris Agreement.

By: 

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence and Professor

Sustainability Ethics and Law

Widener University Commonwealth Law School

dabrown57@gmail.com