Climate change and the environment

Climate change could be tackled in various ways. We could aim to throttle its causes. We could aim to keep the climate, as measured by a wide range of physical, biological and financial indicators stable. Or we could aim instead to target for improvement all aspects of the environment, whether or not their degradation has been caused by climate change.

Policymakers have mostly gone for the first option: to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, believing that they are the main driver of climate change. Myself, I've advocated in the past the targeting of an array of indicators, including the impacts of adverse climatic events, but also physical, social and financial measures of climate change.

I'm now more inclined to the third option, and think we should try to solve our environmental problems however they are caused, rather than focus on trying to prevent climate change. My thinking is partly a result of humanity's having done almost nothing actually to stop the climate changing.

 For buy-in we need meaningful outcomes

What’s wrong with targeting greenhouse gas emissions?

• We don’t really know what’s happening to the climate;
• We don’t really know why it's happening;
• We don’t know whether trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will solve whatever the problem might be;
• We do know that targeting greenhouse gas emissions will have large upfront costs, and that any benefits will be way into the future, uncertain and, even on the best advice of the experts, tiny.

Admittedly the science appears to say that greenhouse gas emissions are changing the climate in ways that adversely affect human, plant and animal life, though it’s less convincing about the effects of reducing these emissions. But that’s not really relevant. There’ll be no action taken, and indeed there have been no significant actions taken (see here, here and here), because, in my view, the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and adverse impacts is too tenuous and abstract to generate buy-in. And buy-in is what we urgently need.

Note that I am not suggesting we don’t target greenhouse gas emissions: only that any decision to do so needs to be made on the basis of whether it’s the most efficient way of achieving our environmental goals.  Professor Jem Bendell paints a cataclysmic picture:

The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease, and war…

>My suggestion is that planetary well-being would be better enhanced by aiming explicitly to reduce such scourges -  starvation, destruction, disease and war, than by targeting, or pretending to target, greenhouse gas emissions. Reduced starvation, disease and war are goals that are less abstract and more meaningful to ordinary people than climate change. By targeting them we’re more likely to generate the buy-in that is essential to bring about changes that will create, at least in the short term, losers. All the evidence tells us that, after many years of exhortation, dire warnings, and extreme climatic events, there’s very little buy-in to the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

As well as aiming to reduce starvation, disease and war, we could explicitly target also environmental goals that mean something to the non-experts whose buy-in is necessary. These could include reduced air and water pollution, less noise, reduced impacts of adverse climatic events, and reduced loss of biodiversity.

It’s not so difficult: we re-frame and, if necessary, re-orientate policy to meet these goals, rather than a target level of greenhouse gas emissions which is, at best, only a putative means of achieving some of them.

Environmental Policy Bonds

I propose that we reward the sustained achievement of our environmental goals. Further, I propose that we do so in ways that channel market forces – the most efficient way we yet know of allocating society’s scarce resources – into the achievement of our environmental goals. I further suggest that we do this is by nationally or globally backed Environmental Policy Bonds. These could target our biggest environmental challenges, regardless of their supposed source. A bond regime would allow us to target long-term goals, and stimulate research into diverse approaches to solving our problems.

Importantly, the bonds wouldn't dictate how our environmental goals shall be reached. It's quite possible that investors in the bonds will find that targeting greenhouse gas emissions for reduction is the most cost-effective way of solving some of our environmental problems. The crucial distinction between such targeting, and the way emissions are being targeted today, is that bondholders will target emissions only if doing so - at the time and in the areas they decide to do so - is the best way of achieving our goals. They will be making their decisions on the basis of the science (and economics) of the relevant time and place, rather on the fossilised science of today. Their solutions, unlike today's non-solution, will be diverse and adaptive. And - another important difference - the people who look for and implement them will be rewarded only if they are actually successful in improving our environment.