Low-Energy Fridays: What Can Today’s Climate Movement Learn from a 25-Year-Old Analysis?
It’s “Climate Week” in New York City—reportedly the largest one to date. It comes on the heels of a particularly sobered climate movement, as the United States has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, put an end date on renewable energy subsidies, and is currently debating the withdrawal of the Endangerment Finding that underpins climate regulation. Clearly, a wide gap exists between the biggest Climate Week ever and prevailing policies in the United States. But for insights for future climate policy, attendees would be wise to look to the United Nations’ (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “Special Report on Emission Scenarios” (SRES) from 2000. The lesson from that exercise was that an interconnected, technologically advancing world fares better than a divided one, regardless of the ambition demonstrated in wealthy nations.
Back in 2000, it had become clear that policymakers needed a better understanding of the global conditions under which climate change might be more or less manageable. The IPCC created four broad scenarios based on two overarching conditions: 1) nations become either more interconnected or more isolated; and 2) nations focus on either economic growth and advancement or local equity. (As a caveat, these broad characterizations don’t completely capture the nuance of the IPCC’s scenarios. I encourage folks to review the SRES themselves.)
To summarize, the IPCC found that the technologies used for sourcing energy are not the only significant driver of emissions—demographic and economic changes are also incredibly important. An interconnected, technologically advancing world tends to fare better on the climate front than one in which nations are more isolated, even when they prioritize climate policy. This is because the more interconnected world is one in which trade enables access to the most efficient sources of global production and leads to a less resource-intensive global economy. However, a key point from the SRES is that even if nations prioritize climate policy, it may not have much impact on the overall trajectory of emissions if other factors (e.g., population size, economic growth) should result in less efficient land and energy use.
Simply, the SRES shows that a world in which nations trade freely and embrace innovation is also one that rapidly shifts away from the less-efficient incumbent (and climate change-exacerbating) current technologies.
While this should surprise no one, it’s worth reconsidering 25 years later, as the global policy paradigm has certainly not reflected this. Many nations eager to establish climate policy focus more on domestic transitions to specific technology types over innovation that can scale globally, and much of the current trade policy discourse surrounds the growth of trade barriers (e.g., tariffs).
Climate Week should be a time to reflect on the effectiveness of various climate strategies. I delved into data projecting future global emissions earlier this year, comparing newer projections to older ones. While I found that global emissions are (unsurprisingly) expected to keep rising, there was some cause for optimism in that the newer projections showed lower emissions than the older ones. The caveat to this is that it can be almost entirely attributed to the handful of nations shouldering the costs of emission abatement. Many of the largest and/or fastest growing emitters (e.g., China, India, Russia) are doing worse than expected.
The takeaway from more recent data is the same as it was 25 years ago: In order to bring global emissions down, we must find ways to make newer, more efficient technologies accessible to the developing world. While this should be a north star for policy, it often gets lost amidst the widespread preference for regulations, subsidies, and other attainable-but-inefficient policies. However, given the recent retrenchment of many of those policies, it’s worth reconsidering whether they could have succeeded and whether climate hawks should focus on ideas that can make a bigger difference on global emissions.