Wide-ranging international treaties like the Kyoto Protocol may not be the best ways to battle global warming, according to three California scientists. Arguing that global treaties are only as effective as their least willing signatories, the team says that climate change is better fought from the bottom up.
Countries, regional partnerships, U.S. states, and even individual private firms, the scientists believe, can establish various controls to limit climate-changing activities—and many already have.
There are hundreds of independent policies at work now contributing to the effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of climate change.
The European Union, for example, limits emissions from about 12,000 industrial plants. And the United Kingdom and World Bank have established emissions-credit trading systems. Under these plans plants that exceed emissions limits may buy emissions "credits" from plants that emit relatively little greenhouse gas.
The United States government famously rejects greenhouse gas limitations. The U.S. nevertheless has at least two dozen firms that have imposed their own limits. And the rejection of binding limitations at the federal level has not stopped nine northeastern U.S. states from collaborating on their own plan to cap carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
Lowest Common Denominator
The authors of the new article, which will be published tomorrow in the journal Science, point out that international treaties tend toward the mildest binding measures, since such measures are always the easiest for everyone to agree upon.
The more countries that sign on to a treaty, the less stringent the terms become, because everyone has to be accommodated, the authors say. "A system that originates from the top," they write, "takes the speed of its least ambitious nation."
The authors see a different, and more effective, approach, one that is already underway: Make nonbinding agreements on goals at the international level and let each nation create its own climate-enhancing projects to meet them.
These projects can take various forms: commitments to control emissions, funding for scientific research into cleaner energy sources, or policies that make populations more resistant to climate change, for example.
Not all experts agree that this is the most effective approach.
A. Denny Ellerman is a senior lecturer with the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Invoking Mao Zedong's motto encouraging many ideas from many sources, Ellerman calls the bottom-up tactic the "let a thousand flowers bloom" method, and he remains skeptical.
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