Climate and the environment: it could have been so different

Several years ago Michelle Nijhuis reviewed Losing earth: the decade we almost stopped climate change, by Nathaniel Rich. She wrote about missed opportunities to address climate change in the 1980s. In 1980 the US National Commission on Air Quality convened a meeting of climate and energy: 

[W]hen it came time to commit to specific solutions, the experts began to hesitate. China, the Soviet Union, and the United States were all accelerating coal production; [President] Carter was planning to invest $80 billion in synthetic fuels. Proposed laws or regulations would focus attention on the costs of emissions reduction, instantly politicizing the issue. “We are talking about some major fights in this country,” said the economist Thomas Waltz. “We had better be thinking this thing through.” By the third day, Rich recounts, the experts had abandoned solutions and were even reconsidering their statement of the problem, loading it with caveats. (Were climatic changes “highly likely” or “almost surely” to occur? Were said changes of an “undetermined” or “little-understood” nature?) In the end, the meeting’s final statement was weaker than the language the commission had used to announce the workshop .... Early warnings, Michelle Nijhuis, New York Review of Books, 27 June 2019

Then, as now, politicians' priority is to avoid difficult 'fights'. Much easier to move on to other, less contentious, issues. 

One of the advantages of Social Policy Bonds is that they put in place positive incentives. They channel self-interest into the public good. Sure, bondholders could lobby in favour of public funds being diverted to their target goal, but there is nevertheless a presentational advantage. With Climate Stability Bonds, people would be rewarded for avoiding climate change and its negative impacts. The climate goal could be expressed as a range of physical, ecological, financial and social indicators, all of which would have to fall into an approved range for a sustained period before the bonds would be redeemed. Importantly, the bonds could work well regardless of whether people believe or disbelieve (or say they disbelieve) that the climate is in fact changing. As with other goals that Social Policy Bonds could target, what matters is that the goal is achieved, not the effort required to achieve it, which means that, if the climate were somehow to revert to that deemed to be acceptable, bondholders would be paid out, even if they merely held the bonds and hoped for that outcome. Of course, if a bond regime were to target a goal seen as likely to be achieved, the float price of the bonds would be close to their redemption value. 

I say all this knowing that it's unlikely Climate Stability Bonds are ever going to be issued. They would require a huge redemption fund, backed by governments the world over, and there's no will now for such an initiative. The missed opportunities abound also for other environmental issues. Thus, the current Economist tells us that:

One study found the average size of wildlife populations had shrunk by 95% since 1970 in Latin America and the Caribbean - more than in any other region of the world. The drug lords' side-hustle: smuggling macaws, jaguars and frogs, the Economist, 10 October 2024

It's to be expected that vested interests will oppose policies that threaten their short-term financial goals. It's more of a tragedy that those who should be showing leadership back down in the face of such opposition. The Social Policy Bond principle, with their focus on rewarding meaningful social and environmental outcomes, could help, but inspired leadership would still be required. I'm not holding my breath.

Useless organisations

Adam Kogeman writes to the Economist:

 [T]he UN does some good through the provision of humanitarian aid, but it is a net negative contributor to global peace and prosperity. [It] prevents no conflicts and brings about no peace. Millions of Rwandans, Ukrainians, Sudanese, Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis and Israelis, among others, can attest to that. It doesn’t follow through on its grandiose but unserious pledges to heal the environment and improve the lot of the world’s poorest. It provides diplomatic cover to the world’s worst human-rights abusers and physical cover to terrorist groups. It is consumed by a rabid obsession with denigrating the world’s only Jewish state. ...America’s occasional inability to hold sway at such a compromised, ineffectual institution is a reflection of the UN’s dysfunction and illegitimacy, not an indictment of its unmatched geopolitical influence. Letter to the editor, Adam Kogeman, the Economist, 26 September 2024

Whatever their founding intentions, I believe that every institution, be it public- or private-sector, including government (at any level), trade union, church, university, charity or large corporation, eventually, inevitably, becomes consumed by one over-arching goal: self perpetuation. Vested interests get bedded in, acquiring the power to oppose meaningful reform. (See one of my previous posts here about how, despite the many efforts of many organisations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nothing has been achieved.)

[T]the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Washington has sometimes claimed greatly to have advanced human understanding of addiction, largely thanks to itself, at the same time as the country in which it is located has suffered from an unprecedented epidemic of deaths from overdose—of drugs of addiction. The total of these deaths far exceeds that of all American military deaths since the end of the Second World War, two major wars included. ...The vast increase in the study of crime has not resulted in the diminution of crime, on the contrary, though it has certainly increased the number of criminologists. ... Another field of study whose academics and practitioners have made claims to great strides in understanding is psychology. This study too has undergone a vast expansion, indeed out of all recognition. Psychology is now the third most popular subject in American colleges and universities, and no doubt elsewhere as well. ...Despite unprecedentedly large numbers of psychologists, the psychological condition of the population does not seem to have improved. Finding a cure for psychology, Theodore Dalrymple, Quadrant, 30 September 2024

Whereas large private-sector corporations at least, in theory, are subject to the discipline of the market (which they do their best to undermine), those organisations whose supposed goals are to solve our social and environmental problems face no such restraint. All of which means, to me, that we need a new type of organisation: ones whose every activity is dedicated to achieving their stated goals. A Social Policy Bond regime, targeting broad, long-term goals, would lead to the creation of such organisations. They'd be driven entirely by financial incentives, which need not be as mercenary as it sounds. We pay people to teach, for example, or to care for people, but that doesn't mean those professions should be regarded with the disdain that many feel when the concept of paying people to achieve social goals - a la Social Policy Bonds - is mentioned. 

A bond regime would work by raising funds to pay investors in the bonds only when a targeted social goal had been achieved. Incentives would cascade down from investors to all those contracted to work to achieve the goal. In the long run, a new type of organisation would evolve with the sole function of funding the most promising approaches to achieving the goal and, importantly, terminating those that are failing. Payment is thus inextricably linked to achievement of the goal. For more about such an organisation see here.