Tackling Dangerous Climate Change: Slow‐Ramp or Springboard?
| Published date | 01 October 2010 |
| Author | Michael Mason |
| Date | 01 October 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-5899.2010.00044.x |
Tackling Dangerous Climate Change:
Slow-Ramp or Springboard?
Michael Mason
London School of Economics and Political Science
The Politics of Climate Change by Anthony Giddens.
Cambridge: Polity, 2009. 256 pp., £12.99 paperback, 978
0745646930
A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global
Warming Policies by William Nordhaus. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008. 192 pp., £17.99 hardcover,
978 0300137484
A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate
Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity
by Nicholas Stern. London: Bodley Head, 2009. 256 pp.,
£16.99 hardcover, 978 1847920379
In the wake of the failure of the UN climate negotiations
in December 2009, hindsight unfairly benefits any review
of the various manifestos on climate change policy pub-
lished before the Copenhagen meeting. The three books in
question – by a renowned sociologist (Giddens) and two
eminent economists (Nordhaus and Stern) – merit atten-
tion on the basis of their comprehensive assessments and
aspirations to global policy relevance. All recognise the
great difficulties in securing international agreement on
strong climate mitigation and adaptation measures, though
Giddens’ volume was the most prescient in anticipating the
lowest common denominator structure of the Copenhagen
Accord. Significantly, given the continuing attacks on the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), all
three authors also accept its scientific account of global
warming. In this review, I highlight the key differences in
their prescriptions for policy action to prevent dangerous
climate change, which can be characterised as ‘slow-ramp’ –
gradually increasing restraints on carbon emissions (Nord-
haus) – and ‘springboard’ – immediate deep cuts in emis-
sions, whether mainly by market mechanisms (Stern) or a
broader mix of policy instruments (Giddens).
Arguably the most significant provision in the Copenha-
gen Accord is the acceptance of the IPCC view that deep
cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are required to hold the
projected increase in global mean temperature to 2
°
C
(compared to pre-industrial levels). Warming above 2
degrees is taken to be ‘dangerous anthropogenic inter-
ference with the climate system’, which parties have an
obligation to prevent under Article 2 of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
There remain uncertainties about how likely such a tem-
perature increase is in relation to predicted greenhouse gas
emissions and concentrations, yet the severity of the prob-
lem is acknowledged by each author. Stern is the clearest
in pinpointing the dangers: given current concentrations of
greenhouse gases at 430 parts per million (ppm) CO
2
equivalent, he cites UK climate models indicating that the
chances of exceeding 2
°
C are 78 per cent at 450 ppm and
96 per cent at 500 ppm. He claims that current emission
levels and atmospheric stocks of greenhouse gases render it
highly unlikely that concentrations can be kept below 450
ppm, so policy makers must strive to stay within an upper
limit of 500 ppm, which would at least provide a strong
chance of avoiding an even more harmful rise of 3
°
C
(Stern, pp. 26–27). In other words, and this is not con-
tradicted by the short summaries on climate science in
Giddens and Nordhaus, ‘dangerous’ climate change is now
highly likely, so the policy challenge is how quick and deep
our emissions reductions should be to reduce this harm and
prevent more damaging future rises in temperature.
In choosing between possible trajectories for reducing
emissions, policy makers cannot avoid making judgements
both about future returns on capital and also how the
relative welfare of future generations is weighted in cur-
rent decision making. The rate at which we ‘discount’
future costs and benefits is critical to addressing the cli-
mate change problem, because there are significant uncer-
tainties in calculating the welfare impacts of something
affecting more than one generation. If, as Giddens and
Stern note most forcefully, dangerous climate change
poses a potentially catastrophic threat to future conditions
of human life on the planet, then the decision environ-
ment is even more fraught. There is a familiar collective
action dilemma here, which Giddens labels, seemingly
without irony, ‘Giddens’s paradox’ (Giddens, p. 2): how
to craft effective policies in the face of high-consequence
risks which fail to register as immediate and tangible
dangers?
A clear division between Nordhaus and Stern on the
issue of discounting largely accounts for their respective
support for the slow-ramp and springboard approaches to
Global Policy Volume 1 . Issue 3 . October 2010
Copyright Ó2010 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Global Policy (2010) 1:3 doi: 10.1111/j.1758-5899.2010.00044.x
Review Essay
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