Download Oslo lecture October 2014

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
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Working Group II Report on ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, IPCC Fifth
Report 2014: chapter headings:
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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):
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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 fuelefficient 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 within
countries
– 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, shorttermism 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’
Conclusion: Building an eco-welfare
state
Requires:
• New policies on consumption
• New policies on work
• But these cannot be disentangled from
economic policy
• So how build this in context of unfettered
capitalism?
• ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’