We’ve
recently completed two major (and closely related) reports for the
Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin. Heinrich Boell is the
leading German Green Foundation, and has long been on the
forefront of the global movement to meld the justice and sustainability
agendas. So we're pleased to announce...
A
Brief,
Adequacy and Equity-Based Evaluation of Some Prominent Climate Policy
Frameworks and Proposals
A Critical
Appraisal of the Vattenfall Proposal for a Fair Climate Regime
In
this report, we briefly consider six approaches to a post-Kyoto climate
regime, all of which claim to be fair. We evaluate each of
them on its own terms, and also in terms of its
ability, or potential ability, to deliver the all-important
quality
that we call "developmental equity."
We say “frameworks and proposals” because one of
our six, the Climate Action Network’s Viable
Framework for Preventing Dangerous Climate Change,
is too general to be a taken as a proposal. In fact,
two of the others, the South-North Dialogue's Equity
in the Greenhouse proposal and our own Greenhouse Development
Rights, can be considered as attempts to flesh out the CAN
framework.
In any case, these six (the others are Contraction and Convergence, the Vatttenfall Proposal, and the Global Climate Certificate System) were chosen for this analysis because they all have something of a political profile, and, of course, because they all claim to be based on explicit equity principles. In this they’re notably different from most other approaches now in play and under development, and considering them as a group turns out be instructive.
And, yes, one of the six is our own Greenhouse Development Rights, but we think that you'll find that, in evaluating it, we've been remarkably, well, fair.
In this second report, we expanded our analysis of the Vattenfall Proposal. It was an interesting exercise, because, with this proposal, Vattenfall - a large, Northern European utility with substantial investments in nuclear energy and lignite based power plants - crossed an important line. It stepped beyond generalities and (a first for the business sector, as far as we know) made a specific, quantitative proposal for a global burden sharing framework that it quite explicitly claimed to be fair.
It turned out that we did not agree. But the proposal is still interesting, and merits a bit of attention.