Price carbon — I will if you will

[muriel_volestrangler]

Negotiations at the United Nations climate summit in Paris this December will adopt a 'pledge and review' approach to cutting global carbon emissions. Countries will promise to reduce their emissions by amounts that will be revised later. The narrative is that this will “enable an upward spiral of ambition over time”. History and the science of cooperation predict that quite the opposite will happen.
...
Success requires a common commitment, not a patchwork of individual ones. Negotiations need to be designed to realign self-interests and promote cooperation. A common commitment can assure participants that others will match their efforts and not free-ride. A strategy of “I will if you will” stabilizes higher levels of cooperation. It is the most robust pattern of cooperation seen in laboratory and field studies of situations open to free-riding.
...
We, and others, propose an alternative: a global carbon-price commitment. Each country would commit to place charges on carbon emissions from fossil-fuel use (by taxes or cap-and-trade schemes, for example) sufficient to match an agreed global price, which could be set by voting — by a super-majority rule that would produce a coalition of the willing.
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A global price does not automatically result in acceptable burden sharing. A 'Green Climate Fund' will be needed to transfer funds from rich to poor countries. To minimize disputes, the objective of climate-fund transfers should be to maximize the global price of carbon. This can be implemented in a way that encourages rich countries to be generous and poor countries to vote for a higher global carbon price for example, by making all climate-fund payments proportional to the agreed carbon price.

http://www.nature.com/news/price-carbon-i-will-if-you-will-1.18538

http://carbon-price.com/

[daleanime]

1. kick, kick, kick....

[Hortensis]

2. The pledge and review approach was apparently what was achievable

in 2009, when getting nations to cooperate at all was very problematic. I don't know what should replace it, but hopefully we'll see real progress in Paris now that far more nations are getting really serious about this. Look at the commitments China and India say they intend to make.

On a personal level, of course, "I will if you will" should be just "I will." We've cut back our footprint a lot, and my next target is, once again, less wasted food. We're not too bad as Americans go, I think. I'm finally getting my husband to look for leftovers in the front of the fridge for lunch, instead of always making himself a sandwich, but we can still save some real money over time by being better organized.