Current global climate policy efforts “cannot fly,” says Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder (and also an expert on sports governance). In the Spring issue of the journal Issues in Science and Technology, Pielke writes, “What the world’s leaders have been able to agree on will not prevent the steady increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the risks of climate disruption that will result.”
Using a metaphor of the necessity for a “flight envelope” in order for aircraft to fly, Pielke, who is not skeptical of global warming science but of the solutions offered to date, says, “For a specific approach to climate action to succeed, it must operate within a policy envelope, the combination of policy design and political, economic, technological, and other conditions necessary for the approach to be effective.” The title of his paper is “Opening Up the Climate Policy Envelope.”
“In the face of ongoing failure to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions,” says Pielke, climate policymakers “are rejiggering the way they define the climate change challenge as if that will somehow allow policies that have been failing for over 25 years to become successful.”
Pielke argues, “The failure of global climate policies to date suggests that new policy options should be explored—that we may need a significantly expanded policy envelope to begin to make satisfactory progress. But rather than exploring such options, we have instead been protecting the current policy envelope from critical scrutiny. One mechanism of such protection is via scenarios and assumptions that underlie the authoritative policy assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”
But the current approaches to rolling back greenhouse gases around the planet – big, international agreements – aren’t the answer, according to Pielke. From the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to Al Gore’s 1997 failed Kyoto Protocol, to the equally doomed to failure 2015 Paris Agreement, the focus has been on mechanisms bound to fail.
These conventional approaches have been based, he argues, on “two reinforcing sets of assumptions. One is that the costs of inaction will be high due to projected large changes in climate resulting from a massive increase in future emissions and resulting negative impacts on societies. The second is that necessary incremental actions to reduce and ultimately eliminate emissions will be technologically feasible at low cost, or even at no net cost at all—that such actions are economic and political no-brainers.”
Maybe. Maybe not. “What if there are other ways to address the challenge?” asks Pielke. “What if our view has focused on a policy regime that cannot succeed? What if we need to think differently in order to succeed? How many more decades of failing to make real progress will be necessary before asking such questions is not only politically acceptable but unavoidable? What if it is then too late?”
Pielke challenges the heavy reliance on a particular set of assumptions about the growth of carbon emissions, the “Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5”, which relies on the notion that use of coal will increase dramatically over the 21st Century. The International Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report adopts this approach. “Despite its outlier status, RCP 8.5 is the most commonly used scenario in climate impact studies, appearing in thousands of academic papers,” Pielke says.
RCP 8.5, he says, is unrealistic. Yet it “remains a scenario favored in most climate impacts studies published in the academic literature. One reason for this is obvious: because the scenario generates very high carbon dioxide emissions, the associated climate impacts projected in climate models can also be very large, and thus lend continued urgency to calls for emissions reductions, and supporting economic models that show very high costs of future climate change impacts.”
When presented with critiques that the current policy orthodoxy isn’t working, Pielke observes, the conventional response has been a new form of “climate denialism,” which he says is “manifested in the Paris Agreement’s call for a more stringent target (1.5°C), made seemingly feasible by the incorporation of assumptions about the future that are at best wildly optimistic.”
“We need to break free of such assumptions in order to recognize that the current policy envelope does not contain the pathways to meaningful progress, but rather is an obstacle to discovering such pathways,” Pielke concludes. He argues, “We don’t know much about the scope of the climate policy envelope because we have done little to explore its dimensions since it was first locked in more than 25 years ago. Climate policy business as usual means that we go exactly where we have been headed, repeating the same behavior, and modifying our assumptions to accommodate our continuing failure to make progress.”
— Kennedy Maize