Climate Change Governance after Bali

It is a long and winding road from Bali to a meaningful climate change regime. The “Bali Roadmap” is singularly indistinct in its details. Because the stakes are extremely high, we are unlikely to see any diplomatic breakthroughs in the negotiations until the very last minute. Consequently, I argue in this piece that the next year or so can be fruitfully used to help build the political support for achieving a genuine breakthrough at that fateful point. Relying on multilateral diplomacy, based on the general model which has been successfully pursued to create international regimes in other substantive domains of global environmental politics, is not likely to be effective for climate change in the short to medium term. I offer some suggestions to improve the prospects for multilateralism through an effort to fortify the foundations for meaningful multilateral diplomacy while we still have time.

The issue of climate change now seems firmly planted on the international agenda. Yet the political will for meaningful action is not yet apparent.

The facts of the matter are now fairly clear. Scientific consensus is expressed in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group (WG) I report, which calls anthropogenic climate change “unequivocal.”¹ Between the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the Stern Review, and now the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC, it is widely agreed that severe consequences will occur if global concentrations of carbon are allowed to exceed 450–550 ppm by 2050. Keeping emissions below this level will entail 50–85 percent reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 from current levels.²

A standard list of policy responses was also endorsed by the IPCC WG III, many of which hearken back to 1970s efficiency framing of the energy policy debates. These responses include: increased energy efficiency, fuel switching, more renewables, nuclear power, conservation, appliance efficiency, emission control, carbon sequestration, aforestation, and international cooperation.³ Some mitigation responses call for changes in production, and others for changes in lifestyle and consumption. Adaptive responses can help the majority of the world’s population, but don’t receive as much policy attention in terms of immediate actions.

Estimates show that these goals are demanding, but attainable. The annual costs are something on the order of 1 percent of current world GDP, and 1 percent of world gross fixed capital consumption.

However, these consensual “goals” are well beyond the less demanding targets of Kyoto, which have not been achieved. Thus focusing on a more demanding global aspiration seems unlikely to succeed. This is not to reject multilateral environmental diplomacy which has worked well in dealing with such issues as stratospheric ozone depletion, European acid rain, and marine pollution in many of the world’s oceans. Climate change is the limiting case, though, for the multilateral diplomacy approach. Climate change is economically and politically more difficult than other issues yet addressed, so it is not surprising that the diplomatic efforts to date have been disappointing.

Why Collective Action on Climate Change is Politically Challenging

The core political reality is that the likely short to medium term victims from climate change are primarily those in the countries of the Global South, which lack meaningful political clout at the international level, whereas those who are asked to make meaningful short to medium term (and possibly highly expensive) policy changes are the more influential countries of the Global North. Thus those with the most political capacity for dealing with climate change are some of the most reluctant to make meaningful short term commitments. While the EU talks a good game, its emissions are still projected to increase. Without the votes in the UN General Assembly of the small Pacific Island states, Egypt and Bangladesh, it seems unlikely that discussions would have ever begun.

While recent public opinion surveys show that climate change is a widely shared concern worldwide, the intensity with which environmental values are expressed still tends to be rather shallow. Few people are willing to make corresponding economic sacrifices, and most people make electoral decisions based on local and economic factors rather than global...