Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
7/31/2015
The United States has an option when it comes to addressing climate change: Act now and be a global leader, or wait and see, and enjoy continued dynamic economic growth, RAND Corp. said in a report released this week. “The United States may choose whether it wants to be a leader or a follower in any transition to a low-carbon economy. Reducing its own emissions increases its leverage on other countries to reduce theirs,” according to the report, which later notes that “alternately, the United States might choose to let other countries set the pace in reducing emissions. This would attenuate, or at least postpone, the difficult and costly domestic adjustments needed to reduce emissions.”
If the U.S. were to adopt a wait-and-see strategy to climate change, the document says, immediate costs would be lower. In this scenario, the nation would not make expensive investments in early stage innovation, but instead wait until other countries have developed the technologies needed to address climate change. The U.S. could then purchase those technologies at a lower price with less risk involved. However, the United States is the “healthiest of the world’s large developed economies,” and it is not certain other counties would in fact step up to develop these technologies. As a result, according to the report, global emissions might be higher than if the U.S. had taken the lead. In this instance, the nation would be exposed to “the risks of damage from further rises in temperature and sea levels and of losing the innovation edge to countries that move first.”
If the U.S. is to act now, according to the report, the government must focus on three key areas. First, support for research and development of low-carbon technologies for many sectors, including the energy industry, would need to ramp up. The document also suggests the establishment of a carbon tax or cap and trade system. Lastly, RAND said, the government must “implement complementary measures that focus on particular economic sectors, including: demonstration projects for such technologies as carbon sequestration … [and] using a social cost of carbon in estimating the cost-benefit ratios of all regulatory policies”
A large-scale rollout of carbon capture and storage technology is key if the world is to avoid a rise in global temperature of more than 2 degrees, RAND asserted. “Primitive versions of the requisite [CCS] technologies exist, but to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions in the future, especially in a global economy many times larger than today’s, would require deploying these technologies at orders of magnitude beyond their current scale.”
