The first step toward implementing the international Paris climate change agreement is pretty straightforward, according to Nicholas Stern, chair of the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment: stop doing stupid things.
Direct as that sounds, actually doing this is probably bit more complicated, as the stupid things are also big things. “Stopping doing the stupid things is big, so stopping subsidizing carbon, acting strongly on air pollution,” Stern said during a Tuesday panel discussion at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
According to the International Energy Agency, the value of fossil-fuel subsidies worldwide totaled $493 billion in 2014, though Stern suggested the amount is actually much higher. “We have to stop doing mad things, like subsidizing hydrocarbons in various ways, including, of course, all the pollution that they bring. Unpriced pollution is letting people do something very damaging for nothing. That’s a subsidy in my book,” he said.
The Paris Agreement was adopted by nearly in December during the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It has been signed by more than 170 governments and may come into force as early as this year, adding urgency to the conversation surrounding implementation.
The agreement sets a legal framework under which nations are to pursue non-legally binding nationally determined actions to counter climate change. The structure of the agreement is well designed to achieve the kind of outcomes necessary to support implementation, as it gives nations just the right amount of independence, Stern said. “There is no police force from Mars or judiciary from Jupiter that’s going to enforce this. That’s why it’s so important to have something that people will want to do, and then they’ll feel obligated to do it because they’ve said they would. I think that process, that legally binding process, is actually quite strong.”
The legally binding framework sets up mechanisms for reporting, transparency, and the increasing ambition of the agreement, among other things.
Working in the context of that framework, nations, no matter what their nationally determined commitment, will have to address with the several market failings related to climate change, Stern said. Doing so will require changes in policy. “There’s a whole range of market failures active here, obviously the greenhouse gases and the pollutions, but so too the R&D, so too the capital markets, so too the network structures which are so important behind all this, so too the information. You’ve got half a dozen market failures here that the policy story has to pick up.”
There is no one size fits all policy answer, according to Stern, though he “always puts carbon pricing first.”
