5 takeaways:
➀ The road to Glasgow began in Rio. In the late 1980s, governments from around the world came together for the Montreal Protocol, which regulated chemicals that damaged the Earth’s ozone layer. It was the first and last climate agreement to enjoy bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, nations began to try to regulate carbon, but negotiators ran into the buzzsaw of local politics, as leaders weighed domestic pressures against a global ideal. “The Bush administration at that time had become aware of the potential power of the issue of carbon, but also had become aware of intense political domestic opposition to engaging in a systemic regime about carbon,” said Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now at Wake Forest University. The U.S. instead opted for voluntary climate change action plans, which had little effect, he said. Carbon levels kept increasing.
➁ The 1997 Kyoto Protocol treated developed and developing nations differently. It held richer nations to tougher emissions standards on the theory that if you broke it, you fix it. The developing world argued that holding them to the same rigorous standards would keep them impoverished, Meiburg said.
➂ Rich nation climate activists are declaring COP26 a failure — but on climate change, all politics is local. In developing countries, carbon regulations are seen as dooming local efforts to catch up with wealthy nations, including former colonial powers. In the United States, efforts to tax carbon run into ingrained tax resistance, and efforts to regulate carbon run into constituents in coal country. “What is the most important thing to national political actors in entering into international agreements?” Meiburg asked. “The answer is the domestic political consequences of those agreements. In other words, people see their activities in the international sphere … through the lens of, ‘What’s this going to do to me politically at home?’”
➃ The scientific “debate” evolved into a partisan one — and one portrayed as a he said/she said story. Meiburg said that opponents of action on climate change took advantage of the norm that journalists must present both sides of a story. That’s good — as long as the true balance of opinion is accurately reflected. On climate science, however, the vast majority of scientists have long held one view, but news stories too often presented two views equally. Later, carbon regulation foes personalized the issue. “You also started to see a launch of ad hominem attacks on climate scientists — very aggressive public relations on the part of denialists and an effort to reframe the issue by focusing on not the consequences of climate change but the cost of the control measures that might be required in order to reduce carbon emissions,” Meiburg said.
➄ Efforts to enforce international agreements have floundered on inconsistent accounting standards. Documenting how much carbon is put into the atmosphere from emissions, or how much is removed through forestation, is an inexact science, Meiburg said. “I’m sure there are efforts to try to promote consistency in how this kind of accounting work is made,” Meiburg said, but the world is still struggling to agree on measures of carbon accounting and sustainability accounting.
Speaker:
Stan Meiburg, Former Acting Deputy Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Director, Master of Arts in Sustainability Program, Wake Forest University
This program was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
