ArticlePDF Available

William Nordhaus’s climate club proposal: thinking globally about climate change economics

Authors:

Abstract

‘Think globally, act locally’ has long been a rallying cry for progressives and green activists. In this article I stress the importance of thinking globally before acting locally in the wake of the 2015 Paris conference on climate change. Both the content of the Paris Agreement and the political rhetoric surrounding it feel like a return to 1992 following the signing of the Rio Declaration and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Policy Quarterly – Volume 12, Issue 2 – May 2016 – Page 23
Introduction
‘Think globally, act locally’ has long been a rallying cry for
progressives and green activists. In this article I stress the
importance of thinking globally before acting locally in the
wake of the 2015 Paris conference on climate change.
parties, while leaving actual policy design
to countries operating under a ‘pledge
and review’ arrangement. The pledge-
and-review procedure leaves untouched
the incentives for free-riding that sank
the Kyoto Protocol, while, on the question
of the agenda for effective actual action,
the Paris Agreement leaves a substantial
policy vacuum. New Zealand, like most
other countries, can continue to wait
to see what everyone else does, while
emphasising the broadly correct and
persuasive point that we are too small
to save the planet on our own. After
watching this process of free-riding play
out over the past two decades, and after
watching calls for global good citizenship
fall on deaf ears – especially the bit of
the story where rich nations are asked
to agree to large-scale wealth transfers in
favour of poorer nations – it is time to go
back to first principles.
At the outset it has to be emphasised
that in the absence of a legitimate,
hegemonic world government to legislate
Geoff Bertram is a Research Associate at the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria
University of Wellington.
Geoff Bertram
William Nordhaus’s
Climate Club Proposal:
thinking globally about
climate change
economics
Both the content of the Paris Agreement
and the political rhetoric surrounding it
feel like a return to 1992 following the
signing of the Rio Declaration and the
United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change. Then, as now, the
air was filled with high aspirations, and
declarations of political commitment,
and promises of future action; but now,
as then, the real work of translating
aspirations into effective action remains
to be done. From Rio to Kyoto took five
years; the road to general acceptance
that the Kyoto Protocol had failed took
another 15 years. Having thus come
full circle on climate change policy, it
is important to reflect on mistakes that
were made first time around, and to draw
lessons for practical policy in the coming
decade.
Among the policy mistakes made
after Rio, two stand out. One was to
underestimate the importance of free-
riding. The second was to adopt too
narrow a set of options for the policy
agenda.
The Paris Agreement tries to limit
free-riding by having all countries as
Page 24 – Policy Quarterly – Volume 12, Issue 2 – May 2016
and enforce policy, many of the textbook
solutions for market failure have to be
rethought. As Barrett points out,
The approach [to global climate
policy] taken thus far has been
to set economy-wide targets and
timetables. This approach would be
ideal were it possible to regulate the
world’s greenhouse gas emissions in
top-down fashion. Unfortunately,
however, the world’s governance
arrangements have to work from the
bottom up. The world does not have
one government; it has nearly 200.
An agreement to reduce emissions
must not only be attractive from
the perspective of the global good.
It must also be something to which
countries individually want to accede
and to adhere. (Barrett, 2009, p.2)
The issue
Climate change is a problem requiring
collective action in an age when the
prevailing ideological climate is strongly
individualist and anti-collectivist. But
while ideology is not helping, the real
stumbling block to reaching an effective
global policy regime to cut back carbon
emissions is economic. We are up against
the ‘tragedy of the commons’ the
difficulty of securing the supply of a
public good when the individual incentive
for all players is to free-ride on the efforts
of others. As Gollier and Tirole summarise
the situation:
Most benefits of mitigation are global
and distant, while costs are local
and immediate. Climate change is
a global commons problem. In the
long run, most countries will benefit
from a massive reduction in global
emissions of GHGs, but individual
incentives to do so are negligible.
Most of the benefits of a country’s
efforts to reduce emissions go to
the other countries. In a nutshell, a
country bears 100% of the cost of
a green policy and receives, say, 1%
of the benefits of the policy, if the
country has 1% of the population
and has an average exposure to
climate-related damages. Besides,
most of these benefits, however small,
do not accrue to current voters, but
to future generations. Consequently,
countries do not internalize the
benefits of their mitigation strategies,
emissions are high, and climate
changes dramatically. (Gollier and
Tirole, 2015, p.6)
Free-riding – the basis of the ‘tragedy
of the commons’ – is a staple topic in the
elementary economics textbooks, and the
textbooks quickly offer three standard
solutions. Either individual incentives
have to be brought into line with the
common good by pricing in all relevant
externalities, or a legitimate collective or
central authority with a clear mandate
and adequate enforcement powers must
intervene to block or restrict any market-
driven activities that threaten the common
good, or some combination of the two.
How cap-and-trade came to dominate
the options
Economists instinctively favour pricing
as an essential component of any policy
response because if prices are wrong,
then individuals have the incentive to
subvert or evade any command-and-
control regulations that may be imposed,
triggering the need for costly and probably
ineffective enforcement measures.1 In
policy debates over climate change to date
the idea of directly pricing in the externality
has generally been framed in terms of a
carbon tax imposed by some legitimate
central authority. The command-and-
control alternative has been framed as
each country being allocated a quota limit
on its emissions and required, on pain of
enforceable direct sanctions, to limit its
domestic emissions. The third theoretical
option – a combination of the two
has been cap-and-trade, under which a
command-and-control global emissions
cap is allocated via a market process that
is designed to seek out the most cost-
effective mitigation options.
A standard argument, advanced by a
lot of economists at the beginning of the
big climate change policy debates of the
late 1980s and early 1990s, ran in three
steps:2
• Aglobalcarbontaxwasruledoutby
the absence of any legitimate global
taxing authority and by the perceived
moral hazard problems of having
a single agency handling the vast
revenues involved.
• Purecommand-and-controlis
notoriously inefficient when
compared to an arrangement
that focuses all effort on securing
the lowest-cost means of cutting
emissions, so some way of bringing
market incentives to bear was
needed.
• Cap-and-tradelookedlikeawayto
do this, provided that a couple of
obvious problems could be solved:
a strictly limited quantity of
tradable permits would have to be
allocated on an acceptable basis to
a set of initial recipients;
the new global permits market
would have to meet some basic
requirements of competitiveness
and liquidity.
Briskly abstracting from the complexity
of the real world, Bertram (1992) proposed
that emission permits be allocated on a per
capita basis across the world’s population,
with each permit denominated as one
individual’s share of the global annual
carbon cap. As the cap tightened over time
the scarcity value of permits would rise, but
In policy debates over climate change
to date the idea of directly pricing in the
externality has generally been framed in
terms of a carbon tax imposed by some
legitimate central authority.
William Nordhaus’s Climate Club Proposal: thinking globally about climate change economics
Policy Quarterly – Volume 12, Issue 2 – May 2016 – Page 25
as technological progress reduced the carbon
intensity of economic activity their scarcity
value would fall. A well-functioning permit
market would reflect these two opposing
forces, and the resulting price signals would
guide resources into the most cost-effective
allocation consistent with sustainability of
the global environment.
Seduced by the deceptive elegance and
simplicity of this scheme, I was confident
that the one obvious problem could be
overcome: the rich countries would have to
accept that giving every global inhabitant an
equal right to the atmospheric commons
would mean that when the permit market
opened, the rich would have to buy a big
chunk of transferable quota from the poor.
The resulting annual wealth transfer with a
$20 per ton carbon price would, I calculated,
have been about $50 billion in 1992 US
dollars, slightly greater than the total flow of
international development aid at that time,
but only a fraction of, for example, global
arms expenditure. A carbon price of $40 per
ton would transfer US$100 billion per year.
This seemed, I argued, a manageable cost to
save the planet, and I appealed to the self-
interest of the rich as the reason for them
to accept the cost voluntarily as the cheapest
way to save the earth’s climate.
There were two legs to my argument
that now look, respectively, wildly over-
optimistic and sadly prescient. The wildly
over-optimistic:
The large industrial countries would
have to shoulder an adjustment
burden proportional to the scale
of their existing polluting activity,
since the scheme would oblige
the polluters to pay the rest of the
world community for their right to
pollute. The leading polluters would
naturally be reluctant … However,
the peoples of the rich countries have
a large stake in protecting the global
environment, which might well
outweigh political pressures from
powerful industry lobby groups.
The world community faces an
historic chance actually to achieve
the development goals to which
so much lip service is paid on the
diplomatic circuit, as a by-product
of that community’s willingness
jointly to confront the greenhouse
issue. The developing countries
deserve no less than full partnership
in this process. If full partnership is
denied them, they have the ability
credibly to threaten ecological
disaster. Prudence, as well as
benevolence, should prompt the rich
to tolerate economic redistribution
on a very considerable scale.
(Bertram, 1992, pp.435, 440)
The prescient:
If the opportunity is lost to tackle
development and sustainability
as simultaneous parts of a
joint problem, then the global
outlook darkens seriously. Either
the greenhouse effect could be
held at bay by condemning the
poor countries to long-term
underdevelopment; or the South
might grow for a generation or two
without regard to the environmental
consequences, exposing the entire
global community to the risk of
catastrophic climate change. (Bertram,
1992, p.440, emphasis added)
The rest is history. At Kyoto in 1997 the
rich countries set up a limited emissions
trading regime among themselves,
but with no global cap. In place of an
authoritative and binding global cap,
country-by-country targets for Annex I
countries were negotiated, that never came
close to consistency with a serious global
carbon budget. No credible enforcement
machinery emerged. Meanwhile, the
global south, including China and India,
was left to roll on with business-as-usual
emissions-intensive growth.
Two key mistakes
What, with the benefit of hindsight,
can one say about the reasoning that
led many economists in the 1990s and
2000s to advocate global cap-and-trade?
Two mistakes stand out. The first was
over-optimism about the possibility of
establishing a binding global quantity
cap on emissions in the absence of a
global government. Once cap-and-trade
negotiations moved from a single global
cap and free allocation of permits per
capita across the entire global population,
to the Kyoto arrangement of letting
countries negotiate their own pre-
specified quantitative targets, the essential
institutional architecture of my 1992
plan was dead, and with it the hope of
confronting the whole global community
with a uniform common incentive
to abate. Thereafter, climate change
negotiations became bogged down in a
free-riding morass as each country tried
to minimise its own target and hence its
compliance costs.
The second common mistake was to
work from an incomplete listing of the
options for organising a global policy
regime, overlooking the option that has
now abruptly leapt to the forefront in the
current economics literature: a negotiated
global carbon price floor secured without
imposing a global carbon tax.
The new policy frontier: a negotiated and
enforceable global price floor
Bertram (1992, pp.431-36) canvassed
four options, which were presented as an
exhaustive list:
1. Direct regulation: transparent and
certain, but
• administrativelycostly;
• hardtoharmoniseacrossmany
countries/jurisdictions;
• hardtoenforceeffectively(inthe
absence of a world government)
or fairly (given the existing
imbalance of power between large
and small countries).
At Kyoto in 1997 the rich countries set
up a limited emissions trading regime
among themselves, but with no global
cap.
Page 26 – Policy Quarterly – Volume 12, Issue 2 – May 2016
2. Carbon tax: the textbook answer, but
• thetaxwouldhavetobespecied
in some currency, after which
exchange rates could present a
problem and could be subject to
manipulation;
• noglobalauthorityexistswiththe
mandate to impose the tax; and
• therevenuescollectedwouldbe
on a huge scale even if there were
a taxing authority, which would
present a moral hazard problem.
3. Private litigation: the initiative would
lie with individuals, agencies and
companies around the world to sue
polluters through the courts of each
country, but
• wealthypolluterscouldstall
litigation indefinitely;
• itisunclearwhatsanctionsthe
courts could impose; and
• therewouldbealossof
sovereignty as each country faced
having its courts invaded by non-
residents.
4. Tradeable permits: judged best if done
as laid out in the paper, even though
• thebigwealthypolluting
countries would have to swallow
large wealth transfers to poor low-
emission countries; and
• thelikelyattemptbylargevested
interests to capture the scheme
by seeking grandfathered permits
would have to be defeated.
Looking down that list it is obvious
with hindsight that (at least) one option
was missing. Because the price option
was framed as a tax, rather than simply
as a price, the problems of implementing
a global carbon tax were allowed to
sink the price option without further
consideration. Cap-and-trade was the
fallback means of getting a global price
in place, but it suffered precisely the same
fatal flaw as the carbon tax: there was (and
is) no global authority with the mandate
and the means to enforce a global policy
from the top down.3
Once, however, thinking shifts
from a top-down to a bottom-up way
of addressing the global problem, it is
possible to think of a global (or at least
widely applied) price for carbon that is
not secured by means of a global carbon
tax. All that is required is that a global
price floor be agreed and enforced by
some coalition or ‘club’ of nations. This is
the option that now commands growing
attention and support among economists.
It was the subject of the lead article,
by William Nordhaus, in the American
Economic Review for April 2015, and
was the central theme of a heavyweight
symposium in the September 2015 issue
of Economics of Energy and Environmental
Policy, with papers by Weitzman (2015),
Stiglitz (2015), Gollier and Tirole (2015)
and Cramton, Ockenfels and Stoft
(2015).
The proposal runs as follows:
• Allcountriesthatsign up(thereby
forming a coalition or ‘climate
club’) agree on a price that is to
apply to carbon emitted within their
borders. Ideally the club would be
the entire global community, but
smaller coalitions can implement the
scheme, and there can even be several
different coalitions, each with its own
price.
• Eachgovernmentwithin theclub
adopts policy measures to bring
their internal carbon price up to that
international price. They may do
this by means of a domestic carbon
tax, or a tradeable emission permits
scheme with a floor price set at the
agreed international price, or any
other measure they may dream up.
All revenues from a domestic tax or
other scheme would remain with
the national government in the first
instance (‘subsidiarity’) and would
be spent or distributed as that
government chooses.
• Allcountrieswithintheclubimpose
a uniform tariff at their borders on
imports from the rest of the world,
both to incentivise others to join the
club and as a means of restricting
carbon leakage.
Of the three components of this
scheme, only one single thing has to be
collectively negotiated and agreed: the
carbon price. The single price commitment
eliminates the need to negotiate a set
of country-by-country quantitative
emission targets. The big advantage of
going down this route is ‘dimensionality’.
If the world’s governments are asked to
agree on (or accept a collective decision
on) just one single number – the price of
carbon emissions – they have only that
one thing to talk about and the success
or failure of the negotiations would boil
down to the emergence or non-emergence
of just one agreed number. (Under the
Paris Agreement’s pledge-and-review
replacement for Kyoto, the negotiation has
to produce something like 200 individual
country quantitative targets, for emission
magnitudes the measurement of which is
itself open to negotiation.) As Weitzman
summarises it,
A meaningful comprehensive
quantity-based treaty involves
specifying as many different binding
emissions quotas … as there are
national entities. Each national
entity has a self-interested incentive
to negotiate for itself a high cap on
carbon emissions – much higher
than would be socially optimal. The
resulting free-rider problem plagues a
quantity-based approach
… low dimensionality argues
in favour of a one-dimensional
harmonized carbon price over
an n-dimensional harmonized
cap-and-trade system among n
nations … Put directly, it is easier
to negotiate one price than n
quantities – especially when the one
price can be interpreted as ‘fair’ in
terms of equality of marginal effort’.
(Weitzman, 2015, pp.38, 40)
The single price commitment eliminates
the need to negotiate a set of country-by-
country quantitative emission targets.
William Nordhaus’s Climate Club Proposal: thinking globally about climate change economics
Policy Quarterly – Volume 12, Issue 2 – May 2016 – Page 27
The detailed policies to make that
price applicable are left to participating
governments, as are any revenues
generated. This principle of subsidiarity
means that the issue of international
redistribution of income and wealth is
dropped from the negotiating agenda, so
that absolute priority can be given to the
single goal of establishing a global carbon
price. (I used to think that the two goals –
a carbon price and global equity could
be achieved jointly, but I now concede
that the myopic self-interest of the rich
is an immovable roadblock, and that we
simply have to work around it.)
The two greatest strengths of this
approach are: (1) the creation of a
uniform and universal incentive across
many countries to reduce emissions
wherever it is cost-effective to do so under
the prevailing carbon price; and (2) an
enforcement mechanism (border tariffs)
that operates impersonally through
the market rather than requiring legal
prosecution, specific targeted sanctions
or a threat of military intervention, and
which provides an incentive for non-
participant countries to join the club.
Nobody thinks this approach would
be simple in practice. All the economists
writing along these lines agree that it
faces enormous obstacles and objections,
though probably less serious than those
confronting the alternatives, and with
far greater chance of solving the climate
change problem than those more
‘politically feasible’ alternatives.
Thinking globally, acting locally
What does this imply for national
policy? Start with the clear recognition
that the central problem is free-riding,
which means conceding that the current
New Zealand government stance can be
defended as economically rational given
the current global policy regime. For a
‘typical’ or ‘representative’ individual
around the world there are likely to be
more penalties than rewards from living
in a country that acts unilaterally to cut its
carbon emissions in a world where others
free-ride. The benefits of unilateral action
are intangible (mainly moral satisfaction);
tangible gains are negligible for a small
country that acts alone, since there will be
no climate change mitigation benefits to
one’s grandchildren so long as free-riding
by others continues. In stark contrast,
whatever costs may result from living in
a world that collectively puts a price on
carbon, those costs pale into insignificance
beside the tangible benefits from effective
mitigation. It is, in short, entirely ‘rational’
for voters to support global action but
oppose unilateral national action.
Individual citizens may have agency
within their nation, but they have none
at global level. To get the desired global
result one still has to act through one’s
national government, so what is needed
is a policy that can be adopted by
individual nations without plunging them
into unproductive economic pain, and
which can then evolve into a collective
global policy that provides a consistent
worldwide incentive to cut back carbon
emissions. We are searching here for what
economists call incentive compatibility.
We are looking for a national strategy
that does not require premature and
costly unilateral action, but that has a
serious chance of providing a focal point
around which international negotiations
may be organised. Hence the appeal of
the climate club idea.
The form of each potential club
member’s upfront price commitment
is ‘I will if you will’: in other words, a
single country does not bind its citizens
to anything unless and until a coalition
of some minimal credible size emerges.
But once the coalition reaches critical
mass the international agreed price
would come into being. All that has to
be done by the lead country or countries
is to call for formation of that coalition,
invite others to join, and perhaps propose
an actual price as the starting point for
negotiations. Painless leadership has
some appeal, surely?
The second element of the strategy,
provided that a viable (critical-mass)
club forms, would be translating the
agreed-upon price into domestic terms.
New Zealand would be able to do this
under the existing emissions trading
scheme by putting a floor price under the
market for New Zealand units (NZUs),
and by blocking or taxing the import
of carbon credits from any country that
has not joined the club and imposed a
corresponding floor price or carbon tax.
Or we could move to a carbon tax as the
Greens have proposed.
The third element – the crucial part of
making any club stable is excludability:
imposing a meaningful cost or penalty
on those who do not join the club, which
provides the incentive for them to join.
Central to the climate club proposal is
border adjustment. Members of the club
would impose a harmonised tariff to
apply on all goods imported from non-
participating countries. Non-membership
would then mean confronting the carbon
tariff whenever trading with countries in
the club. The tariff would both restrict
carbon leakage and provide the incentive
for new members to join up.
Tariff design
There are two options for this tariff
design: a tariff based on the carbon
content of imported goods, or a simple
penalty tariff on all imports from non-
members. Stiglitz and Helm have argued
for the first of these, mainly as a targeted
weapon against carbon leakage, but partly
also on the basis that solid precedents
would make it WTO-legal. Nordhaus
argues for the second – a uniform penalty
tax on non-participants – on the basis
that (1) it is simple compared with the
complexity of a carbon tariff; (2) the
A carbon-pricing club would have an
inclusionary rather than an exclusionary
aim, and would be pursuing the global
good rather than just the self-interest of
members.
Page 28 – Policy Quarterly – Volume 12, Issue 2 – May 2016
relevant damages to be countervailed are
not so much carbon leakage as climate
change in general, which non-participants
are failing to address via the pricing
route; and (3) the central purpose is to
incentivise club membership (Nordhaus,
2015, pp.1348-50).
Are such ‘border carbon adjustments’
(tariffs) novel, or incompatible with WTO
rules, or unthinkable? Consider the Trans-
Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA),
under which a group of countries led by
the United States is to form an exclusive
club with various market barriers to be
overcome by non-members wishing to
trade with the club. Whereas the TPPA is,
I would argue, a negative example of club
formation, with exclusion of China and
ascendancy of the US as one of its core
purposes, it is certainly not incompatible
with existing trade law. A carbon-pricing
club would have an inclusionary rather
than an exclusionary aim, and would be
pursuing the global good rather than just
the self-interest of members. But it would
use the same essential defensive tool of a
common external tariff or other barrier
against non-members to ensure there is
a benefit of membership and a cost of
defection from the club.
Nordhaus, however, accepts that his
proposal for a straightforward penalty
tariff on non-participants could run
counter to international law as it currently
stands, and he bluntly proposes that:
an important aspect of the proposal
will be a set of ‘climate amendments’
to international-trade law, both
internationally and domestically.
The climate amendments would
explicitly allow uniform tariffs on
nonparticipants within the confines
of a climate treaty; it would also
prohibit retaliation against countries
who invoke the mechanism. (ibid.,
p.1349)
It is probably true that whatever
option was chosen for the common tariff,
someone would challenge it under the
GATT/WTO rules, and this challenge
would have to be successfully fought,
either under the GATT’s chapter XX
exclusions or by securing a change to
international law. If a challenge succeeded
and/or the law could not be changed, then
in the worst case the carbon club would
disband and individual nations would fall
back to the default option of business-as-
usual trade. If the challenge failed, the
club would immediately gain momentum
and members. My expectation and hope
is that any challenge would fail, but it is
obvious that defeating a challenge would
be more likely the greater the number
and weight of nations joining up to the
carbon club at the start. In short, the
downside of stepping up to the club-
forming carbon-pricing proposal is the
possibility of no change from the status
quo, and the upside is the chance of a
serious and coordinated assault on global
warming, using a mechanism that short-
circuits the free-riding problem.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that the Paris
Agreement has not solved the basic free-
rider problem in climate change policy.
The quantity-based pledge-and-review
approach is too complex, too weak and
too vulnerable to manipulation. A price-
based market mechanism has the potential
to reduce complexity and manipulation,
while removing much of the free-riding
incentive, so long as it embodies strong
penalties for defection. Two of the leading
figures in the economic debate summarise
these points as follows. First, Weitzman:
With the failure of a Kyoto-style
quantity-based approach, the
world has seemingly given up on a
comprehensive global design, settling
instead for sporadic national, sub-
national, and regional measures.
These partial measures seem far
from constituting a socially efficient
response to the global warming
externality. Perhaps … the Kyoto-
style quantity-based focus on
negotiating emissions caps embodies
a bad design flaw. The arguments of
this paper indicate a way in which
negotiating a binding internationally-
harmonized nationally-collected
minimum price on carbon emissions
might help to internalize the global
warming externality. (Weitzman,
2015 p.49)
Second, the ever-cautious Nordhaus:
Here is the bottom line:
without sanctions there is no stable
climate coalition other than the
noncooperative, low-abatement
coalition. This conclusion is soundly
based on public-goods theory, on
C-DICE model simulations, on the
history of international agreements,
and on the experience of the Kyoto
Protocol.
… an international climate
treaty that combines target carbon
pricing and trade sanctions can
induce substantial abatement. … The
attractiveness of a Climate Club must
be judged relative to the current
approaches, where international
climate treaties are essentially
voluntary and have little prospect of
slowing climate change. (Nordhaus,
2015, p.1368)
1 There is a strong stream of research led by Elinor Ostrom
that emphasises the power of voluntary collective action
through non-price measures to solve tragedies of the
commons problems, but this works well only at local level:
for example, protecting local water aquifers from depletion,
or allocating scarce irrigation water from a shared canal
system, or managing a clearly bounded fishery. A successful
pledge and review process following the Paris Agreement
would vindicate Ostrom’s position at a global scale, but
would require a truly seismic shift in world politics. See
Ostrom (1990) and Potete, Janssen and Ostrom (2010). I
have discussed Ostrom’s ideas in more detail in Bertram,
2013, pp.10-13.
2 For a straightforward statement of this case see Bertram
(1992), based largely on an earlier paper that I and
two colleagues wrote in 1989 for the Ministry for the
Environment (Bertram, Stephens and Wallace, 1990).
3 There does exist a mechanism in the United Nations
Charter whereby the UN Security Council could become
such an authority, by declaring climate change a danger to
‘international peace and security’ and taking action against
free-riding nations.
The bottom line is that the Paris
Agreement has not solved the basic free-
rider problem in climate change policy.
William Nordhaus’s Climate Club Proposal: thinking globally about climate change economics
Policy Quarterly – Volume 12, Issue 2 – May 2016 – Page 29
Barrett, S. (2009) ‘Rethinking global climate change governance’,
Economics, 3 (5), March
Bertram, G. (1992) ‘Tradable emission permits and the control of
greenhouse gases’, Journal of Development Studies, 28 (3), pp.423-
46, reprinted in T. Tietenberg (ed.), The Economics of Global
Warming, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1997; online at http://www.
geoffbertram.com/fileadmin/publications/Tradeable_Emission_Permits_
and_the_Control_of_Greenhouse_Gases.pdf
Bertram, G. (2013) Green Border Control: issues at the environment/
economy border, http://www.geoffbertram.com/fileadmin/publications/
Borders%20paper%20at%205%20May%20final.pdf
Bertram, G., R. Stephens and C. Wallace (1990) Economic Instruments
and the Greenhouse Effect, working paper 3/90, Wellington: Graduate
School of Business and Government Management, Victoria University
of Wellington
Cramton, P., A. Ockenfels and S. Stoft (2015) ‘An international carbon-
price commitment promotes cooperation’, Energy and Environmental
Policy, 4 (2), pp.51-64
Gollier, C. and J. Tirole (2015) ‘Negotiating effective instruments against
climate change’, Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy, 4
(2), pp.5-27
Helm, D. (2010) ‘A carbon border tax can curb climate change’, Financial
Times, 5 September
Nordhaus, W. (2015) ‘Climate clubs: overcoming free-riding in
international climate policy’, American Economic Review, 105 (4),
pp.1339-70
Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: the evolution of institutions
for collective action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Potete, A.R., M.A. Janssen and E. Ostrom (eds) (2010) Working
Together: collective action, the commons and multiple methods in
practice, Princeton: Princeton University Press
Stiglitz, J. (2006) ‘A new agenda for global warming’, The Economists’
Voice, 3 (7)
Stiglitz, J. (2015) ‘Overcoming the Copenhagen failure with flexible
commitments’, Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy, 4 (2),
p.29-36
Weitzman, M. (2015) ‘Internalizing the climate change externality:
can a uniform price commitment help?, Economics of Energy and
Environmental Policy, 4 (2), pp.37-49
References
Victoria Professional and Executive development
High quality professional and executive development courses
specifically designed for the public sector:
MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT
→ Fri 27 May, 9am–4.30pm
→ Fri 15 July, 9am–4.30pm
→ Fri 30 September, 9am–4.30pm
MAKING POLICIES WORK: SKILLS FOR POLICY
ANALYSTS AND ADVISORS
→ Fri 1 July, 9am–4.30pm
→ Wed 21 September, 9am–4.30pm
STRATEGIC THINKING FOR GOVERNMENT
→ Wed 13 July, 9am–4.30pm
→ Tue 15 November, 9am–4.30pm
GROUP FACILITATION SKILLS
→ Tue 25 & Wed 27 July, 9am–4.30pm
→ Tue 18 & Wed 19 October, 9am–4.30pm
ROLES AND SKILLS OF POLICY ANALYSTS AND
ADVISORS
→ Thu 25 August, 9am–4.30pm
ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES AND
APPLICATIONS IN PUBLIC POLICY
→ Thu 3 & Fri 4 November, 9am–5pm
USING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR EFFECTIVE PUBLIC
ENGAGEMENT
→ Thu 26 & Fri 27 May, 9am–4.30pm
→ Tue 11 & Wed 12 October, 9am–4.30pm
PUBLIC SECTOR FINANCE FUNDAMENTALS
→ Thu 7 July, 9am–4.30pm
→ Tue 11 October, 9am–4.30pm
ADVANCED POLICY LEADERSHIP WORKSHOP
→ Thu 16 & Fri 17 June, 9am–4.30pm
→ Thu 27 & Fri 28 October, 9am–4.30pm
ENGAGING EFFECTIVELY WITH YOUR STAKEHOLDERS
→ Thu 16 June, 9am-4.30pm
→ Wed 17 August, 9am-4.30pm
→ Thu 3 November, 9am-4.30pm
We can also deliver in-house courses, customise existing courses or design new programmes to suit your requirements
We now also run courses at our Auckland training rooms.
For more course dates, further information and to enrol visit www.victoria.ac.nz/profdev or call us on 04-463 6556.
... Designs similar to the one above have been suggested by Stiglitz (2006), Helm (2012), andNordhaus (2015). For an overview of this discussion, see Bertram (2016). ...
Article
Full-text available
The global coverage and the need for consensus explain why the UN Paris agreement, in several critical dimensions, is characterized by low levels of commitment and reciprocity. Hence, complementary designs are needed. This paper analyzes the parameters of such designs. New agreements should cover only nations that are willing to high levels of commitments and reciprocity. They should use measures that governments can control and be made accountable for. Commitments should be short-term and few-dimensional and they should incentivize efficient reductions, prevent leakages to outside nations and provide sanctions for noncompliance. Further, they should provide incentives to outsiders to reduce emissions and encourage them to join the agreement. A Climate Club that harmonizes minimum national carbon prices (i.e. carbon taxes), introduces a common carbon tariff, and welcomes new members to meet these criteria. Such a complementary design also has the potential to expand and, with time, provide a global price on carbon. • Policy relevance • The paper demonstrates the need to develop complementary international climate policies to the Paris agreement. It analyzes design flaws of the UN agreements and, as a complement, proposes a Climate Club among nations that are willing to introduce a price on carbon. By agreeing on a carbon tax and a carbon tariff, the club creates mechanisms that reduce emissions and enlarge the club, with the potential to provide a global price on carbon. • Policy insight • The Paris design includes all nations. Such a design will be insufficient. Nations with low ambitions are provided with a veto-right, which explains the flaws of the Paris agreements. • A complementary design among nations with high ambitions is needed to compensate for the flaws of the Paris agreement. • By agreeing to an internal minimum carbon price and an external carbon tariff, a Climate Club can create such a design.
Article
This paper describes and analyzes a proposal for a pay-for-cuts carbon treaty and illustrates how it would work with numerical simulations for 186 countries. A treaty board would pay each country’s government an amount P for each CO 2 ton the country cuts by any method. Each government would decide how to get its firms and households to cut CO 2 emissions; the board would encourage a carbon tax or cap-and-trade but not require it. [Formula: see text] is the number of tons that country i reduces its CO 2 emissions. [Formula: see text] equals country i’s base emissions minus its actual emissions which are publicly available data. Country i’s government would receive [Formula: see text] from the board. The board’s [Formula: see text] payments would be financed by country government contributions to the board. A formula would give each country’s government the amount it must contribute each year. The formula would aim to make government contributions equal to the board’s [Formula: see text] payments and equitably distribute the burdens from cutting world emissions. Representatives of the countries would have to approve the board’s most important decisions.
Article
Full-text available
We know the science of climate change; we know the economics of climate change; we also know the law of climate change. However, we do not know how countries may come together to cooperate on climatechange mitigation. One way of doing so successfully is by putting together the climate regime with the international trading system via the creation of climate clubs, namely the coalition of the willing. This article aims to explain that, by building climate clubs and making use of the international trading system, we can reach a better future for all. Through the lens of international trade, this article explores how smaller coalitions (so-called climate clubs) – unilateral, bilateral, plurilateral, rather than multilateral regimes – of states/non-state actors can catalyze or influence action on climate change. The premise of this article is that global action on climate change has not been effectively implemented, as it relies on consensus from too many actors. Thus, it proposes how international trade mechanisms may be re-oriented to address climate change. The article challenges the assumptions about the existing multilateralagreement regime, and argues that reducing dependence on these multilateral mechanisms may influence greater attainment of sustainability goals (more flexible, not reliant on difficult-to-gain consensus among many actors). The article, therefore, examines the future of international regimes and how they may contribute to climate-change mitigation. Its forwardlooking orientation – how international trade can leverage climate-change mitigation – is an important and novel contribution in examining how environmental concerns can be included into international regimes. What changes will look like and how change is attained (through policy, regulations, law, agreements, incentives) may contribute to developing global- level institutional solutions for how climate-change mitigation is framed in international regimes and discourses. The article also addresses emerging academic research into climate clubs in international climatechange mitigation institutions/regimes. The article contributes to growing discourses in global climate governance for how these arrangements and agreements should look/be designed to create real action on climate-change mitigation. Therefore, it expands on existing scholarship through taking a specific lens (international trade) and how it may contribute to mitigating climate change through coalitions (climate clubs) beyond how the existing international regime is configured. climate clubs, minilateralism, legitimacy, multilateralism, accountability, international trade
Article
Full-text available
We know the science of climate change; we know the economics of climate change; we also know the law of climate change. However, we do not know how countries may come together to cooperate on climate change mitigation. One way of doing so successfully is by putting together the climate regime with the international trading system via the creation of climate clubs, namely the coalition of the willing. This article aims to explain that, by building climate clubs and making use of the international trading system, we can reach a better future for all. Through the lens of international trade, this article explores how smaller coalitions (so-called climate clubs) – unilateral, bilateral, plurilateral, rather than multilateral regimes – of states/non-state actors can catalyze or influence action on climate change. The premise of this article is that global action on climate change has not been effectively implemented, as it relies on consensus from too many actors. Thus, it proposes how international trade mechanisms may be re-oriented to address climate change. The article challenges the assumptions about the existing multilateral-agreement regime, and argues that reducing dependence on these multilateral mechanisms may influence greater attainment of sustainability goals (more flexible, not reliant on difficult-to-gain consensus among many actors). The article, therefore, examines the future of international regimes and how they may contribute to climate-change mitigation. Its forward-looking orientation – how international trade can leverage climate-change mitigation – is an important and novel contribution in examining how environmental concerns can be included into international regimes. What changes will look like and how change is attained (through policy, regulations, law, agreements, incentives) may contribute to developing global-level institutional solutions for how climate-change mitigation is framed in international regimes and discourses. The article also addresses emerging academic research into climate clubs in international climate-change mitigation institutions/regimes. The article contributes to growing discourses in global climate governance for how these arrangements and agreements should look/be designed to create real action on climate-change mitigation. Therefore, it expands on existing scholarship through taking a specific lens (international trade) and how it may contribute to mitigating climate change through coalitions (climate clubs) beyond how the existing international regime is configured.
Article
Full-text available
This paper explains why the approach taken so far to mitigate global climate change has failed. The central reason is an inability to enforce targets and timetables. Current proposals recommending even stricter emission limits will not help unless they are able to address the enforcement deficit. Trade restrictions are one means for doing so, but trade restrictions pose new problems, particularly if they are applied to enforce economy-wide emission limitation agreements. This paper sketches a different approach that unpacks the climate problem, addressing different gases and sectors using different instruments. It also explains how a failure to address the climate problem fundamentally will only create incentives for different kinds of responses, posing different challenges for climate change governance. Special issue “Global Governance—Challenges and Proposals for Reform” Published as Policy Paper
Article
Full-text available
In environmental matters, the free riding generated by the lack of collective action is aggravated by concerns about leakages and by the desire to receive compensation in future negotiations. The dominant 'pledge and review" approach to mitigation will deliver appealing promises and renewed victory statements, only to prolong the waiting game. The climate change global commons problem will be solved only through coherent carbon pricing. We discuss the roadmap for the negotiation process. Negotiators must return to the fundamentals: the need for uniform carbon pricing across countries, for verification, and for a governance process to which countries would commit. Each country would enjoy subsidiarity in its allocation of efforts within the country We suggest an enforcement scheme based on financial and trade penalties to induce all countries to participate and comply with the agreement. Finally, the choice among economic approaches, whether a carbon price commitment or a cap-and-trade, is subject to trade-offs, on which alternative reasonable views may co-exist. We discuss monitoring reasons for why we personally favor an international cap-and-trade agreement.
Article
Full-text available
This article reiterates the case for tradeable permits as a global policy option for limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and considers the detailed design of a global tradeable‐permit regime, emphasising the importance of the initial assignment of property rights, and arguing that the relevant property rights in this case are the rights of every member of the world community to share in a sustainable global atmosphere and climate. The allocation of permits should therefore be done on a per capita basis across the world community, with the result that rents generated by the process of reducing carbon emissions would accrue to non‐polluters, most of whom live in the ‘South’. The international transfers of income and wealth implied by the proposed scheme are large but feasible. There is therefore a real prospect that an international convention on carbon dioxide emissions could end the debt crisis and finance sustainable development in the South..
Article
It is difficult to resolve the global warming free-rider externality problem by negotiating many different quantity targets. By contrast, negotiating a single internationally-binding minimum carbon price (the proceeds from which are domestically retained) counters self-interest by incentivizing agents to internalize the externality. In this contribution I attempt to sketch out, mostly with verbal arguments, the sense in which each agent's extra cost from a higher emissions price is counter-balanced by that agent's extra benefit from inducing all other agents to simultaneously lower their emissions in response to the higher price. Some implications are discussed. While the paper could be centered on a more formal model, here the tone of the discussion resembles more that of an exploratory think piece directed to policy-makers and the general public.
Article
To promote cooperation in international climate negotiations, negotiators should focus on a common commitment. Such commitments have the advantage of facilitating reciprocal "I will if you will" agreements in a group. Reciprocity is the basis for cooperation in repeated public goods games, and a uniform price would provide a natural focal point for a common international commitment. Such a price is also essential for efficient abatement. Countries would retain flexibility in how to implement the price with cap-and-trade, a carbon tax, or a hybrid approach. Country risk is reduced relative to risk under international cap-and-trade since carbon revenues stay within the country. Price commitments also tend to equalize effort intensity and can facilitate enforcement. To encourage participation by less-developed countries, a green fund is needed to transfer money from richer to poorer countries. Transfers are smaller and more predictable with a uniform price commitment than with international cap and trade.
Article
The fundamental issues presented by climate change are first, that the global environment is a global public good and second, the question of how to share the burden of providing a better climate. Everyone would like to "free ride" on the efforts of others, but there is disagreement over who is free riding. The Kyoto approach, based on dividing up emission rights, has an inherent problem in that such rights could easily reach a monetary value of over a trillion dollars a year The approach suggested here avoids any attempt at a grand solution to the fair allocation of these rights. A low-carbon economy could be achieved through the imposition of a moderate carbon price, which would raise substantial revenue and allow a reduction in other taxes, thereby keeping the deadweight loss small. Countries should be given flexibility in how they meet their obligations whether through a carbon tax, a system of cap and trade, or even possibly certain regulatory mechanisms. But a fully voluntary agreement likely cannot include countries that export a significant amount of fossil fuel. A green fund financed by allocating say 20% of carbon revenues collected in developed countries could be used to implement "differentiated responsibilities."
Book
The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr Ostrom uses institutional analysis to explore different ways - both successful and unsuccessful - of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the 'tragedy of the commons' argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.
Article
This chapter proposes an agenda to deal first with the United States' pollution and second with that of developing countries. It suggests that the way to get nations, and particularly the United States, to reduce CO2 emissions significantly is to use trade sanctions. The United States, and implicitly other nations who are doing little to curb emissions, are unfairly subsidizing their exports by not forcing manufacturers to pay the full cost of emissions. To avoid trade sanctions, nations should tax carbon emissions to reflect the long-term social cost of emissions. If trade sanctions could be used this way, one nation might force another to tax its emissions, not necessarily because it cares about the environment, but for the myriad reasons that a nation seeks to raise the cost of other nations' exports.
Green Border Control: issues at the environment/ economy border
  • G Bertram
Bertram, G. (2013) Green Border Control: issues at the environment/ economy border, http://www.geoffbertram.com/fileadmin/publications/ Borders%20paper%20at%205%20May%20final.pdf
Economic Instruments and the Greenhouse Effect, working paper 3/90, Wellington: Graduate School of Business and Government Management
  • G Bertram
  • R Stephens
  • C Wallace
Bertram, G., R. Stephens and C. Wallace (1990) Economic Instruments and the Greenhouse Effect, working paper 3/90, Wellington: Graduate School of Business and Government Management, Victoria University of Wellington