An Outdated Idea Is Still Shaping Climate Policy - The Atlantic - 0 views
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the ideas underpinning this week’s ceremony are simply outdated
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Reading news of the China talks, I thought of a recent paper by the political scientists Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger. They argue that, since the 1990s, policy makers and academics have conceived of climate change in a mostly useless way. Officials have taken their cues from economists and imagined climate change as a free-rider problem, in which the goal is to prevent nations from taking advantage of one another.
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The challenge of global climate action isn’t that other people will benefit from your emissions cuts; it’s that many interests actively oppose decarbonization. The key to passing climate policy is stitching together a coalition that will support and sustain decarbonization.
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is is familiar enough: Coal mines suffer; electric utilities prosper. Because political leaders want, above all, to maintain the support of key constituencies, climate policy flows from a societal negotiation between potential winners and potential losers, a fight between climate reformers and climate obstructionists
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Surveying the past few decades, they find that countries almost never care about free riding. “Governments implement climate policies regardless of what other countries do,” they write, “and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with free-riding has been in place or not.”
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When Donald Trump took the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, other nations did not react by withdrawing as well. Instead, revulsion at Trump himself—and his climate views by proxy—strengthened political support in those countries for continuing climate action.
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both Aklin and Mildenberger’s coalitional idea and the free-rider conception of climate action seem to operate within the Biden administration
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The president’s domestic-policy staff, epitomized by his adviser Brian Deese, is pursuing coalition-building climate policies, primarily characterized by public spending. The policies spread the economic gains of decarbonization around and increase the Biden coalition’s support for further action.
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An older guard, epitomized by Kerry, hopes to secure other countries’ involvement as well, in order to prevent free riding.
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Whose theory is better? Neither seems necessarily awful to me. Kerry’s approach actually fits within Deese’s: Securing foreign climate commitments makes the task easier at home.
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now. The Biden administration has sold climate action as concretely in America’s interests: Its infrastructure package seeks to develop green industries not out of a sense of global do-goodism but because America’s economic competitiveness is at stake. And Xi Jinping’s government has, since last year, pursued aggressive climate policy as a way to build its international prestige. China uses climate policy to sell the orderliness and sanity of its system over the cacophonous and chaotic American approach.
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So the weekend’s announcement seemed anticlimactic, to be honest. Of course the Biden administration and the Xi government now say they want further emissions reductions in the 2020s: Both governments are already acting domestically as if climate action is in their concrete interests.
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. The question for me is whether—during this transition period—the politics of free riding help or hinder Biden’s attempt to forge a stronger pro-decarbonization coalition. If Biden commits to slashing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, will that make the public pay more attention to—and feel more skittish about—the rest of his climate-policy playbook?