You may have read about the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21, where an estimated 300,000-350,000 people converged to walk several miles to draw attention to the pressing need to address climate change. The timing of the walk was in anticipation of a United Nations climate summit hosted two days later by the Secretary General. President Obama attended and spoke at the event, which included representatives from 125 countries—mainly heads of states.
But notably absent were the leaders of China, India, and Russia. This was disappointing, of course, because the global climate challenge cannot be solved without the active commitment and participation by those three nations. That is why I went to China for two weeks this past summer (to teach renewable energy law and policy) and why I’ll be going to India later this month for two weeks (to explore the impact of climate change on water resource management). We need to build international networks of scholars, scientists, attorneys, activists, and government officials to address the complex challenge of climate change.
How will we do that? At this point, most eyes are focused on “the road to Paris” under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC was adopted in 1992 and gave birth to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol then entered into force (without participation by the United States) in 2005 and helped to build and test important climate change policies and law before it expired at the end of 2012. The UNFCCC “Conference of Parties” (COP) meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark was supposed to result in an agreement that would succeed Kyoto, but negotiations collapsed. An estimated 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions were covered under Kyoto’s rules, but only 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions are currently covered under the so-called Kyoto II through 2020. It is therefore imperative that a new agreement be reached by the end of 2015 when the COP meets in Paris. The recent “climate summit” in New York City was intended to get early commitments from world leaders to guide negotiations leading to Paris.
But Paris may not be where all of the action is: in a little-noticed development, the UN Secretary General has been supporting independent assessments by teams in most of the major greenhouse gas emitting-countries under the auspices of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DPPP) through the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The logic is that each country needs to develop a strategy that works for it—internally, given the politics of that country and its own unique social, economic, technological, and environmental conditions—before those countries can come together to reach an international agreement. The countries involved in the DDPP account for the overwhelming majority of global greenhouse gas emissions. And they include China, India, and Russia as well as the United States, the largest economies in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Australia. Reaching agreement among these countries for deep reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 could therefore be the basis for a broad agreement in Paris.
There are two aspects of law that are particularly interesting regarding the DDPP effort: (1) the United States is building its DDPP approach on the legal authority that the federal Environmental Protection Agency already has under the Clean Air Act, including both mobile source emissions (already adopted) and stationary source emissions controls (proposed), so the Congress doesn’t need to act to allow the United States to go forward to implement and demonstrate a commitment absent in 2009; and (2) the President could conceivably sign an executive agreement in Paris rather than a multi-lateral treaty if the agreement merely requires the U.S. to continue doing what it is already doing under domestic law—and such an agreement would not require the ratification of the U.S. Senate, because it would not qualify as a treaty obligating the United States to anything new. Using the latter approach would significantly alter the politics of getting a deal in Paris.
Finally, the entire DDPP effort is based on earlier analyses completed for California—where ambitious researchers and political leadership asked “what comes after 2020?” The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) requires the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to reduce California greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020—but then there is no legal requirement in state law to reduce further after 2020. Scientists project that global emissions will need to be reduced by 50-80% by 2050, though, to avoid extreme outcomes associated with climate change. The DDPP effort tries to figure out how each country can achieve that goal by 2050—based on California effort to do the same. So California climate law and policy, which must also soon be modified to get us on a deep decarbonization pathway from 2020 to 2050, is continuing to influence both national and international negotiations on climate policy.
As I’ve said before, California is the epicenter of global climate law and policy. It’s where the action is.