Excerpt from BAMS Vol. 89, Issue 1, January 2008 - Policy Program Notes |
Contact Paul A. T. Higgins 202 737-9006 ext. 433 |
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FEDERAL CLIMATE POLICY
Design Principles and Remaining Needs
By Paul A. T. Higgins
The AMS Policy Program recently initiated a series of workshops that will seek to identify key design principles for federal climate policy along with any remaining policy needs that, if met, could help promote sound responses to climate change.
There is a great need for this series, in my view, for two reasons. First, because our ongoing and increasing emissions of greenhouse gases pose substantial risks to society. Second, because large gaps remain in our consideration of potentially beneficial policy options—cap-and-trade approaches for reducing emissions being a notable and important exception that I will come back to later in this article. For a comprehensive risk management strategy to emerge, we will need to overcome these gaps and explore a much larger set of policy options.
In the most general sense, society has three options for reducing the risks associated with climate change: We could mitigate (i.e., reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and thereby reduce the amount that climate changes), we could build our adaptive capacity (i.e., increase our ability to cope with the climate changes that lie ahead), or we could geoengineer, by which I mean that we could develop and deploy additional global-scale changes to the Earth system in the hope of counteracting the worst impacts of our greenhouse gas emissions (critically, without triggering unintended and unpleasant side effects). Of course, none of these three overarching approaches is mutually exclusive—we could use them together and in a wide range of different combinations. Each of these broad categories (mitigation, adaptation, and geoengineering) also encompasses a wide range of more specific policy options.
For the most part, these policy options simply haven’t been explored at the federal level. Until very recently, for example, the potential to mitigate through greenhouse gas emission fees (often called carbon taxes, and the focus of our first workshop) has received relatively little attention. The same could be said of policies that could promote adaptive capacity, or that relate to geoengineering.
Our goal with this series is to help round out federal climate policy discussions by focusing on those areas that haven’t gotten the attention that they may need. By doing so I believe these intensive workshops can help POLICY PROGRAM NOTES FEDERAL CLIMATE POLICY Design Principles and Remaining Needs society move forward in dealing with climate change. Put simply, we offer these workshops very much in line with the philosophy that our policy decisions have the best chance to benefit society if we ground them in the best available knowledge and understanding.
Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any silver bullets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions or for dealing with the risks we face from changes in climate. Putting a price on carbon emissions, however, will almost certainly be a key part of any successful long-term solution.
There are two ways that we could put a price on carbon: through a cap-and-trade system or by putting a fee directly on greenhouse gas emissions. Cap-andtrade approaches have already received enormous amounts of attention, and proposals are moving forward in Congress—appropriately so given capand- trade’s potential effectiveness in climate change mitigation and our increasingly evident need to get on with reducing emissions. In contrast, emission fees often receive fairly cursory dismissals despite their considerable potential for reducing emissions and their possible advantages relative to cap-and-trade approaches (though cap-and-trade approaches also have potential advantages relative to fee-based policies).
Therefore, by focusing our first workshop on emission fees I believe we will have both helped round out discussions about climate mitigation and initiated a broader workshop series that will be able to promote sound federal climate policy more generally. To have the best chance for a beneficial impact, I identified three goals for the workshop at the outset:
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That all participants gain a better understanding of what emission fees are and how they could work as a tool for mitigation. This included a full exploration of both their advantages and their disadvantages.
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That we identify the design principles for Federal policies that would allow us to maximize the advantages of emission fees and minimize their disadvantages.
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That we identify the remaining policy issues and needs that, if addressed, could help further the development of sound approaches for dealing with climate change.
To accomplish these goals, we heard from a wide range of speakers and delved deeply into the nuances of emission-fee approaches for climate change mitigation. Our participants included researchers, policy makers, leaders from the business community and environmental advocacy organizations, and members of executive branch agencies. In my view, the day was a terrific success.
The next steps will be to disseminate our findings widely. Those interested should keep an eye out on the conference Web site (www.ametsoc.org/FCP) for the resulting report and on the ClimatePolicy Web commentary (www.climatepolicy.org) for more analysis. By the time this article appears in print, we hope the presentations will be available through both Web sites. Indeed, by the time this note is published, I hope we are well on our way to the second workshop on federal climate policy.
-PAUL A. T. HIGGINS
Paul A. T. Higgins is a senior policy fellow at the AMS Policy Program.His efforts are geared primarily toward helping society understand how to deal with climate change.
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