According to a near-unanimous consensus of scientists,
the world is very close to a tipping point on atmospheric
carbon: we must drastically curtail our carbon burning or
climate hell will soon break loose. This means every
nation must install economy-wide valves for reducing
their carbon use. I described earlier how America might
do this using a carbon, or sky trust. Since we
can’t halt global warming by ourselves, however,
the necessary complement to such an American trust is a
global trust.
A global carbon trust would require national governments
to recognize that, just as they can, and should, delegate
internal trusteeship duties to trusts, so should they
delegate global trusteeship duties. The alternative,
I’d argue, is paralysis in the face of clear and
present danger.
Consider the long and tortuous climate negotiations
that began in the early 1990s. They produced, first, a
toothless pledge by all nations — the Rio
Convention of 1992 — to voluntarily reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions to the 1990 level by 2010. Five
years later, they produced a slightly toothier protocol
in Kyoto, which took another five years to ratify and
translate into operational rules. An equally prolonged
negotiation now looms for the successor to Kyoto, which
expires in 2012.
No doubt these negotiations could move faster if the
current U.S. administration weren’t so obstinately
opposed to them. But the deeper problem is that nearly
two hundred sovereign nations are trying to negotiate a
deal that satisfies everyone. The process is inherently
cumbersome, and not surprisingly, the results fall far
short of what scientists say is necessary. Perhaps,
therefore, it’s time to delegate. I can imagine a
global atmosphere trust working something like this. It
would be governed by a smallish board of trustees and a
general membership consisting of all signatory nations.
The general membership would appoint the trustees. There
might be, as in the U.N. Security Council, a number of
seats reserved for “great powers” (in this
case, large emitters) and another number set aside for
regions. However, once trustees are appointed, their
loyalty would shift from individual nations or regions to
future generations. This is critical.
The trustees would decide, based on peer-reviewed
scientific evidence, where to set a global cap on carbon
emissions. Each year, they’d issue tradeable carbon
emission permits up to that year’s limit. A portion
of these permits (initially, a majority) would be
distributed at no cost to participating nations based on
a pre-agreed formula. The remainder would be auctioned by
the trust, with the revenue used to remediate damage
caused by climate change and aid the inevitable victims.
The trust would determine on a yearly basis how many
permits were needed for these purposes, and how the
remediation funds would be spent.
The trustees would make decisions by majority vote,
with no vetoes. Like a court, they’d explain their
decisions in writing, showing exactly how they protect
future generations. The general membership could override
a trustee decision by, say, a two-thirds majority. In
this way, signatory nations could put short-term
interests over long-term ones, but they’d have to
do so explicitly, and implicitly admit to stealing or
borrowing from future generations.
The knotty question is, What formula should be used to
distribute carbon emission permits among nations? The key
to crafting such a formula, given the disparate interests
of so many nations, is to ground it on some universal
principle of equity. The Kyoto Protocol didn’t do
this; it was a hodgepodge of deals and escape hatches
aimed at pleasing the United States, which in the end
didn’t ratify anyway. The next international
regime, however, must appeal to the poor and the
up-and-coming, as well as to the United States and other
developed countries. Without an organizing principle
based on equity, it’s hard to see how any deal can
be reached.
Fortunately, an equitable organizing principle has
been advanced: it’s known as contract and converge.
Here’s how it would work.
First, an overall reduction schedule would be agreed
to; this is the contract part of the equation. Then,
rights to the global atmospheric commons would be divided
among nations in proportion to their populations —
in other words, one person, one share.
However, absolute proportionality wouldn’t kick
in for a decade or two, during which time the allocation
formula would converge toward proportionality. The rate
of convergence would be a topic for negotiation; the goal
of per capita equity would be accepted at the outset.
Before and after convergence, poor and populous
countries with more permits than emissions could sell
their excess permits to rich and relatively
underpopulated countries that are short on them. In this
way, nations could pollute at different levels, with
overusers of the atmosphere paying underusers for the
privilege. Americans could, in other words, extend our
present level of carbon use for another decade or so, but
we’d have to pay poor countries to do so.
Would a global atmospheric trust be too great a
surrender of national sovereignty? I think not.
We’re not talking about world government here.
We’re talking about a trust to manage a specific
worldwide commons. The one and only job of that trust
would be to set and enforce limits on certain emissions
into that commons. Some loss of sovereignty is involved,
but less than we’ve already yielded to the World
Trade Organization. Compared to the benefit we and all
nations would gain — a stabilized climate —
our loss of sovereignty would be small potatoes.
If a global atmosphere trust could be established, it
would be a watershed twenty-first-century event.
Geopolitically, it could lay the foundation for a
harmonious century, much as the Versailles Treaty paved
the way for a disharmonious one in the twentieth. It
would also help the world deal gracefully with the
decline in global oil production that experts say is
imminent.
Economically, a global atmosphere trust would spur
some important changes. Corporations the world over would
immediately pour money into energy efficiency and
noncarbon energy infrastructure. There’d be a rush
to deploy new technologies. Economies — including
ours — would boom, not despite higher carbon
prices, but because of them.
Why would this happen? The simplest reason is that a
global atmosphere trust would remove an enormous cloud of
uncertainty. Businesses would see the future of carbon
burning, and be more confident that a price shock —
more damaging than a gradual rise — wouldn’t
derail their plans. Such a trust would also remove a
major source of international tension — the
scramble for declining oil supplies — that could
easily lead to war. In addition, the flow of money to
poor countries (from sales of emission permits to rich
countries) would lift their economies and wages, help
U.S. exports and slow U.S. job loss. All these things
would ensure that while high-carbon activity declines,
low-carbon activity rises at a comparable rate.
But growth in aggregate economic activity isn’t
the only benefit we’d see; qualitative improvements
would also occur. Thus, as long-distance transport costs
rose, manufacturers would shift from global to local
production. Farmers would return to practices they used
before cheap petrochemicals became available.
They’d grow more food organically and sell more
through farmers’ markets and urban buying clubs,
cutting out middlemen and keeping more of their
products’ value. For nonperishables, consumers
would shop more on the Internet and less at
drive-and-haul malls. Thanks to eBay, Craigslist, and
similar services, they’d also buy more secondhand
goods and dump fewer into landfills. More workers would
ride bikes, jitneys, and trains, and work online from
home. Cities would favor footpower, suburbs would
reorganize around transit hubs, and new forms of
co-housing would spread. All these changes would be
profitable and even exciting. And they’d proceed
with relative smoothness if we placed the global
atmosphere in trust.
On the other hand, if we leave our atmosphere as an
unmanaged waste dump, our glorious industrial party will
abruptly end, brought to its knees by oil price shocks,
climate disasters, or a monetary panic. After that, no
one can know what will happen. That’s the stark
choice we face. ...
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