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Climate Change-Science, Strategies, and Solutions
Editor: Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change
Publisher information: Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001, 400 pp
ISBN: 90-04-12276
Negotiating the Kyoto Protocol
Author: Heike Schroder, University of Erfurt, Germany
Publisher information: Munster: Lit-Verlag, 2001, 193 pp
ISBN: 3-8258-5446-9
The Fuel Tax Protests in Europe 2000-2001
Authors: John Mitchell and Muge Dolun, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London
Publisher information: London: RIIA, 2001, 71pp
ISBN: 1-86203-135-5
The number of books looking at climate policy issues is growing rapidly. The three books reviewed here cover different aspects of climate policy and also have very differing qualities.
Claussen has brought together all the resources of the Pew Center, a U.S. think tank advocating action to combat climate change, to edit a satisfyingly up-to-date collection of articles by competent authors on a wide range of aspects of climate policy. Many chapters are based on earlier Pew Center reports and most target a U.S. audience. The book can be strongly recommended for economists and political scientists who become interested in climate change discussion and want to get a quick overview. It is structured in five main parts with a very useful "facts and figures" section and a detailed index to round it off. Each part starts with an overview chapter.
The first part looks at the science of climate change and its regional impacts. While the science chapter by Tom Wigley gives a good and concise summary of current knowledge, the impacts discussed only relate to the U.S. agricultural sector, coasts, and water resources. However, the chapters clearly show the uncertainties in assessing impacts even in a country with very good data availability.
The second part looks at global climate policy strategies, with a chapter on the EU, U.S., Japan, and a summary of studies on the electricity sector in five major developing countries. The introduction by Claussen tries to explain on one page why it has been found difficult to advance climate policy in recent years. While the EU chapter is a bit black and white, the chapters on the U.S. and Japan neatly explain the problems that have led to these two countries becoming more and more reluctant to embrace climate policy action. U.S. inaction is explained by the difficulty in getting policies implemented in the cumbersome "checks and balances" governance system, optimism that a cheap technical fix will be found in the (near) future, a general aversion to taxes and government intervention, and public opinion that is only mobilised by a "clear image" of some catastrophe. However, the assertion that the Clinton administration's decision to accept targets and timetables slowed the process, giving ammunition to domestic opponents of climate policy, is astonishing, yet no credible explanations are given. The Japanese situation is peculiar as the energy efficiency of industry is declining and household energy use is growing quickly despite a decade of economic stagnation. The increasing opposition to nuclear power has made it more difficult to reach reduction targets. This explains the desperate clinging to additional sinks. The studies on Argentina, Brazil, China, India, and Korea are summarised in an extremely short manner, while the description of the linear programming (LP) model used to derive forecasts for 2015 is detailed. All scenarios show dramatic emissions increases and do not show any substantial substitution of fossil fuels by renewables.
Part 3, on the economics of climate policy, is by far the strongest and reunites analyses by some of the more renowned names in this field. Stavins gives a very nice introduction to the critical questions that should be used by any university course on climate change economics. He first discusses difficulties in evaluating the benefits of reducing climate change and then describes the different categories of abatement costs with an eye on the dynamic efficiency of policy instruments. Furthermore, the discounting issue and the question of distribution are addressed. Weyant manages to clarify the arcane world of economic modelling in a very readable way by discussing the main assumptions of models and graphically showing the differences between models of the Energy Modelling Forum family. A section on technological change is a good appetizer for the subsequent chapter by Edmonds, Roop, and Scott, who give a very good description of the issue of technical progress in assessing costs of climate policy action. They first look at past technical changes before going into the detail of technology modelling in different models. Ehrlich and Brunello describe how information-based changes in the economy allow quicker turnover of capital and thus faster increases in efficiency. A chapter on emissions trading by Edmonds and his group follows. This focuses rather too much on the results of the Second Generation Model. Unfortunately, the project-based Kyoto Mechanisms are just left out. Reinhard and Packard set out a vision of a sensible manager who tries to integrate climate change and policy as one of the many risks his business faces.
Part 4 discusses climate policy strategies within the U.S. For a European reader, the examples often do not seem particularly promising or effective, but in the much more restrained U.S. context they really represent progressive action. After an overview by New Hampshire State Governor Shaheen, Brown describes the approaches of New Jersey and Oregon. While the former is a typical example of a voluntary agreement, and thus likely to fail, the latter's carbon emission standards for new power stations-coupled with the possibility of providing offsets-can be compared with some of the stronger European approaches and has mobilised several million dollars of investment in emissions reductions. A chapter on the strategy of Austin, Texas shows the problems that even positively engaged local governments of quickly growing U.S. metropolises face without any "biting" policy instruments at their disposal. The potential of European municipalities is much bigger in this respect. A somewhat advertisement-style presentation of Intel's voluntary efforts to reduce PFCs in semiconductor production and a very detailed discussion of greenhouse gas reporting of different U.S. companies round off this section.
The final part, "current developments," has a short and somewhat superficial chapter by Claussen on international climate negotiations but a very detailed discussion of U.S. legislation on climate change, ranging from the (in)famous Byrd-Hagel senate resolution of 1997 to the latest domestic U.S. bills on incentives for sequestration. This chapter is a must for European readers who want to understand legislative activities in the U.S. The "facts and figures" section lists global and U.S. emissions data and is a good primer for anyone interested in these basic data.
Overall, the Pew Center book has a wealth of interesting and up-to-date analyses, but clearly reflects the U.S. preoccupation of its authors.
Schroder's book, a German PhD thesis, suffers from the fact that a general analysis of the Kyoto Protocol has been conducted in several books during the last years. Grubb et al. (1999), Oberthur/Ott (1999) and Mwandosya (2000) have made general analyses, while Taalab (1998) has analysed NGO positions at the Kyoto Conference and contains a comprehensive collection of NGO position papers issued there. Unfortunately, Schroder cannot add new knowledge or theoretical explanations to the existing books and her references have some important gaps. However, for a newcomer, her book is well structured and does not contain factual mistakes. After a concise introduction of the history of climate science, Schroder describes the process leading to the UNFCCC. She then describes the negotiation positions of the EU, U.S., and Japan. Unfortunately, the very important sub-national industry and NGO interests are only superficially analysed. An analysis of the Kyoto Conference follows which underrates the role of NGOs. The 70-page annex with the text of the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol could have been avoided.
Mitchell and Dolun are the first to analyse events that could have potentially severe consequences for the implementation of climate policy instruments in industrialised countries: namely, the protracted civil disturbances by interest groups in several Western European countries after the oil price rises of mid-2000. This episode led to a reduction of fuel taxes in several countries and the abolition of plans to raise fuel taxes in the long run. Their short book is structured in two parts. The first one contains a discussion of the events in France, a much more detailed discussion of the sequel in the UK, and a very brief overview what happened in other European countries. Part two discusses the underlying arguments the protesters used.
Chapter one describes the powerful position of the haulage sector in France. While petrol tax had been high but constant for a long time, diesel taxes had been raised regularly in small steps for climate policy reasons. While the oil price rose strongly in mid-2000, a fiscal surplus was announced that made it easy for interest groups to argue for tax reductions. The first unrest was started by fishermen blockading ports, but was soon taken up by hauliers, who used the very effective tactic of blocking fuel depots. Despite fuel stations running dry, the general public was supportive. The government thus caved in quickly in the first week of September, gave up future increases in diesel tax, reduced the tax on domestic heating oil by 30 percent, and offered special subsidies to the most active interest groups.
The British situation was special inasmuch as the diesel tax equalled the petrol tax and the tax rate had been increased regularly by considerable amounts since 1993 ("escalator"), again, explicitly for climate protection reasons. This led to the UK fuel tax load becoming the highest in Western Europe. But when oil prices started to rise in late 1999, the escalator was abolished in the March 2000 budget. Hauliers and motoring associations had been lobbying strongly against fuel tax increases since 1996, with growing acceptance in the general public since mid-1999. When the French protesters won the concessions described above, hauliers in the UK took up their tactics. These proved very effective, as within one week only 10 percent of filling stations had supplies left. An astonishing feature was the decentralised way the protests had been organised, which bypassed the traditional associations of hauliers and motorists. The main actors were an ad-hoc "Fuel Forum" and "Farmers for Action" group. As in France, the public and media supported the protesters. In contrast to France, the government took its time to decide but reduced fuel taxes by 6 percent, nicely veiled as "temporary extension" of tax reduction for low-sulphur fuel. Strikingly, green groups were not very active trying to argue for keeping the tax level during the protests; this however changed when there was a threat of renewed protests in November 2000.
Chapter three is disappointing, as the developments in other European countries are only vaguely sketched out. It would have been interesting to analyse the case of Germany where the government not only did not lower fuel taxes but kept an "escalator" in place while giving very targeted subsidies to specific interest groups.
Part two of the book is a bit sketchy. It rather nicely shows the problematic European dimension of differing fuel taxation strategies that led to growing gaps impacting on competition between the hauliers of different EU countries. However, the blunt argument that externalities of road transport would more than be covered by UK fuel taxes and thus the "escalator" was no longer justified, is a bit too easy given the continued increase of transport-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The same applies to the point that a greenhouse gas trading system would lead to a lower cost-per-litre of fuels. As long as there is no economy-wide climate policy this argument does not hold. Moreover, negative externalities of transport (noise, appropriation of public space) are clearly higher than those of other processes emitting greenhouse gases.
Remarks:
http://pub.iges.or.jp/modules/envirolib/view.php?docid=412
Full text is available on EBSCOhost database: http://www.ebscohost.com/
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