I am not a climate change skeptic but I am skeptical about the real impact of a series of annual summits that draws many thousands of delegates and journalists by air from all over the world to sit and talk about making promises to change behavior and reduce carbon dioxide and other kinds of emissions.
The COP 21 in Paris is not different. As its name says, it is the 21st “conference of parties” and there will be another one next year in Marrakech.
The unprecedented showing of top political leaders underlines the importance of the subject but their presence mainly paralyzes traffic in Paris as the motorcades of the likes of presidents Barack Obama, Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin traverse the city to and from a temporary conference center, an “ephemeral town ” built on the site of the Le Bourget airstrip north of Paris that is normally used by business jets or for airshows.
The pomp and circumstances of gastronomic lunches and dinners are in sharp contrast to the goals of the meeting – reducing greenhouse emissions by rich countries and to financially aid poorer countries to not repeat the errors of the industrialised countries.
One aim is to collect 100 billion dollars by 2020 to help poor countries as part of a goal to limit global warning to 2°C between now and 2100. Each country is expected to detail concrete steps and all are working to arrive at a common declaration, which is unlikely to be binding.
In the end, it is an annual talkfest of civil servants, NGOs and other campaigners, at the expense of tax payers, to best devise ways to re-allocate tax payers funds.
This will only serve to raise awareness among the public and perhaps lead to tweaks in the legislative framework for energy investments and infrastructure.
But there is unlikely to be any change in the behavior by economic actors – producers and consumers – if there is no impact on prices.
The main problem of climate change is that, despite good intentions, the polluter does not pay.
Emissions during production or the excavation of raw materials, further emissions during transport, refrigeration, air conditioning, wastage of foodstuff, they are all “external” costs that are not reflected in the market price.
There will be no change until these costs are included in the transaction prices.
Carbon emission trading is just a proxy for getting the cost in the price. It does not reward for the avoidance of emissions but it seeks compensation via an intricate trading system that is open to abuse and greed.
CO2 emissions are also just one of the many elements that cause global warming and it would be foolish to focus too narrowly on just one cause as the avoidance of one polluter may result in more pollution of a different kind.
The real solution is to “internalize” the costs – to add a levy for transport distance, for the degree of pollution, which needs to be paid before a product can be sold in a country.
Yes that would be a tariff, just as the GATT and WTO have been relentlessly removing import barriers for the past decades, but they would be tariffs that apply equally to all producers. A clean neighboring country could even be selling at a cheaper price than polluting local producers.
Of course this is easer said than done. There needs to be a definition of the levies and a way to check compliance. But with the burden of the proof on the producers, and the checks by the consumer countries, this may not be more complex than a CO2 trading scheme.
It is certainly less evasive and more practical than another series of COP meetings.
Without concrete changes to the pricing of products and services, producers and consumers are less inclined to change their behavior to whatever the tens of thousands of participants at CO2-emission intensive COP summits would like them to do.
