Spotlight Cancún: Economics Textbooks Get Climate Change Wrong

Kristen Sheeran, Guest Blogger
Another in a series from the Triple Crisis Blog and the Real Climate Economics Blog on the Cancún Climate Summit.

A useful new report by Yoram Bauman and the Sightline Institute reveals the deficiencies of many of the best selling economics textbooks in dealing with climate change, arguably one of the most important economic concerns of our time. The report finds that some of the most widely used textbooks present out-of-date accounts of climate science, minimize the economic urgency of the climate crisis, and provide superficial treatment of the real policy challenges inherent to solving the problem.

I wish I could say that I am surprised.

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Spotlight Cancún: So, Where is the Global Feed-in Tariff these days?

Alan AtKisson, Guest Blogger
Another in a series from the Triple Crisis Blog and the Real Climate Economics Blog on the Cancún Climate Summit.

The movement of ideas through the international system is a mysterious thing. Consider, for example, the circuitous journey of the “Global Feed-in Tariff”: this is the idea of guaranteeing the purchase of renewable energy by electricity utilities, supported by a subsidized price. What is happening with this potential global climate-game winner?

The feed-in tariff model (to simplify, “tariff” means “price support” in this case) has worked brilliantly to spread wind and solar energy in countries like Germany and Spain. Too brilliantly, worry some experts, who point to grid over-load risks. Other experts say that risk is remote. But in the rest of the world, “too much solar energy” is hardly the problem. Despite the amazing, astonishing spread of the stuff, and the steady drop in prices, wind and solar energy are still (says conventional wisdom) “too expensive” compared to “conventional” sources like coal and natural gas.

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Spotlight Cancún: Climate Economics and Policy Resources

Another in a series from the Triple Crisis Blog and the Real Climate Economics Blog on the Cancún Climate Summit.

Frank Ackerman’s comprehensive book on climate economics: Can We Afford the Future: Economics of a Warming World
Frank Ackerman et al., “The Economics of 350”
James Boyce, “Cap and Dividend, A State By State Analysis”
Climate-L, a knowledge base of UN and intergovernmental activities addressing climate change policy
Earth Negotiations Bulletin
IATP series on Climate and Agriculture: Cancun 2010
ICTSD on trade and climate change
IFPRI on the impacts of climate change on agriculture
IISD Reporting services
Official UNFCCC website
Official Mexico’s COP16 website
Nalin Kulatilaka, “Green Revolution 2.0: A Sustainable Energy Path”
South Centre, “Addressing Climate Change through Sustainable Development and the Promotion of Human Rights”
The UN on Development and Climate Change
The World Bank on Development and Climate Change
UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2010: Investing in a low-carbon economy

Spotlight Cancún: Negative Carbon and the Green Power Fund

Graciela Chichilnisky, Guest Blogger
Another in a series from the Triple Crisis Blog and the Real Climate Economics Blog on the Cancún Climate Summit.

The Kyoto Challenge

Most people know that the United Nations Kyoto Protocol limits global carbon emissions. It is the only international agreement we have for resolving potentially catastrophic climate change. But few people know how it works. Few people are aware that the Kyoto Protocol has already funded US$50 Billion in clean technology projects in developing nations through its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Since the Protocol became international law in 2005, this funding took place in a short period of five years, and continues growing. During this five year period, the carbon market of the Kyoto Protocol grew from zero to US$165 billion in annual trades, and the projects funded by the CDM achieved a real impact. These projects have decreased carbon emissions by the equivalent of 40% of EU emissions.[1]

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Spotlight Cancún: Key Issues in the Cancún Climate Conference

Martin Khor
Another in a series from the Triple Crisis Blog and the Real Climate Economics Blog on the Cancún Climate Summit.

Triple Crisis Blogger Martin Khor published the following South Centre policy brief on what to expect from the Cancún climate negotiations on issues like the global climate regulatory regime, proposed obligations for developing countries, and others.

Key Issues in the Cancún Climate Conference

A year after the chaotic Copenhagen summit, the 2010 UNFCCC climate conference begins in Cancún.  Expectations are low this time around, especially compared to the eve of Copenhagen.

That’s probably both good and bad.  The conference last year had been so hyped up before hand, with so much hopes linked to it, that the lack of a binding agreement at the end of it and the last-day battle over process and text made it a near-disaster.

Few expect this year’s meeting in the seaside resort of Cancún to produce anything significant in commitments either to cut Greenhouse Gas emissions or to provide funds to developing countries. Thus if Cancún ends with few significant decisions, it won’t be taken as a catastrophe.  It will however be seen as the multilateral system not being able to meet up to the challenge.  And that system will be asked to try harder, next year.

Spotlight Cancún: Climate Realism

Eban Goodstein, Guest Blogger
Another in a series from the Triple Crisis Blog and the Real Climate Economics Blog on the Cancún Climate Summit.

The elections earlier this month saw the breaching of the 2016 deadline set by NASA’s Jim Hansen for global CO2 stabilization, and also moved us well beyond IPCC Chair Rajendra Pauchuari’s statement that action beyond 2012 “will be too late”. So where does this leave us? For what are we now, officially, too late?

Until this year, one could envision, just barely, a “politics as usual” scenario that set us on track to stabilizing C02 concentrations at 450 ppm.  The 450 goal would, according to the IPCC’s best guess, have held global temperatures to 2.1 degrees C above pre-industrial levels—a further 1.5 degrees C warming this century. Getting there would have required US policy that initiated cuts in 2012, and delivered 80% reductions by 2050. These would have had to have been coupled with Chinese and Indian commitments to stabilize emissions by 2025, and then start down their own aggressive emission reduction pathways.

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Spotlight Cancún: Making the Economic Case for Tackling Climate Change

Kevin Gallagher and Frank Ackerman

Triple Crisis bloggers Kevin Gallagher and Frank Ackerman published the following opinion article in the Guardian on the economic case for tackling climate change and why it has the potential to persuade US policymakers to take action.

Cancún and the new economics of climate change

The failure of US climate legislation, following last year’s disappointing negotiations at Copenhagen, casts a pall over the round of climate talks in Cancún this week. And the global recession and budget-cutting crisis makes this seem like the worst time for new climate initiatives. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of delaying action: the laws of physics don’t need 60 votes in the US Senate to continue making the world’s climate less and less liveable.

There are two battles over climate change. The legitimacy of climate science has been challenged in the media, but repeated reviews have found only scattered typographical errors in IPCC reports and other assessments. Last year’s theft of emails from climate scientists revealed the shocking news that leading researchers can be rude and competitive – but not much else. While science-deniers remain prominent in US politics, most of the world has moved on.

What the debate has moved on to, though, is concern about the costs of climate policies. Bjorn Lomborg, the poster child of climate scepticism, is no longer attacking the science; instead, he now claims that the damages from climate change would be small, while the costs of doing anything about it would be enormous. The new Lomborg (“Scepticism 2.0”) relies heavily on a few conservative economists, notably Richard Tol and William Nordhaus, to suggest that we can’t afford real climate solutions.

Read the full article at the Guardian.

Spotlight Cancún: The Curtain Rises for Climate Negotiations

Miquel Muñoz

The UN Climate Change Conference started today and will be meeting for the next two weeks in the resort city of Cancún, México. The Spotlight Cancún series, a joint series by Triple Crisis and the Real Climate Economics blog, which this post begins, will invite experts to analyze different aspects of the climate change negotiations, and how these, in turn affect the bigger picture of finance, development and the environment. We welcome Miquel Muñoz as a regular contributor to Triple Crisis to begin the discussion.

The Cancún conference runs through December 10 and comprises: six official UNFCCC meetings (COP 16, COP/MOP 6, AWG-LCA 13, AWG-KP 15, SBSTA 33 and SBI 33); side conferences such as the Global Business Day, Agriculture and Rural Development Day, Oceans Day, Development and Climate Days, and Forest Day; hundreds of official and unofficial side events; and all the social and cultural activities that traditionally accompany such meetings, such as the climate village. Cancún, like previous UN Climate Change Conferences, is more than just a negotiation; it’s the yearly gathering of the climate change community.

Over the next two weeks, we may or may not hear about Cancún in the news. Distractions such as sabre-rattling half a world away and leaks of US diplomatic cables will keep the two greatest greenhouse gas emitters, the US and China, the UN Secretary-General, foreign ministries from all over the world, the international press and others occupied. But even without these distractions, the truth is that expectations for any agreement happening in Cancún were already low. So low, in fact, that some analysts have even posted a pre-mortem of the meeting.

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