THE atmosphere is one of humanity’s common goods, and it carries a central value for life and the survival of human beings on planet Earth. The complex causes of climate change, the diverse impacts and different responsibilities of a variety of agents, the determination of what can be demanded of each individual agent place us squarely in the camp of what we could call “complex justice.” It cannot be resolved with allocations according to the rules of the market but requires specific political agreements. Among the institutions that share some type of responsibility in the fight against climate change and the diverse global summits where the state of affairs is reviewed and new objectives are negotiated, a global regime of climate change is being shaped little by little. Its complexity is not and cannot be less than that which it is attempting to manage.
THE CLIMATE IS NO LONGER WHAT IT ONCE WAS
Because of climate change, we have lost meteorology as a neutral topic of conversation, an objective reference independent of our behavior, which allowed us to talk about something that affected us, but for which no one was responsible, as interesting as it was politically sterile. Anything we locate within the neutral space of fatalism is a wonderful topic for small talk, where we are looking for some common ground that is, above all, not offensive.
But the climate is no longer what it once was. With climate change, meteorology has stopped being something inevitable; one can be more or less against it, curse those who are guilty, bemoan our inability to do anything, and even be provocative by denying the evidence. Which means it is no good for creating banal consensus. This does not mean that the climate is merely a human construction or that we can do with it whatever we choose; it means that from now on, it is established as an area of responsibility (and is, therefore, inevitably controversial). One is tempted to declare that the advance of civilization means precisely that there are consistently fewer things that are unquestionable and inevitable and more for which we are responsible.
The difficulties that arise when trying to reach an agreement about how to respond to climate change stem from three relatively new characteristics of this phenomenon: its anthropogenic nature, its universality, and the density of interactions that are in play. In other words, it is a reality subject to human change, we are all affected by it, and it is not easy to understand the quantity of variables that are involved. Given this human responsibility, there is a new field of deliberation and intervention regarding what was previously an inevitable reality over which no decision had to be made. Weather and the climate, paradigms of things that are givens, are actually realities that are partially shaped by human beings and are, therefore, now the object of controversy. Our ancestors would not have understood that one can disagree with the climate and propose changing it. The climate has experienced a change in nature and appreciation similar to other realities such as health, intimacy, or inequalities: they have gone from being inevitable facts to being dependent variables and, for that reason, a topic of interest for democratic citizenry just like any other. The weather used to be, we could say, an insipid topic for elevator conversations and has now become the object of passionate debates.
If the topic is not now able to generate banal consensuses, it is due to its seriousness and complexity. Nowadays the climate is pure politics, perhaps the most serious and passionately political matter on our agenda. The period from now until 2020—a brief span of time, barely two or three legislative sessions—will determine the living conditions of upcoming generations. Climate change is without a doubt the greatest problem of collective action the world has ever had to confront. That is why one could speak of a “tragedy of commons” (Hardin 1968), and why the Stern Review labeled climate change as “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure” (Stern 2007).
Human beings have competed for many things throughout history, we have even killed for some of them, and now we could do so over the climate. If things continue on this path, we will face “climate conflicts” whose consequences we can barely imagine. Traditional wars over resources, regarding everything that has to do with the use of lands and access to potable water, will become more acute. Climate change will potentially also lead to conflict regarding the relationship between generations; there is obvious injustice in the fact that some people have to pay for the excesses of their ancestors or their lack of foresight and self-control.
And there will be, without a doubt, massive migrations. We can already talk about “climate refugees,” in other words, people fleeing because of a climate event (Welzer 2007). This concept refers to the masses of refugees whose subsistence in their places of origin will become more difficult or impossible, in such a way that they will want to participate in the possibilities of survival of privileged countries. According to data from the Red Cross, there are currently twenty-five million such people, and it is calculated that there may be between fifty and two hundred million in 2050. We will no longer be able to distinguish between climate refugees and war refugees, because many new wars will be caused by the climate. There is a direct connection between both categories in Sudan, for example, and many indirect connections, to the extent that global warming accentuates inequalities and creates new conflicts.
The problems planted by all of this are extensive and will demand political decisions, not only market incentives. Who knows whether the politics of climate change, in addition to enriching our daily conversations, can help us carry out a renovation of politics that we knew to be necessary but that no irresistible force compelled us to undertake?
CAUSES AND IMPACTS
The governance of climate change raises, as a preliminary issue, the difficulty of identifying causes, impacts, and responsibilities in a just fashion. For each of these questions, there are similarities and differences between countries, which make them deserve responsibilities that are also differentiated.
If we begin with causes, we find great asymmetry. Global warming is caused by a plurality of actors, but the largest part of the responsibility belongs to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development) countries, because of both past emissions and their high level of emissions today. There are ninety-some states that emit carbon dioxide at climate-changing levels because their forms of production or consumption make use of fossil fuels. It is also the case that the countries that have the greatest impact on climate change are those least affected by it, while those who barely help create it end up being the most affected. In industrialized countries, every inhabitant produces an average of 12.6 tons of carbon dioxide a year, while in the poorest countries, it is 0.9 tons. Almost half of all global emissions are due to countries that were industrialized early on, in spite of the rapid pace of emerging countries now. The
Stern Review (2007) notes that since 1850, the United States and Europe have generated close to 70 percent of CO
2 emissions. Developed countries continue to contribute substantially to the growth of that quantity. The United States is the country with the greatest amount of CO
2 emissions (more than twenty tons per person per year); Europe and Japan, close to half of global emissions; China, a fourth; India, one-tenth; and the African continent, less than one ton per person per year. For that reason, there is huge inequality between countries when it comes to responsibility for the emission of greenhouse gases: people who live in the one hundred countries that will be most affected by climate change are only responsible for 3 percent of global emissions.
If we consider impacts, we will note that when it comes to effects, there is equality in principle, but a notable degree of inequality in reality. In the first place, climate change is a universal phenomenon, in other words, it affects everyone indistinctly, and there are no places that are absolutely protected or territorial strategies to limit its scope. Equality regarding the impacts of climate change comes from the fact that its effects are not spatially limited. Climate change ends up having a bearing on countries that are somewhat indirectly affected by it. Its consequences are not limited by the place in which it originated. States with minimal technological or economic capacity that have barely contributed to creating the problem (such as almost all the African states) as well as the countries that are most motivated to protect the climate (such as the countries in Europe) are at least as affected by its negative consequences as states with greater emissions.
But we can also prove inequitable impacts, since the effects of climate change vary depending on geographic factors. Floods will principally affect populations situated on river deltas, and the increase in sea level will affect coasts and small islands. But the principal source of inequality is poverty and different response levels based on the ability to make modifications from the infrastructural, technological, or economic point of view. Poor countries are relatively more vulnerable to damages caused by climate change (Serfati 2009). Although all countries find themselves affected by climate change, the poorest geographic areas will be the ones that suffer the greatest consequences of climate change and suffer them most intensely, since they are the ones that have the highest temperatures, as well as the most agricultural and least diversified economies. Socioeconomic factors are more significant than the climate in things related, for example, to the spread of illness. There are a thousand times more cases of dengue fever in the north of Mexico than in the south of Texas, in spite of the fact that the climate is very similar in a hundred kilometer area. The same is true of natural disasters, which affect countries in a very different manner depending on their level of development. An earthquake is not the same from one country to another, so we could probably say that, deep down, there are no natural disasters, but rather social disasters, or natural disasters whose effects are different depending on social conditions.
Climate change has very different regional effects and its social repercussions also depend on corresponding abilities. In the most advanced countries, where there is a high standard of living, good food, and a high level of protection against disasters, and in which material damages can be compensated, it is likely that the possible social consequences of climate change will be limited; regions with hunger, poverty, lack of infrastructure, and violent conflicts will be harder hit by environmental changes. Regarding these effects, there are multiple disadvantages: the same countries that will probably be most affected are those that are less able to confront those consequences. Countries that would be least affected or that could even reap benefits are more able to manage problems that might arise from any changes. The irregularity of monsoons first affects the countries in Southwest Asia, and floods threaten large river deltas, such as Bangladesh or India. Rising sea levels will be felt most on small islands, such as those in the Pacific, but also in cities such as Mogadishu, Venice, and New Orleans, which are at sea level. For rich countries like the Netherlands, it will be comparatively easier to improve their protective dikes; reforestation after a storm is better handled in Kansas than in Kerala (Santarius 2007, 19). Thus, existing global symmetries and inequalities are made more acute by climate change.
Another asymmetry that ends up further complicating matters has to do with the varying level of impact on different generations. Time is pressing, of course, but not enough to facilitate solutions, since egoistic actors can hope that they will not suffer the consequences of global warming. The demand for cooperation is weakened. For people who are alive today, solutions to this problem cost more than we would get out of them. Incentives for cooperation do not work because the generations do not coexist at the same time.
As if this asymmetrical framework were not enough, certain effects may be harmful to some groups and beneficial to others. Along with the disastrous consequences of climate change in the South (flooding, droughts, the disturbance of ocean currents, an increase in tropical diseases), there could be positive effects in the North (an increase in land values, new maritime routes) (Easterbrook 2007). Some regions will benefit since their agricultural conditions or their attractiveness to tourists could improve. Russia, for example, could benefit from future ecological crises since it has a large amount of gas and petroleum, and rising temperatures will allow for new areas of cultivation.
It is true that climate change does not affect in precisely the same way those who live in one place or another, the rich and the poor, or countries whose levels of development do or do not permit certain self-limitations. If being universally affected is a motive for reaching agreement, unequal effects mean that there are different interests that make reaching an agreement complicated. In any case, the advantages are only appreciable in the short term; by the very nature of the problem, there will eventually be only disadvantages that extend to every corner of the world. In the end, there will be nothing but losers.
The final cause of equality in the face of disaster is the fact that this “world risk society” (Beck 2007) is characterized by a degree of connectivity between diverse actors of a scope unprecedented in history (Homer-Dixon 2006, 112). This society displays the exact fulfillment of the theory of “external effects” (Swaan 1993), which says that given our high degree of interdependence, problems of poverty and health increasingly threaten every member of society, not merely those directly affected, and these problems thus require collective solutions. An awareness of this fact was at the heart of the creation of the welfare state and is just as valid today for the effects of climate change. All countries will end up being affected by it, and because of that, we need cooperative solutions. It is something Norbert Elias also noted in his sociological writings when he showed the extent to which an increase in interdependence means a decrease in power differentials between actors. He called this process a “functional democratization” (1996, 72) and it eventually ends up being institutionally manifested. Although Elias was describing this sociological mechanism on a national scale, it can also be observed nowadays at the level of global interdependence. Risks end up making the most diverse actors equal and also redirecting their varied responsibilities toward concerted actions.
A CASE OF COMPLEX JUSTICE
In addition to the complexity that stems from the analysis of causes and impacts, there is another source of complexity that stems from the global network of interdependencies that make reaching agreements on justice and government responsibilities difficult. It is not so much the number of agents involved as the complexity of the criteria of justice that appear in negotiations. Their essentially controversial character is due to the complexity of the interactions that are in play. This type of agreement puts to the test humanity’s ability to reach a compromise that balances conflicting interests and distant aspirations for justice. The fact that damages are not geographically distributed with criteria of equality is not a neutral matter; there are some who lose more than others. That is why climate change has become an especially controversial political question.
In the negotiations for agreements on climate change, the climate per se is not discussed, because no one questions the need for an agreement on intervention to stop climate change. Governments seem to be in agreement about the principle of taking resolute action against the warming of the planet, but they continue to be profoundly divided about the division of efforts, fundamentally between advanced and developing countries. Controversies include the criteria of justice that will determine corresponding decisions, such as how and when responsibility is taken for the protection of the environment, by whom, and how that responsibility is divided. This does not have as much to do with the water, air, and trees as with employment and well-being. The least developed countries do not understand why they should assume the costs of the industrial nations’ irresponsible development. Countries in Asia or the former Soviet bloc do not want to threaten their process of economic recuperation, while the most advanced economies resist being the ones who pay for the rest of the world. Finally, the most developed countries believe they would be unjustly affected by the restrictions. Opposing interests barely allow progress to be made on commitments.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been constructed on the basis of a principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” based on the circumstances of every country (Article 4). This provision has in fact acted as an alibi for a lack of commitment to reduction on the part of developing and emerging countries, a position that has been confirmed in the Kyoto Protocol. Emerging states like China, and especially India, have not shown any disposition to renounce the advantages that have been conceded to them in this way, even though a commitment of this type should not be effected for at least ten or twenty years. At the same time, they have suspended any initiative in this direction, making it conditional on the industrialized countries, particularly the United States, demonstrating that they are going to make substantial efforts to reduce emissions.
If the commitments acquired by Europe at the Copenhagen Summit were ambitious, it is because the cost of reducing greenhouse gases is relatively lower in Europe than in other regions of the world. In economic terms, it will cost the United States as much to reduce emissions 4 percent between now and 2020 as it will cost Europeans to reduce emissions 20 percent by the same date. The comparisons of commitments regarding emission reductions cannot be fully appreciated without referencing the economic costs they entail. When Europe supports heroic environmental measures, we must keep in mind that they do so from a very favorable position.
Developing countries have presented two lines of argumentation in this regard. The first concerns the “historic responsibility” for carbon that developed economies have emitted until now. These advanced countries have used up much of the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon, and they should compensate developing countries for this “expropriation.” It is the “development imperative” proposed by Giddens (2009, 9): the poorest nations have only contributed to global warming marginally; they must have the opportunity to develop even if this process provokes emissions, for a rather extended period. The argument is serious, but certain objections should be taken into consideration. In the first place, considering the emerging countries’ desire to accelerate modernization that will allow them to recover from their historic underdevelopment, we could ask ourselves: does justice mean that everyone must have the same opportunity to destroy humanity’s survival conditions? In addition, rich countries were not fully aware of the consequences; when they were developing, they believed, as almost everyone did until recently, that the atmosphere was an infinite resource. In addition, the “expropriators” are dead and buried. Their descendants, even if they could be identified, should not be considered responsible for acts they did not commit. There is a gap between cause and effect (those who create a problem and those who must resolve it are not contemporaries), which makes both the assigning of responsibility and the achievement of commitments more difficult. These objections do not completely disallow the argument of “historic responsibility” since developed economies still benefit enormously from past industrialization.
The developing countries’ second line of argumentation concerns the just distribution of future carbon emissions. Let us suppose that global emissions are controlled by emission permits. Developing countries believe that these permits should be distributed on the basis of the population or per capita income. If we take population as a criterion, the reasoning is legal: every human being has the same right to use global carbon. If we focus on per capita income, the argument is egalitarian: permits should be given to the poorest populations so they can attain the same heights as the others. These two principles imply that the permits should be conceded to developing economies, whether because they represent the majority of world population or because they represent the majority of the world’s poor people. The problem is that these principles are not generally recognized in international relations. If there is, for example, no agreement about the principle of dividing natural resources, why would there be agreement related to the atmosphere? Nor can we say that the idea of rigorous equalitarianism stirs great enthusiasm. Development assistance has never achieved even half of the 0.7 percent that the United Nations hoped to achieve.
To escape this labyrinth, the economists Vijay and Patel proposed applying a principle that is widely accepted as a minimal condition of impartiality: doing no harm (Vijay and Patel 2009). In the context of climate change, the application of this principle would mean allowing developing countries to reduce their efforts until they have eliminated poverty. It would be a question of allowing them to maintain their current pace of growth for some time (longer for Africa than for China, for example), after which the concession of these permits would be progressively reduced. Climate models afford us a foundation upon which we might come to an agreement on these periods of time. To accelerate the process of coming together, the transfer of certain technologies to less developed countries could be favored so they could reduce the cost of their efforts.
This approach also has the advantage of taking into consideration “historic responsibility.” An important part of the damages caused by carbon accumulation in the atmosphere is the elevated costs of reduction for all countries. In the proposed model, a portion of these costs would be covered for a specific period. It also keeps the legal and egalitarian arguments in mind when conceding emission permits to the poorest countries, which is a significant financial transfer, while the distribution of permits on the basis of current emissions would benefit rich countries excessively. This transfer would only last for a certain period of time, the length of which would have to be agreed upon. This would be more acceptable for the governments and citizens of advanced countries than distributing permits based on per capita income, which would mean transferring much more to developing countries than current transfers.
Negotiations on climate change are so important that no one can allow themselves the luxury of digging in their heels. Questions of adaptation are fundamental for successful negotiations, if we want to include countries like China, India, and Brazil in the agreements, since in the near future, they will represent a large percentage of global emissions. For this reason, distributions must be carried out in a spirit of justice. Of course, the conceptions of justice are as diverse and controversial as those of self-interest. Precisely because of this, the political skill to articulate global governance is an absolute necessity when it comes to constructing a commitment between different parties.
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
What type of global governance corresponds to the types of challenges raised by climate change? The heart of the difficulty could be summarized by the idea that we have trusted market solutions, and we have not made very much progress in the construction of political agreements. Why is it so necessary to make progress on agreements of a political nature in order to confront the question of climate change? Do we not already have a series of procedures that have allowed us to make a certain amount of progress? There are, of course, market solutions such as selling emissions or “joint implementation” that have led to partial results. It is also true that we will not make progress if we make decisions that fight
against the market. The problem is that the market cannot resolve the entire issue. The market offers “appropriate signs” for the production of private goods, but not for collective goods and even less for the avoidance of “negative externalities.” Market instruments are not suitable for anticipating long-term environmental costs. The economic costs of climate change are only predictable in a very approximate way. Uncertain future events are particularly resistant to precise cost assessments. This demotivates economic actors from taking these forecasts into account and makes the task for political institutions more difficult when they attempt to establish regulations that can be accepted by everyone.
It is difficult for negotiations to reach an agreement that is equal to current challenges because we benefit from the idea that behavior can be changed by economic incentives. The problem is that economic reasoning favors the attitudes of those who are called “clandestine passengers”: we can presume that everyone shares in the effort, but the winner will be the one who does the least. Global public goods, more than anything else, suffer from what has been called “free riding” (Keohane 1984). The failure of negotiable emission permits is unsettling proof of this. Governmental good will does not suffice to implement a system of coercions that is imposed on everyone.
One of the consequences of neoliberal ideology has been to limit the field of possible political options, reducing the environmental economy almost exclusively to “market-based solutions,” to technological innovation, and to energy efficiency (Paterson, 1996, 169). The limits of this procedure have to do with the idea that emission rights give the emitter precisely that: a “right” to continue practices harmful to the environment rather than promoting more demanding political agreements, encouraging a transformation of lifestyle and consumer habits. It is still paradoxical that the same market forces that are responsible for the problem are charged with resolving it.
Questions like climate change should be analyzed in light of another conceptual framework and managed differently. It is a question of a public good of the kind we call external to the market. We talk about external goods when the consumption or production of a good affects someone else without that being perceived by the market. As for public goods, the climate has the property of nonrivalry (everyone benefits from a stable climate), but its nonexcludability is not so evident (those who do nothing for it can benefit, at least in the short term), and to this extent, there is no market incentive to pursue it. The market, especially an energy market configured in an oligopolistic fashion, cannot produce efficient energy in the blink of an eye. All we have is the weak guarantee that climate change is perceived as a real danger for the long-term equilibrium of economies and societies. However, this warning can only be realized and addressed with political logic, concretely by policies that seriously consider the long run (Giddens 2009). That is why the climate is a good that cannot be abandoned to the market; it requires global governance.
The economic crisis has made this requirement more self-evident. We need policies more than the market, and the policies must be less prosovereignty. The world where sovereign practices made sense has changed radically in a few short decades. In order to confront climate change more efficiently, we must move toward a more cooperative world. We need a cooperative solution, a solution that is scientifically solid, economically rational, and politically pragmatic.
It is obvious that we do not have the institutions we need to manage such intense interdependence. There is no “green Leviathan” that can impose agreements and responsibilities. The international legal regime is weak; international governance on this subject is very fragmented. It is a question of a complex regime, with diverse actors, regulations, and conventions.
For those who have followed the negotiations on climate change from its beginnings, differentiation is imposed as an obvious necessity so that developing countries are progressively integrated into a binding international agreement. It was necessary during the first stage of the Kyoto Protocol for the most developed countries to be the first to move forward. Although the effects of acting unilaterally are limited, the initiative between the European Union and the United States could act as a model for other countries (Sands 2003; Aldy and Stavins 2009). In any case, the most ambitious objectives of some countries will not in and of themselves avoid global warming. Climate change demands a multinational solution.
In a situation of global competitiveness, the measures that combat climate change will not be disadvantageous to the competitiveness of the actors if everyone is required to follow them. At the same time, the difficulties of international politics in relation to climate change will not be resolved without a political effort to develop a design that promises to help and not hinder the development of Southern countries. Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) points in this direction. If international agreements do not expressly guarantee the Southern countries’ right to development, those countries could conclude that they have little to gain from policies that, in the end, restrict access to energy sources and technologies that have historically allowed growth in the developed world. GDR refers to a development threshold; countries beneath the threshold would not be prepared to assume the costs of transition since survival and development would be their priorities. In this case, they have little ability or responsibility to resolve the climate problem. That is why cooperation—which includes financial and technological transfers—is an inevitable part of the governance of climate stabilization. Even if industrialized countries reduce their emissions to something close to zero, they should also help other countries to be able to do so.
The diverse global summits that have taken place until now are a fundamental element in the construction of this complex system of governance. The objective of the Copenhagen Accord, joined by 120 countries that are responsible for four-fifths of global emissions, was the stabilization of global warming at two degrees Celsius, which constitutes progress when we remember that until that point only the European Union supported this goal. Since 2009, the G8 and G20 states have as well, but this objective is simply something countries “take note of,” not a legally binding agreement in international law. It has no mechanism to guarantee that the objective is sustained. The problem with these agreements is that they result in obligations that states impose on themselves, so there is no way they can be sanctioned for failing to comply.
Climate change is a typical phenomenon of “glocalization,” of interdependence between local actions and omissions with global effects. This problem is, in a way, the prototype of the complex scenarios that exist in a globalized world: there are no actions that have consequences only on the local level, nor is there any transnational institution that can manage these issues from a global perspective. The way we solve this question will be a model for the solution to similar conflicts. It is clearly a question of managing complexity: complexity of responsibilities, of potential impacts, of the costs of action, as well as the strategic performances the states develop out of the diverse questions that are in play.