Copenhagen as a monumental tragedy of the Commons

We feel reasonably safe in making a precise prediction: the 45,000 people gathered at COP 15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Copenhagen will fail to come up with a genuinely workable solution to the crisis of global warming. Rather than a solution, we predict cheap posturing and an agreement that consists of little more than a license for further negotiations, all as means to evade responsibility for devising a means of effective planetary governance.

Granted, this time around the US delegation might be attending the meeting as more than observers, Nicolas Sarkozy might be threatening to impose a carbon tax on an generally unwilling French public, and delegates from Tuvalu might be eliciting more than normal levels of guilt from some people living at higher elevations. But none of that will be enough for Copenhagen to save us all from ourselves.

Global warming is an unmistakable tragedy of the commons, a collective action problem whose dimensions we outlined in an article about a previous failed meeting on global warming in 1999: Global Tragedy of the Commons at COP 6.

In the classic Tragedy of the Commons, a collectively owned natural resource is being wasted through individual over-use. With global warming the "individuals" in the equation are nations and the commonly owned natural resource is the ability of the atmosphere to absorb the infrared radiation of the sun without excessive warming of the lower atmosphere and oceans. The collective action problem here is the refusal to limit carbon emissions.

But what made COP 6 interesting was that its failure was not due simply to every nation wanting to overuse the common resource, but that they were neither equal in power nor in consumption of the common resource. Powerful nations determined to use more of the common resource gave precedence to their own near term national interests, and the outcome was anything but fair and effective.

So we again find ourselves, this time at COP 15, looking for a solution to the collective action problem. From political economy we can identify four characteristics associated with successful solutions.

First, distributional conflicts are minimal because rivals share at least a limited sense of common identity.

Second, clear boundaries defining the natural resource actually narrow the range of disputes.

Third, enforcement costs are small.

Finally, aggregate benefits are large and collective.

Unfortunately, that last characteristic is the only one that describes the global warming problem - the aggregate benefits from a solution are enormous and available to all.

Distributional conflicts surrounding global warming are anything but minimal. Most of the delegations at Copenhagen appear far more interested in avoiding shouldering their share of the burden than in seeing the job done. Consider the flat refusals to consider sacrificing economic growth to limit carbon emissions by the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India or China) and equally flat US dismissal of proposals for large scale economic aid to assist poor societies in reducing their carbon emissions.

Global warming is attributable to so many different sources of carbon emissions that narrowing the range of disputes may be impossible. Enforcement costs for any effective agreement will in fact be large, if for no other reason than that it is still difficult to accurately measure carbon emissions.

So what might an effective global warming agreement look like? Generally there are only two categories of solutions for collective action problems: regulation and property rights (or in the case of nations, territorial sovereignty). Voluntary agreements feel good but are unworkable if the economic benefits from cheating are large, and the economic benefits of ignoring voluntary limits on carbon emissions while others adhere to them are enormous.

What the world learned from the 2005 COP 11 in Montreal was that voluntary goals are the preferred instrument of states least willing to do their part in solving the problem. The probability that COP 15 will give birth to an international administrative entity with the authority and resources to enforce carbon emission reductions is extremely unlikely, leaving only property rights and territorial sovereignty as options.

How property rights and territorial sovereignty could be used to negotiate a solution can be seen in the history of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. One of the more daunting problems dealt with in that international agreement was the collective action problem of over-fishing. Although that problem is far from solved, provisions in the treaty allowing nations to extend their authority 200 nautical miles from their coasts by claiming Exclusive Economic Zones and the granting of Individual Transferable Quotas to fishermen by some nations have at least achieved the sort of reductions necessary for sustainable fishing.

That quasi-sovereignty and quasi-property rights like these may be the only way forward is also indicated by the initial success of the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme. This cap and trade program has given European Union members states experience with a carbon emission market and the introduction of mandatory ceilings in 2008.

Climate change scientist James Hanson inveighs against national carbon cap and trade deals for moral and practical reasons. He’s right that national carbon markets tend to reward the wrong people, encourage the wrong behaviour, and fail to encompass the carbon emissions of the rest of the planet. But while dividing the existing carbon footprint among states in a planetary cap and trade by specifying national shares of global carbon emissions as quasi-sovereignty rights is obviously distasteful, it could possibly be our only way to get some purchase on the problem.

And if the problem is as severe as the consensus climate science indicates, then we cannot afford to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Indeed, we can’t even allow the good to be the enemy of barely enough. Even with a planetary cap and trade that sets national ceilings that can be agreed upon the world will still need an enforcement mechanism with enough teeth to make carbon emission limits real.

But in the end, the primary obstacle to an effective global cap and trade structure is still the self-interested resistance to mandatory carbon emission ceilings that we see so much in evidence at COP 15. For all the pretty rhetoric, there is no minimum sense of common identity among the states represented. There is no sense that we are all in this together. Unless and until the negative effects of global warming frighten the major powers into action, expect another failure in Copenhagen.