Climate Change and the Arab Spring

Don't have time for a more substantive post right now, but I want to keep the lights on here so I thought I'd pass along this interesting-looking report from CAP on the possible relationship between climate change and the Arab Spring. I've blogged before about how external monetary dynamics could have played a role by effecting commodity prices which helped motivate the uprising, but obviously Fed policy isn't the only thing that moves commodity prices. Draughts and other climate-related factors could very well play a role as well.

(ht: Josh Kertzer)

A Trade Story IPE Folks Should Love

This NY Times article is over a month old now, but I'm highlighting it anyway because it is illustrative of trade politics dynamics that we often emphasize in IPE. It would make a good case study for an introductory class. Here's the issue:

The United States on Thursday announced the imposition of antidumping tariffs of more than 31 percent on solar panels from China.

Here's the ostensible policy process:

The American decision was made by civil servants in a quasi-judicial process that is heavily insulated by law from political interference and does not represent a deliberate attempt by the Obama administration to confront China on trade policy. But that distinction has been largely lost in China, where the solar panel issue has been one of many causes embraced online by the country’s vociferous ultranationalists, who put heavy pressure on Chinese officials to respond forcefully to perceived snubs to China.

Here's the materialist policy process:

SolarWorld Industries America, which led the coalition of manufacturers that filed the solar dumping case, welcomed the department’s ruling. The decision “is a very positive step in the process. It’s also in line with what we expected,” said Ben Santarris, a company spokesman. “We consider this a bellwether case. It underscores the importance of manufacturing to the U.S. economy.”

Here's the opposing domestic force:

Many solar panel installers in the United States have opposed tariffs on Chinese panels, contending that inexpensive imports have helped spur many homeowners and businesses to put solar panels on their rooftops. The new tariffs are likely to mean a substantial increase in the price of solar panels here.

Here's the opposing foreign force:

“This is really a surprise,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s really dangerous.” Mr. Li said that Chinese companies would “certainly” retaliate by filing a trade case at China’s commerce ministry accusing big American chemical companies of dumping polysilicon, the main ingredient in solar panels, on the Chinese market.

Here's the supporting ideational force:

“China’s method is straightforward: it sets forth industry-specific Five-Year Plans and then uses all forms of national and local subsidies and other governmental support to quickly transfer jobs, supply chains, intellectual property and wealth, to the permanent detriment of U.S. and global manufacturers,” he said. “China’s ability to ramp up and overwhelm an industry is unique and particularly devastating with new and emerging technologies, where global competitors may be less established and can be knocked out more easily and quickly.”

Here's the opposing ideational force:

Chinese officials have been indignant at American criticism of their solar power industry, pointing out that the United States has urged China for years to embrace renewable energy as a way to reduce air pollution, combat climate change and limit the need for oil imports from politically volatile countries in the Mideast.

There's more good stuff at the link, including a bit of historical context. Pedagogically speaking, it would be nice if this ends up being settled at the WTO. Then we could bring in all of interests, ideas, and institutions into one nice, compact little story.

Climate Change, Development, and Conflict

The Journal of Peace Research has a special issue on the security implications of climate change. The issue can be found here, and is open access through the end of February. Over at DoM, Cliff Bob has already posted some (very good) thoughts, and highlights the main takeaway from the issue:

Only limited support for viewing climate change as an important influence on armed conflict. However, framing the climate issue as a security problem could possibly influence the perceptions of the actors and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That is one takeaway, but Eric Gartzke makes a much more provocative claim: from the perspective of global security, climate change might actually be a good thing. That is, climate change is a byproduct of increased economic activity, increased economic activity is an indicator of increasing wealth, and increasing wealth is associated with a more stable security environment. Or, as Gartzke puts it:

Ironically, stagnating economic development in middle-income states caused by efforts to combat climate change could actually realize fears of climate-induced warfare.

In a series of posts a few years ago I argued that it was not contradictory to believe that climate change was real and would have a non-negligible impact on the planet, but that we shouldn't do anything to stop it. This is true if you believe the costs of mitigation would be lower than the costs of prevention. There are pretty good reasons to think that is true, particularly in the developing world. Gartzke offers another possible worry along those lines.

Negative Externalities and the Tragedy of the Commons

In a classic example of a tragedy of the commons, a field is used by several farmers to graze their cattle. None of the farmers have the right to restrict access to other farmers. The field can support a certain number of cattle, say ten, without being depleted. But any additional cattle added to the field beyond ten will deplete the field and everyone will suffer. In this case, every farmer has an incentive to add the eleventh cow, as the benefit from doing so will accrue only to that farmer, while the costs will be shared by all. Therefore, the owner of the eleventh cow has imposed a negative externality on the owners of the ten when he brings the cow to the field. The tragedy is that because individual incentives deviate from collective incentives, and there is no external enforcement, everyone is bound to suffer.

This example, or one like it, is used to illustrate many problems in the world. Pollution, overpopulation (as in the original Garrett Hardin article that I believe remains the most-cited in the history of the journal Science), climate change, financial regulation, etc. In many cases, we focus on the ability of institutions like government, property rights, or bargained contracts to overcome this tragedy and ensure a more efficient outcome.

The problem is that it makes no sense. At least, it makes no sense when translated into the language of externalities, which nowhere appear in Hardin's original article. To see why, remember this: there are no property rights in the commons. So while the eleventh cow is the one that puts the commons over the edge, this is only true because of its cumulative effect with cows one thru ten. Were any of of those ten absent (i.e. not just the eleventh), the presence of the eleventh would be no problem. Since no farmer has any more or less right to access the commons than any other, all the farmers are equally culpable when the commons becomes depleted. The owner of cow #11 is doing no more (or less) damage than the owner of cow #4. Since all are culpable and all share the cost, there is no externality. All the farmers are contributing equally to the problem, all are equally suffering the cost. The removal of any of the cows would solve the problem, and there is no established reason for the claim that the eleventh cow is the one that should be removed.

The logic of externalities requires an established property right that is being infringed upon. It also requires that someone is forced to pay the costs of an action without accruing the benefits from it. When we realize this, we also realize that the problem of externalities is a much smaller one than we first thought. It does extend to manufacturers that pollute a river that makes fishing impossible downstream, but only if the fisherman has a claim to the river and does no polluting on her own. It does not extend to a financial crisis that culminates in some people being unemployed or losing wealth via asset depreciation, unless (perhaps) the crisis was caused by fraud.

The question that remains: what about climate change? Is this an externalities problem? Every society that has the capability to pollute does so, albeit at differential rates. While the infamous Summers memo was obviously sarcastic, there is a kernel of truth embedded in it: pollution is a by-product of economic activity, all of which generates waste, and the lack of which is a greater threat to human well-being in the developing than climate change. The pollution levels of even low-polluting industrial countries like Japan would be more than enough to warm the planet if all countries polluted at that rate. This is analogous to the owner of the eleventh cow: whenever anyone comes into possession of this cow, they will add it to the commons and everyone suffers. We don't fault the owner of the eleventh cow for ownership, we fault the structure of the interaction. If the only difference between the culpable and non-culpable is opportunity, can we really feel comfortable ascribing blame?

Secondly, is it really clear that people in Bangladesh (say) have a rights claim to an climate environment that is not two or three degrees warmer than it is right now? How did they acquire this right? This is an important point when considering the politics. Some countries, such as Russia and Canada, will likely benefit from a warmer climate. Some countries will suffer. Some countries, like the United States, will probably not be greatly affected in aggregate, but within the country some groups will benefit while others will suffer. Similarly, taking large efforts to prevent or mitigate climate change will benefit some and harm others. How do we resolve this without some sense of who has what claim to what type of climate?

None of which is to deny that even if climate change does not represent an externalities problem, it nevertheless may constitute a human problem. And really I'm less interested in climate change per se as I am in the fact that the tragedy of the commons is not necessarily an externalities problem as we usually think.

I'm planning to follow this post with another post on why we might not want to force people to internalize externalities in all contexts.

The Next Trade Spat?

This has been brewing:

"The trade war between China and Europe will not break out over manufacturing industry, customs duties, dumping or the yuan exchange rate, but on a front that no one expected: in the sky," writes La Stampa, in the wake of a threat voiced by the Beijing representative at the IATA (International Air Transport Association) Conference to simply close Chinese air space "if the EU, as it has already decided, introduces an emissions tax on all intercontinental flights leaving the EU on 1st January." The European Commission plans to grant a "license to pollute" similar to those already esablished for other industrial sectors to every airline operating in Europe, explains Le Monde: 82% of emissions rights will be free, but a 18% will have to be purchased on "carbon credits market."

My understanding is that so long as the EU rules are applied non-discriminatorily, such an emissions tax is WTO-legal.

Elasticity of Morals, con.

Tyler Cowen notes the decline in "green" brands. He suggests that the trend is over. But I think it's just another data point demonstrating the income elasticity of public morals. Note that the earlier posts at that link have a more detailed discussion. I'm sure people have written about this at length before, but my education hasn't covered it and people seem to not generally talk in those terms. But why not?

An alternative theory is that it's about partisanship, not income. For example, we know that anti-war demonstrators, who often couch their protests in moral terms, tend to stay home when their preferred candidate in office. Since most environmentalists are on the left, perhaps the face that Obama is in office has led some to be less willing to spend extra on green goods, which has then led to fewer green brands making it onto the market.

That may be part of it, but I don't think it's all of it. High income countries tend to promote all kinds of civic virtues that are not shared by lower income countries. High income regions within high income countries do too. Public virtue appears to be a normal good, to at least some extent: people want more of it as their incomes increase.

Green Graft

This doesn't strike me as a very large problem, but it is interesting:

The European Commission suspended trading in greenhouse gas emissions permits on Wednesday for at least a week after the theft of permits worth millions of euros via online attacks. ...

The attacks raised new questions about the viability of Europe’s main tool to combat a rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The stolen permits are part of Europe’s effort to cap the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, that companies may emit each year. Europe’s system is the world’s largest market for greenhouse gas emissions credits.

Companies exceeding their emissions quotas buy certificates from companies that succeeded in shrinking their carbon footprint by, for example, adopting lower-emission technology or modifying production in other ways.

This is not the first problem that Europe has had with its cap and trade system, however:

Europe’s system has had a rocky ride since trading began six years ago, including extreme volatility, tax fraud, recycling of used credits and suspicions of profiteering, in addition to online attacks.

One year ago, swindlers used fake e-mail messages to obtain access codes for individual accounts on the national registries that make up Europe’s system.

This is all pretty low-level theft, but in small ways it does undermine the integrity of the system. This is one reason why most technocracy-minded folks prefer straight carbon taxes rather than cap and trade. When cap and trade works well it mimics carbon taxes, but it is prone to rent-seeking, inefficiency, and (apparently) fraud. Carbon taxes have fewer moving pieces and they're more difficult to game.

More broadly, cases like these demonstrate that reaching an international agreement on climate change isn't the whole battle. Preventing leakages, inefficiencies, and poor incentives may be just as difficult, especially since states with weak or corrupt domestic institutions (e.g. China, India) are involved. It's a very real problem, but it isn't discussed very often.

Thanking China For Stealing Our Jobs

Look, if China subsidizes green technologies, and then those technologies are created and sold at below-market prices to the U.S., then that is a very good thing for the U.S. It means that China is effectively paying for part of our energy conservation (and, by extension, our energy consumption, since green technologies drive down the price of fossil fuels). Munger nails it:

Look, if the only way you can make money is to pay more than 100% of the purchase price in subsidies, you don't want to be in that business.

Conversely, if you can pay less than 100% of the purchase price to get the product, then that's a really good transaction. This Chinese policy hurts Chinese people and helps American people. In fact, it doubly helps us, because not only do we get solar panels are much lower prices, but we also no longer have to subsidize American production with tax dollars. That money can now go to other productive uses.

We should be pleased. Maybe Amy Chua can have her kids write a really nice "thank you" card.

The Political Economy of Climate Change

Or, why hoping for an international agreement in Cancun or elsewhere is senseless:

In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years.

This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars. ...

He said politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the last “time of crisis” in the 1930s and 40s. ...

“The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale of the problem we face,” he said.

There is no country that is willing to do this. Not one. Not if doing it would prevent climate change from occurring. Not if every other country was doing it too. We have had no economic growth in the past two years, more or less, and the political fallout has been enormous. Imagine the reward given to the politician that advocated forfeiting the next two decades of growth?

In two old posts I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations of how much economic well-being we'd be giving up in order to follow scientists' recommendations to combat climate change. Under one scenario, in which we sacrifice 1% of GDP growth (not total GDP) from now until 2100, our 2100 standard of living would be more than halved. Of course, that's just the medium run. As I wrote in one of those posts:

In other words, the cost of stopping climate change is infinitely high if your time horizon is long enough, but is extraordinarily large even in the short run.

The point is that sacrificing 20 years of economic growth is a very high price to pay. Economic growth is not just dollars and cents, but also technological progress that those dollars and cents make possible. Think back to 1990: no laptops, PCs were prohibitively expensive, the internet was slow, no smart phones, no HDTV, no iTunes, no sushi restaurants (except in NY and LA), etc. Fill in the blanks.

It will be impossible to convince people that it is worth it. One reason for that, as I mentioned in the posts above, is that economically it probably isn't worth it. In other words, the economic costs of dealing with climate change when it occurs is likely less than the economic costs of trying to prevent it. But even if that weren't the case, the international dimension of this is daunting. British (or American or French or German) voters will be even less willing to sacrifice two decades of growth so that other countries (China and India and Brazil) can continue to grow. Developing countries are already accused of "stealing our jobs" and other such; imagine the fate of the politician who began a stump speech with "You thought China was taking your jobs before, well I say we amplify that process as much as we can. Back to WWII-style austerity!" It's impossible to imagine a political equilibrium which limits MDC growth for the benefit of LDC growth.

The politics of climate change are as abysmal as the economics.

(Link via KPC)

Income and Concern About Climate Change

Erik Voeten at The Monkey Cage comments on a new paper demonstrating the income elasticity of demand of public morals:

The authors argue that this supports the notion that environmental concerns are a luxury good, in the sense that these concerns seem to rise to the front when economic times are good and recede when times are bad. In political science and sociology we would call this a post-materialist concern. This characterization is quite old (although not entirely uncontroversial) but the use of internet search data is novel and interesting.

The Jean Valjean Effect

Via MR, another data point to add to my "elasticity of public morals" hobby-horse (which I think I'm going to start calling "The Jean Valjean Effect", after the character in "Les Misérables", as above): people become much become less concerned about climate change when unemployment rises.

This paper uses three different sources of data to investigate the association between the business cycle—measured with unemployment rates—and environmental concern. Building on recent research that finds internet search terms to be useful predictors of health epidemics and economic activity, we find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate decreases Google searches for “global warming” and increases searches for “unemployment,” and that the effect differs according to a state’s political ideology. From national surveys, we find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate is associated with a decrease in the probability that residents think global warming is happening and reduced support for the U.S to target policies intended to mitigate global warming. Finally, in California, we find that an increase in a county’s unemployment rate is associated with a significant decrease in county residents choosing the environment as the most important policy issue. Beyond providing the first empirical estimates of macroeconomic effects on environmental concern, we discuss the results in terms of the potential impact on environmental policy and understanding the full cost of recessions.

Will the Last Anti-Globalizationist Turn Off the Lights?

Drezner points to this WaPo item, noting that IMF protests ain't what they used to be:

Opponents of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are protesting in the nation's capital.

About 20 activists gathered early Friday afternoon ahead of IMF and World Bank meetings this weekend in Washington. They say the international institutions favor banks and corporations and drive struggling economies into debt and poverty.

20 whole activists? Well blow me down. The G-20 protests in Pittsburgh last year weren't much more impressive. (The protest was at its largest when unaware Pitt students joined protestors and started chanting "Let's Go Pitt!") But this doesn't actually surprise me too much. In teaching over the past few semesters I've noticed that my students generally have no idea that the IMF, World Bank, and WTO are controversial organizations. Even fewer of them know why they're controversial. This is in stark contrast to my undergrad days, which coincided with the Battle in Seattle and other large protests. Then the anti-globalizationists were loud, proud, numerous, and armed to the teeth with a brainful of "Did you know?" statistics and the good humor of Adbusters (where the image above originated). Now nobody on campus seems to care too much.

I wonder why? I can think of a few possibilities. First, the protests were loudest in the 1990s because of NAFTA (1994), the establishment of the WTO to supplant the GATT (1995), the fairly brutal "Big Bang" liberalization of the post-Soviet economies throughout the 1990s, the harsh austerity measures that came with IMF aid following the East Asian financial crises (1997-8), and the accession of China to the WTO (2001). It was a pretty active decade for neoliberals, which means it was a fairly active decade for anti-capitalists and anti-globalizationists despite the collapse of the Soviet system a few years prior.

Since 2001? Not much has happened on the globalization front. Doha is stuck in limbo, even modest FTAs with small countries have been slow in progressing through Congress, and the IMF had basically nothing to do for nearly a decade. Now that the IMF has been pressed into action again it's largely taken a more accommodating line toward recipient states, and it's pretty difficult to argue that Greece, e.g., is a victim of Western economic imperialists. The globalization of the Naughties was a kindler, gentler, calmer globalization compared to the Brave New World Is Flat globalization of the 1990s.

But I think that's only part of it. I think a better explanation is that people in general, and college students in particular, only have attention for one cause at a time, and environmentalism has definitely become the sexy issue over the past 8-10 years. When I hear people complain about China's trade practices these days, the arguments are less about the use of sweatshop labor and more about environmental degradation. To me it seems that the one has simply supplanted the other as the most pressing issue for the socially conscious.

I don't have a good explanation for why the shift has occurred, and maybe my experience isn't representative. I'd love to hear views from others that either confirm or deny my impression. Then again, if only 20 bother to show up for an IMF protest in D.C., maybe there's something to it.

(UPDATE: Drezner responds, and I fire back here.)

Chavez: U.S. Purposefully Caused Haiti Earthquake (and a lesson in overcoming bias)

No joke:

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez Wednesday accused the United States of causing the destruction in Haiti by testing a 'tectonic weapon' to induce the catastrophic earthquake that hit the country last week.

President Chavez said the US was "playing God" by testing devices capable of creating eco-type catastrophes, the Spanish newspaper ABC quoted him as saying.

Evo Morales was only slightly more sane, calling US relief efforts a "gringo military occupation":

President Evo Morales said Wednesday that Bolivia would seek U.N. condemnation of what he called the U.S. military occupation of earthquake-stricken Haiti. "The United States cannot use a natural disaster to militarily occupy Haiti," he told reporters at the presidential palace.

"Haiti doesn't need more blood," Morales added, implying that the militarized U.S. humanitarian mission could lead to bloodshed. His criticism echoed that of fellow leftist, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who said Sunday that "it appears the gringos are militarily occupying Haiti."

Robert Farley adds comment:

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and argue that Chavez' comment is substantially stupider than Pat Robertson's, if only because I suspect that God actually could cause an earthquake in Haiti if He so desired. I suppose we could debate the point, but I also find God's motivation (get back at the Haitians for their Satanic proclivities) considerably more plausible than that which Chavez and Morales attribute to the United States; the single last thing that anyone in the Pentagon wants to do right now is devote more troops and treasure to Haiti...

I'm with him, even though I'm an unbeliever. Robertson's quip is eminently more sensible than Chavez's (although I can understand Morales' skepticism of the U.S.'s intentions given our history in Haiti).

Chavez, Morales, and Robertson are interpreting current events through their ideological prisms. Their presuppositions are absurd, so this predictably leads to bias, and these biases lead to borderline-insane statements. Farley is right to poke fun at their expense.

Unfortunately, Farley's co-blogger Charli Carpenter recently made a similar -- though much less egregious -- mistake when she referred to the Haiti earthquake as a "climate disaster". I took umbrage in comments to that post, and she responded by posting this link as evidence that the Haiti disaster could have been related to climate change. But what does the author of that post conclude about the likelihood that the Haiti earthquake was caused by climate change?

Who knows.

I don't mean to pick on Carpenter, who is one of my favorite bloggers and who provides a unique and vital voice to the blogosphere generally and the IR blogging community specifically. I know that I regularly make the same mistakes in bigger ways. And her broader point -- that the U.S. and international community don't have a coherent disaster-response program, much less standards for infrastructure development -- is certainly well-taken.

But framing matters, and framing crises like the one in Haiti as a climate disaster can be counter-productive. Even people who acknowledge the reality of global warming can be skeptical that every natural disaster is a result of these processes, so claiming any particular crisis is a result of climate change can come across as opportunistic. That turns people off, as it did when similarly dubious claims were made about Hurricane Katrina. The fact is that no one can know, nor could they prove, that the Haitian earthquake or Hurricane Katrina was caused by climate change, and such needless spinning-of-wheels distracts from what's really important: improving and institutionalizing emergency responses to disasters, and improving global infrastructure so that the effects of disasters are not as extreme.

If it's counter-productive when Chavez or Morales or Robertson do it, it's no more productive when we do it. So let's not.

UPDATE: I can't believe it, but Chavez has just jumped his own shark:

In a recent speech against capitalism (South Americans must never get tired of them) Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez lambasted Playstation videogames because they encouraged violence, which is, uncoincidentally, just what capitalism wants. According to the babelfish translation of the spanish language article, Chavez warned that:

In those electronic warlike games “cities are bombed, pumps are thrown”, and are promoted by “Capitalism” to seed the culture of the “violence” that, is saying, guarantees that soon it can “sell arms”.

I’m going to assume that “pumps are thrown” is not a mistranslation, but rather some strange Venezuelan violence phenomenon. The best part of the article though is the picture juxtaposing it

Click the link for the pic; it's well worth it. When Hugo Chavez and Tipper Gore agree on something, you know it's wrong.

Sick of Hearing About Climate Change?

You shouldn't be, because it's hardly been mentioned:



That's a graph of news coverage in the U.S. this year, across media type and outlet (high res image at the above link). Climate change isn't on it. All environmental issues, including climate change, amounted to 1.5% of news coverage combined. And yes, that includes Copenhagen.

(ht: Duncan Green)

Copenhagen

As expected, nothing much happened. I've run down the reasons why before. But there was one interesting moment (even besides the times that Chavez, Mugabe, and Ahmadinejad took the podium):

The deal eventually came together after a dramatic moment in which Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton burst into a meeting of the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders, according to senior administration officials. Mr. Obama said he did not want them negotiating in secret.

Oh, to have been a fly on that wall. Apparently, Wen Jiabao didn't take too kindly to Obama's intrusion, and sent a message of his own:

Mr. Wen did not attend two smaller, impromptu meetings during the day that Mr. Obama and United States officials conducted with the leaders of other world powers, an apparent snub that infuriated administration officials and their European counterparts.

I may have more to say about the actual agreement later, but I remain skeptical that a win-set exists for a meaningful agreement.

Quote(s) of the Day

From Copenhagen. Mugabe:

Why is the guilty north not showing the same fundamentalist spirit it exhibits in our developing countries on human rights matters on this more menacing threat of climate change?

Chavez:

If the climate was a bank, they would have already saved it.

Fair play on the last point, although criticizing governments for being active in their domestic economies is a strange complaint from Hugo. There's more at the link, and Ahmadinejad is on the schedule tomorrow.

Question: how seriously should we take these sorts of complaints? It's a logical fallacy to dispute an argument based on the character of the speaker, but still (to quote HST): do we gotta take guff from these swine? Especially when their nations' biggest industries are exports of carbon-emitting fossil fuels to the Northern economies they bemoan.

(ht: KPC)

China Won't Accept Carbon Tariffs

Via IELPB, the Chinese don't agree with Paul Krugman's assertion that carbon tariffs (or the threat of them) could help put teeth into a global climate change agreement:

"Up to now, whether it is the proposals in the U.S. climate bill or the comments by French President Sarkozy, the carbon tariffs are just a kind of deterrent used by developed countries to put pressure on developing countries, breaking the principle of 'common but differentiated responsibilities' and making them commit to their own emission cuts," Zhang told the conference.

He said retaliation would also be inevitable.

"The United States per capita emission rate is four times as big as China's. Does that mean we can impose 400 percent tax rates on all imported American goods? If so, the result is a global trade war that is good for no one and no use at all in the fight against climate change."

Also, "Frankly, if tariffs are being implemented unilaterally, they cannot be objective and cannot be non-discriminatory." Of course, if the U.S. goes down this road it won't only be China that places tariffs on U.S. goods. Considering that the U.S. is by far the world's largest per capita emitter, it would be really stupid for Obama to encourage a new norm of carbon tariffs.

This argument isn't entirely different from the standard response from developing countries when pressed to adopt strict carbon limits by developed countries: "You already got rich by polluting, and now it's our turn. Why should we have to pay to clean up your mess?" I've gotta say, it's a pretty strong argument, and it's not clear to me that developing countries will be willing to abandon it any time soon. And if developing countries aren't on board, it will difficult to get public support for self-immiserating policies in developed democracies.

The politics of climate change are just really, really bad.

Bloody-Freaking-Obvious Headline of the Day (and a terrible article, too)

And the award goes to... (drumroll)... The New York Times, for "Biggest Obstacle to Global Climate Deal May Be How to Pay for It"!

Quite frankly, that's the only obstacle to a global climate deal. What else is there? Some states are just baddies who want to ruin the globe for everyone else?

But it's just a headline, and those are usually created by someone who didn't write the actual article, so surely the meat is better. Let's take a peek at the lede:

As world leaders struggle to hash out a new global climate deal by December, they face a hurdle perhaps more formidable than getting big polluters like the United States and China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: how to pay for the new accord.

Oh. I see. Elizabeth Rosenthal of the NY Times thinks that there are two distinct hurdles: 1. Cutting emissions; 2. Paying for cutting emissions. But the only reason why #1 is an issue is because of #2. They are the same hurdle. This is pretty much a single-hurdle issue.

Maybe it gets better. 2nd paragraph (bold added):

The price tag for a new climate agreement will be a staggering $100 billion a year by 2020, many economists estimate; some put the cost at closer to $1 trillion. That money is needed to help fast-developing countries like India and Brazil convert to costly but cleaner technologies as they industrialize, as well as to assist the poorest countries in coping with the consequences of climate change, like droughts and rising seas.

Two things of note here. First, as one of the liberal econobloggers (is it Mark Thoma or Dean Baker? I can't remember) is fond of saying, just who are these "many" and "some" economists? Do they have jobs? Research experience on the questions at hand? Any political agendas? Why the anonymity? These questions might not matter much in every article, but because of the second point I think it is very important. Namely: the difference between $100bn and $1tn is 1,000%. This is not a rounding error; this is a difference of $900bn each year, starting in 2020 and projecting into the future in perpetuity (I'm guessing it's real dollars, but the Times doesn't bother mentioning it). Now, "some" economists may lowball their estimate to encourage aggressive action on climate change to suit their political priors, and "many" other economists might overestimate to discourage same, but we'd never know because we have no idea who these people are.

In the third paragraph we get more nameless experts, only this time they are "negotiators and scientists". It isn't until paragraph five that we get any meaningful information at all, and it is not very meaningful, but at least this source has a name and some words have quotes around them:

But to date there is no concrete strategy to raise such huge sums. There is not even agreement about which nations should pay or in what proportion.

“The level of ambition in funding is not matching up to the sense of urgency everyone now has,” said Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, the lead climate negotiator for Brazil, which hopes to get financing to preserve its rain forest.

He added, “Financing and an inadequate level of financing are a deal breaker for us.”

Financing is a deal breaker for everyone, which is why there has (so far) been no deal. This bit, like the rest of the article, implicitly bemoans the fact that states tend to be self-interested, that there are collective action problems, that states have difficulties making credible commitments, and that cheap talk is rampant. Strange concepts to a journalist, apparently, but any actual economist ought to have been able to come up with at least two of those. Someone who studies international interactions might even be able to fill in the gaps. Such a person might even have a name.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA:

Saudi Arabia is trying to enlist other oil-producing countries to support a provocative idea: if wealthy countries reduce their oil consumption to combat global warming, they should pay compensation to oil producers.

Man, has it been a weird news week.

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen's response reminds me of SNL:

Thomas Friedman Has It Backwards

KPC lays the beatdown on this Thomas Friedman column:

Even dumber than the notion that China, the world's biggest polluter, has gone green is the notion that going green is a zero sum competition. Friedman doesn't even try to argue for this point, he simply assumes it as self evident.

Actually, it's worse than that. If China (or any other country) reduces its emissions without the U.S. having to follow suit, that is a good thing for the U.S. Basically, Friedman is arguing that it is a bad thing for the U.S. if someone else pays the cost of reducing global emissions. That is... not the right way of looking at things.

If Friedman's view was right, there would be no coordination problem on climate change, since every state would be competing to lower their emissions. Bargaining over climate change would look nothing like the way it looks. It would resemble the space race, which (coincidentally) is the analogy Friedman uses. But bargaining over climate change doesn't look the space race in real life. One might think that this would lead Friedman to re-think his argument. It doesn't.

Also, we get a re-imagining of the Friedman Unit. It used to be a six month window into the future; apparently that left him too little wiggle room, because he's now trebled it and switched the direction:

I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.

The fact that the modification doesn't improve his logic would be funny if it weren't so tragic.