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Oslo lecture October 2014
Climate Change and the Prospects for Eco-Social Policies
Prof Ian Gough
LSE, UK
Scope of this lecture
• Attempt to discuss together both global policies and national policies– Local policies left to one side
• Re national policies I mainly draw on the UK as exemplar of rich countries
• Focus on climate change – not other environmental challenges– The non-correspondence of places of pollution
and spaces of impacts
The diabolical problem: global ‘carbon space’ vanishing fast
• To achieve a 50-50 chance of avoiding global warming exceeding 2℃ by the end of the century, and taking population growth into account, global emissions must be cut from around 7 tonnes CO2e per person per year now to no more than 2 by 2050: decline of c3.5 times
• If global ouput per person continues to grow at its present rate (roughly trebling by 2050), then global emissions per unit of output must fall by a factor of c9 times by 2050 – only 34 years away
• And remember a 50-50 chance is like playing Russian roulette with bullets in three chambers!
Social impacts of climate change
• Working Group II Report on ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, IPCC Fifth Report 2014: chapter headings:– Freshwater resources– Terrestrial and inland water systems– Coastal systems and low-lying areas– Ocean systems– Food security and food production systems– Urban Areas– Rural Areas,– Key economic sectors and services– Human health– Human security– Livelihoods and poverty.
• 2011 UK Foresight Report adds (among others):– resource scarcity– degraded coastal infrastructure– disruption of shipping and oil supplies– collapse of weak states and rising distress migration.
The distributional justice problem
• Climate change impacts across space and time• Brundtland: sustainable development meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs
• This entails three components of justice:– global justice– intergenerational justice– national social justice
• This talk discusses some of the interrelations
The double injustice
Developed first to explain global environmental injustice:
– Nations and peoples least responsible for climate change are and will suffer the greatest impacts of CC
But can be applied within countries: – Higher income households contribute more to
CO2 emissions than lower income households
– poor and vulnerable households suffer more from environmental degradation
From double to triple injustice
• In addition, poorer nations and peoples may suffer more from climate mitigation policies – extending biofuels can drive up food prices
• Again, this can occur within countries– raising carbon taxes or prices has regressive
effects, burdening lower income households more
• This is the fundamental case for ‘eco-social’ policies that pursue both social distributive and environmental goals
Global dilemmas: human needs and necessary emissions
• World Bank:– ‘If all 40 million drivers of SUVs in the US switched to fuel-
efficient cars, the savings alone would offset the emissions generated in providing electricity to 1.6 billion people in the South’
• Other studies show the trivial costs of bringing everyone up to HDI abd other basic need standards
• Agarwal and Narain, then Henry Shue distinguished:– Necessary emissions
– Luxury emissions
‘Just emissions’
• ‘It is inequitable to ask some people to surrender necessities so that other people can retain luxuries’
• I want to research whether this provides a normative and operational distributive criterion between and within countries
• This informs the ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ campaign– The best worked out proposal so far?
‘Greenhouse Development Rights’
Distinguishes:• National responsibilities for climate change
– cumulative emissions of CO2 since 1990
• National capacities to fund mitigation and adaptation programmes: GDP per head
• But recognises luxury v necessary emissions withincountries– Discount incomes below $8500 per head– Chakravarty et al predicts that by 2030 of one billion ‘high
emitters’ one half will live outside the OECD
• This could provide an international allocation of obligations which meets both environmental and social justice
Stern’s argument against GDR
• To focus on distributive justice in terms of equal allocations is to divert attention from the urgent need to decarbonise the entire world’s energy system
• ‘There is little point in equitable access to a train wreck’
• Equity issues should take the form proposed by the Indian government at Cancun: ‘equitable access to sustainable development’
• This OK, but insufficient, even on pragmatic grounds– Global inequities will block a global agreement– National social inequities will hamper rich country’s
support
Needs, emissions and social policies
• We need a firmer basis for conceiving of necessary emissions
• Won’t ‘necessary emissions’ differ widely across the world?
• Can we within rich countries distinguish necessary from luxury emissions?
• A very brief summary here
A theory of human need
• Basic needs- those preconditions that enable people to– Form and pursue their own goals
– Participate in society
– Critically reflect on the conditions in which they find themselves
• Universal basic needs:– Health
– Critical autonomy
Human needs and sustainable wellbeing
• I argue that only human needs can provide a sound conception of human wellbeing across cultures, countries and generations
• See new article on my website: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/goughi/
Calculating basic emissions
• These needs are universal• But need satisfiers vary according to time, place
and context– Goods, services, activities and relationships
• To construct and estimate these requires combining two sorts of knowledge:– Codified knowledge of experts– Experiential knowledge of people in communities
• Can this be used to estimate basic satisfiers and then basic emissions?
Example: calculating basic emissions in the UK
• The Bradshaw ‘decent life budget’ methodology– consensual discussions
– Expert feedback
• On this basis negotiated quite radical shifts in consumption in the UK:– No private cars
– Housing geared to family size
• Druckman and Jackson: If everyone on this standard, necessary emissions in UK would be 37% lower than actual consumption emissions– A significant saving, but not enough
‘Luxury’ versus ‘lock-in’
• Not all excess consumption and emissions are ‘luxury’
• Part driven by ‘lock-in’: structures and institutions outside individual choice
– Commuting, shopping in supermarkets etc
• These necessary for participation in society as it currently exists – and thus critical for satisfaction of basic needs
Towards an eco-social policy
• To target consumption emissions in the West requires more radical policies to modify preferences and behaviour, and to constrain total consumption demand
• Will need to tackle both luxury and lock-in
• To combine these goals with social equity will require novel forms of policy integration: new proactive eco-social policies
• Consider seven here
1. Variable energy prices
• Rising block tariffs?
• Ie. Extend the range of basic goods subject to some measure of non-price allocation
– Household energy
– Water
• Can this be achieved with private ownership of basic utlities?
2. Energy efficiency policies
• Green Deal to retrofit homes and buildings in UK
• German KfW programme more successful here (Power reserch):
– regulatory framework
– financial incentives
– clarity of the message about integrating home energy efficiency and micro-generation’
• Requires regional banks and strong local government?
3. Feed-in tariffs
• Feed-in tariffs for domestic and community electricity generation
• Again German success: 700,000 energy suppliers
• A means of diversifying ownership of energy supply and building a political constituency?
• But evidence that dominated by large farmers and landowners?
4. Tax consumption/ high energy luxuries
These different:• Robert Frank: tax consumption
– spending habits of the rich foster an unending expansion in general notions of material adequacy
– equals a progressive income tax that excludes savings– But this would benefit higher-income groups – who save
more – and would over time increase, not diminish, wealth inequality.
• More appropriate is selective taxation of high emissions consumption, such as air travel– Here idea of ‘luxuries’ challenges orthodox assumptions
about consumer sovereignty
5. Personal carbon allowances and trading
• A downstream version of upstream carbon trading
– Directly progressive (though still some low income losers)
– Direct impact on consumer behaviour likely
– But would require carbon labelling of thousands of goods (and services?); Tesco experience suggests unlikely without regulation
– Problem of combining with ETS
6. Reduce working hours
• Likely ‘scale effect’ on emissions, but also ‘composition effect’
• Incremental by taking out productivity increases in ‘leisure’: – Change in annual hours of work 1980-2010: US -33
hours, Germany -300 hours
• But would require ancillary ‘traditional’ social programmes to avoid low pay and ‘time inequality’
• The opposite to current ‘social investment’ strategy
7. A preventive welfare state?
• Move social policy upstream and integrate with emissions policy
• Eg.1. Policies to shift personal transport modes away from cars
• Eg.2. Policies to reduce meat-eating, could potentially– Improve health– Reduce GHG emissions, and– Reduce health care costs
• Requires integrated policy-making
The political economy of eco-social policies
• But many of these policies interact with the organisation of the economy
• Implies a more socialised, regulated, directed form of capitalism
• Neo-liberal capitalism at the opposite extreme: excessive financialisation, short-termism and anti-social greed
• This leads to vareties of capitalism
Varieties of capitalism and differences in climate mitigation
• Christoff and Eckersley:
– ‘Laggards’: US, Canada, Australia
– ‘Leaders’: Germany, Nordics – and UK
• Obvious links here with coordinated economies and welfare states:
– Dryzek and Meadowcroft: coordinated market economies with social democratic welfare states tend to see economic and ecological values as mutually reinforcing
Do welfare regimes matter?
• Max Koch argues that generous welfare states still rely on high income/high growth capitalism
– And redistribution may worsen emissions
– Thus finds that lower income Med countries and some Anglo countries, eg NZ, do well
– But much depends on dependent variables: total emissions v policies in place and future targets
• But affirms the truth that welfare states thus far have been built on ‘growth states’