53 Climate Politics
Hansen
Phasedown of emissions cannot restore Earth’s energy balance within less than several decades, which is too slow to prevent grievous escalation of climate impacts and probably too slow to avoid locking in loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet and sea level rise of several meters.
Hansen (2023) PipelinePaper230705 (pdf)
53.1 Asset Revaluation - Existential Politics
Colgan Abstract
Whereas scholars have typically modeled climate change as a global col- lective action challenge, we offer a dynamic theory of climate politics based on the present and future revaluation of assets. Climate politics can be understood as a contest between owners of assets that accelerate climate change, such as fossil fuel plants, and owners of assets vulnerable to climate change, such as coastal property. To date, obstruction by “climate-forcing” asset holders has been a large barrier to effect- ive climate policy. But as climate change and decarbonization policies proceed, holders of both climate-forcing and “climate-vulnerable” assets stand to lose some or even all of their assets’ value over time, and with them, the basis of their political power. This dynamic contest between opposing interests is likely to intensify in many sites of polit- ical contestation, from the subnational to transnational levels. As it does so, climate politics will become increasingly existential, potentially reshaping political alignments within and across countries. Such shifts may further undermine the Liberal International Order (LIO); as countries develop pro-climate policies at different speeds and magni- tudes, they will have incentives to diverge from existing arrangements over trade and economic integration.
Colgan memo
For the last three decades, international relations (IR) theory has presented the politics of climate change as a collective action problem, relying on models of strategic interaction to explain the presence or absence of international cooper- ation. We suggest a different approach. We offer a dynamic theory of climate change politics based on the present and future revaluation of assets. We use “assets” as a broad category that includes all inputs to production and sources of material wealth: capital, labor, and natural endowments. We argue that climate change, along with decarbonization policies to mitigate it, will trigger a profound and uneven process of economic revaluation of these assets. That revaluation will ultimately render certain assets valueless, creating a stark distributional struggle, which we term “existential politics.” Our aim is to develop a parsimonious political-economic model of the role of asset revaluation on climate politics. It serves as a materialist conceptual scaffolding upon which scholars can add ideational variables to explain climate politics.
The traditional thinking over- emphasizes free riding by viewing climate change as a static collective action problem among states. It underemphasizes distributional struggles, particularly those in domestic politics.
The politics of asset revaluation are central to understanding the interests and contestation around climate change.
CFA (Climate Forcing Assets) - CVA (Climate Vulnerable Assets)
We distinguish between two ideal-typical groups: holders of climate-forcing assets (CFAs) (for example, oil fields, beef farms) and holders of climate-vulnerable assets (CVAs) (for example, coastal property, fisheries). As climate change proceeds, and steps to address it unfold, they alter the value of these assets, and thus, over time, alter the balance of political power between their holders.
LIO Liberal International Order
Our theory of asset revaluation highlights a particular threat to the Liberal International Order (LIO) not commonly explored in the IR literature. The variation in climate and industrial policies across nations will affect the costs of exports and imports, incentivizing nations to place new restrictions on trade or other economic linkages. This threat is distinct from those commonly associated with climate change, such as increased risk of conflict, mass migration, or economic crises
We view current plans to introduce carbon border adjustment mechanisms, which would apply tariffs to certain goods from countries that do not have pro-climate pol- icies, as an early indicator of the tensions that we expect to grow between climate pol- itics and the LIO.
Our argument also challenges the implicit normative assumption underpinning much of this special issue: that the LIO as it has existed should be preserved.
The focus on climate multilateralism from the 1992 Rio Summit to the 2015 Paris Agreement has emphasized the collective action problem of mitigation. According to this view, free riding is the key political challenge. This account overlooks critical features of the problem. Many states are defying the static logic of collective action, and instead are choosing to enact pro-climate policies such as carbon pricing or regulations that restrict emissions.
The key driver of climate politics is domestic politics: politicians are responding to the demands of their constituents, many of whom want emissions reductions regardless of what other countries are doing.
We focus on how policy choices iteratively affect the size of economic interests that underpin domestic politics.
Climate change is a distributional problem unprecedented in scale, not only among states, but also within them.
Conventional bargaining models are useful in understanding the role of such obstruc- tionists, but the solutions they suggest have limited application to climate. Bargaining theory offers little insight on the conditions under which actors’ preferences change, and how that affects political outcomes.
Unlike international trade, for example, reciprocity is not a key feature of a potential climate bargain because climate benefits accrue globally, not dyadically.
The infeasibility of intergenerational distribution: conventional bargaining theory has been less successful when applied to climate change.
The empirical results reflect these difficulties: whereas inter- national trade negotiators have overcome various bargaining problems, climate change negotiators have not had similar success.
Existential Politics
Existential politics often means that there is a contest over whose way of life gets to survive. Should we have Miami Beach and the Marshall Islands, or should we have coal miners, ExxonMobil, and Chevron?
This extreme form of distributional politics exists in other areas of international political economy (for example, a trade agree- ment or technological change can wipe out an uncompetitive industry), but we suggest that the scale of climate change will make existential politics the increasingly dominant lens through which to understand climate politics.
As distributional conflicts expand and intensify, climate politics will become existential. Different interests will not only fight over who gets what but also over whose way of life survives.
A greater number of actors will be directly, and sometimes gravely, affected by climate change. In turn, the gravity of these effects shifts the policy discussion from extract- ing concessions—an issue of distribution—to ensuring survival. The politics of mitigation thus seems primed to become increasingly existential.
Colgan (2020) Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change (pdf)
53.2 Climate Clubs
Falkner Abstract
The idea of a stringent climate club, once the reserve of academic debates, is quickly gaining ground in international policy circles. This reflects dissatisfaction with the multilateral UNFCCC process, but also hope that a minilateral club could increase climate policy ambition, reinvigorate the Paris Agreement process, and make future emissions pledges stick. With the Biden Presidency renewing the US commitment toward climate action and the European Green Deal proposal for carbon border tariffs, some are advocating the creation of a transatlantic climate club. What could a club approach hope to achieve, and what do we know about its political feasibility and desirability? In this article, we seek conceptual clarification by establishing a typology of different club models; we inject a greater sense of political realism into current debates on the feasibility of these models; and we consider their legitimacy in the context of international climate cooperation.
Key policy insights
- Knowledge gaps and confusion regarding the nature of climate clubs hold back debates about what intergovernmental clubs can contribute to international climate policy.
- Club design matters: existing club models vary in terms of the proposed size, purpose, operational principles, legal strength, and relationship to the UNFCCC.
- Clubs focused on normative commitments face low barriers to establishment. They lack legal strength but can help raise policy ambition.
- Clubs aimed at negotiating targets and measures can increase bargaining efficiency, but struggle to deal with equity and distributional conflicts.
- Clubs seeking to change incentives via club benefits and sanctions face the highest hurdles to implementation. Their promise to tackle free-riding remains untested and difficult to achieve.
- Climate clubs face an international legitimacy deficit. Any club proposal needs to consider how to add to, and not distract from, the multilateral climate regime.
Falkner Memo
We propose three ideal types of climate clubs (for similar categorizations: (a) normative clubs, consisting of countries that make a normative commitment to certain climate policy objectives; (b) bargaining clubs, which facilitate more effective negotiation of climate mitigation targets, measures and rules among significant powers; and (c) transformational clubs, with legally binding membership rules, tangible club benefits and sanctioning mechanisms that seek to change the incentive structure of a select group of members.
Clubs can be small or large in size. Due to more or less demanding entry rules, they would tend to start out as small minilateral forums, but can grow into larger multilateral bodies, as is the case with the GATT/WTO trade regime. In the climate field, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) serves as the central multilateral regime with near-universal membership, most clubs are smaller and often minilateral in nature. Unlike ad-hoc coalitions in multilateral negotiations or one-off gatherings of state representatives, clubs are permanent creations, whether formally or informally constituted, that are built around a common purpose and with rules governing membership.
A normative club brings together countries that share a normative commitment to achieving certain objectives. The key membership criterion is adherence to the shared climate policy ambition.
The main purpose of a bargaining club is to facilitate more efficient negotiations of common objectives, targets and policies, especially among powerful or significant players in a given issue area. The key membership criterion is significant international status, power and relevant capabilities. Rather than rally like-minded actors behind an ambitious normative commitment, a bargaining club seeks to promote compromise-seeking among relevant players, including those with diverging normative ambition. The minilateral form is the main reason for their greater bargaining efficiency. Bargaining clubs can serve as an alternative to multilateral forums when they achieve deeper levels of cooperation.
Transformational clubs are the most demanding type of climate clubs. They comprise countries that share a common purpose but also seek to change members’ incentive structure. In doing so, they seek to overcome the free-riding problem and enhance compliance with ambitious climate targets. This works in two principal ways: by creating club benefits that are available only to members (e.g. preferential trading, access to technology and finance), and by sanctioning members that are non-compliant.
Falkner (2021) Climate clubs: politically feasible and desirable? (pdf)
53.3 Climate Debt
Sasha
The global North is responsible for 92% of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary, while the global South bears the brunt of the destruction. The climate breakdown is a process of atmospheric colonisation.
To date, there has been no robust attempt to quantify national responsibility for the ecological, social, and economic damages caused by excess global CO2 emissions.
The predominant approaches to conceptualising national responsibility for emissions focus on current annual territorial emissions, or in some cases cumulative territorial emissions, in a manner that does not account simultaneously for both the scale of national emissions and population size of countries.
The literature on climate debt addresses this limitation by recognising the principle of equal per capita access to atmospheric commons, yet existing methods in the literature do not allow quantification of national responsibility for emissions in excess of a given safe global carbon budget.
Furthermore, no existing methods have attempted to quantify responsibility for emissions in consumption-based terms, in a manner that accounts for international trade.
53.4 Distributive Conflicts vs Commons Free-riders
Aklin Abstract
Climate change policy is generally modeled as a global collective action problem struc- tured by free-riding concerns. Drawing on quantitative data, archival work, and elite inter- views, we review empirical support for this model and find that the evidence for its claims is weak relative to the theory’s pervasive influence. We find, first, that the strongest collec- tive action claims appear empirically unsubstantiated in many important climate politics cases. Second, collective action claims—whether in their strongest or in more nuanced versions—appear observationally equivalent to alternative theories focused on distributive conflict within countries. We argue that extant patterns of climate policy making can be explained without invoking free-riding. Governments implement climate policies regard- less of what other countries do, and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with free- riding has been in place or not. Without an empirically grounded model for global climate policy making, institutional and political responses to climate change may ineffectively target the wrong policy-making dilemma. We urge scholars to redouble their efforts to analyze the empirical linkages between domestic and international factors shaping climate policy making in an effort to empirically ground theories of global climate politics. Such analysis is, in turn, the topic of this issue’s special section.
Aklin Memo
Over the past decades, many social scientists have come to view environmental problems as, first and foremost, commons management issues.
Collective action characterizations of commons management issues highlight two distinct logics. First, players must expect an outcome under the “business-as- usual” that is suboptimal compared to some other possible outcome. What makes competing outcomes “better” is not always specified. Second, players face individual disincentives to move from the suboptimal to the optimal outcome. Investing in public goods production is individually costly, but the benefits of action are contin- gent on the number and scale of group contributions. Furthermore, no actor can unilaterally produce the public good alone. Thus, every player has an incentive to free-ride and let others shoulder the costs of public goods provision. But the public good will not be provided if every player behaves this way.
Decades of international negotiations have sought to address free-riding because there was widespread belief that this was holding back climate policy. Treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement sought to create transparent and verifiable commitments, presumably in order to increase compliance. Our findings join critical voices arguing that this was the wrong solution to a misunderstood prob- lem.
Solutions such as climate clubs, while offering several benefits, may still not solve the climate problem if the logic of climate politics has been misdiagnosed. To the extent that distributive conflicts are the main constraint on effective policies, international agreements may be more successful if they instead focus on empowering key pro-climate interest groups and neutralizing veto players, such as fossil fuel interests.
Collective action theory does not provide the only theoretical framework to make sense of political conflict over climate policy. A distinct meta-theoretical approach begins by recognizing the fundamentally redistributive nature of climate policy making. Climate policy involves a dramatic renegotiation of the institutions that structure economic and social activity within each economy. Consequently, climate policies create new economic winners and losers. Sharp divisions in the material interests of political and economic stakeholders subsequently trigger distributive conflict over climate policy making. Conflicts over material benefits are further reinforced by ideological struggles among politicians, voters, and interest groups.
An emerging literature on distributive climate conflict highlights two families of explanations. One literature describes climate policy outcomes as a function of special interest control; a second (possibly complementary) literature emphasizes the importance of a sectoral and ideological balance of power. Together, these accounts highlight an alternative meta-theoretical account that can motivate expla- nations for climate policy action and inaction without invoking the importance of free-riding concerns.
Aklin (2020) Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change (pdf)