COP21, peak oil and climate policy
implementation
Surprisingly, there are still engineers
who seem to be concerned about the peak oil. Jean-Pierre Jancovici
- well-known in French media- made a speech last month at1
BaptistU in Hong Kong that was mainly on peak oil but with some
slides on the textbook
IPAT identity2
at the end of his presentation in order to reach a climax in the
drama: this is the end of growth because we are depleting of oil and
on the top of that, he argued, populations are going to be decimated
as it is the only way to satisfy the IPAT identity.
Usually I ask such pessimistic speakers
how many kids they have to check the consistency of their
thinking3...
Instead, I made him address the following question: “Which
constraint on fossil fuels do you think is the most stringent: the
one on climate change or the one exhaustibility?” Indeed the two
issues are in some sort mutually exclusive: being short of oil makes
it easier to cope with climate change, as less GES will be created.
At least, the two problems are not reinforcing each other. He did
acknowledge that it was climate change even if he seems convinced
that running out of oil is already in the countries’ growth figures
(or will be soon…that was not entirely clear to me).
Having engineers now convinced that
climate change is the issue number one, should we be optimistic about
climate policies that will be implemented in the near future?
Nowadays, economists know quite well which environmental policies
could allow reaching the first best (or nearly). However, they are
hardly implemented. There has been a lot of talking, a lot of debates
and a lot of events around COP21. It will now start soon (some will
say it is already finished since to avoid a “Copenhagen scenario”
a lot of things have been decided in advance) and one may wonder what
to expect.
Many people do
not expect that much. First note that COP21 implies that 20 COPs
already happened! Second, each negotiator’s first objective is to
secure the lowest targets possible for his/her country while the
second one is to congratulate all participants at the end of the
event for such time, energy and money devoted to trying and solve the
climate change issue. This is mainly communication. However, climate
change is a global issue and there is no way to avoid international
negotiation. As a reaction to the expected statu quo, some economists
have therefore called for a uniform carbon price in view of COP21.
The rationale was to propose a very simple instrument that would then
be easier to implement. However it seems quite far form a first best
situation. Also note that in Hong Kong, there is nearly no
environmental policy (except some environmental education). At the
4th Nobel Laureates Symposium on Global Sustainability, 22-25th April
2015, Christine Loh (under Secretary for the Environment in Hong
Kong) publicly said "We now know what we should do but we cannot
do it. Anybody who has any ideas should help us". It seems that
the main problem is implementation, or political acceptability. Why
not design an environmental economics that explicitly accounts for
political constraints? For the time, let’s hope COP21 will turn out
more ambitious than we thought!
1
The event was co-organized by CEFC.
http://www.cefc.com.hk/fr/event/how-does-the-energy-crisis-influence-the-world-economy-and-the-geopolitical-ecosystem/
2 For
a refresher:
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.php?idp=50
3
Having written a book entitled “Climate change explained to my
daughter”, we can infer he has at least one.
