Next week, a big change is coming. Because regardless of the November 3rd election, the United States will formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement on November 4th. Whether or not that gives cover for other countries, like Brazil and Turkey, to leave as well, is a serious concern. But when Trump first announced his intentions back in 2017, Rebecca Leber reminds us, “there was a silver lining” in that 38 additional countries have since joined, and countries like China and India have already begun strengthening their original targets. Domestically, meanwhile, thousands of local leaders like mayors, CEOs, university presidents, and others quickly rejected Trump’s rejection and dedicated their jurisdictions to holding up America’s end of the global Paris Agreement.
Coincidentally, MIT’s latest edition of the Global Environmental Politics journal happens to address the issue of international climate action. In it, UCSB’s Matto Mildenberger and U-Pitt’s Michael Aklin suggest that international climate politics has been “prisoners of the wrong dilemma,” and show that getting a global climate deal isn’t a “collective action” problem characterized by free-riders, or the prisoner’s dilemma variant of it. Instead, they argue, international climate action is a “distributive conflict” between those who would benefit from climate action (people) and those who would bear its costs (polluters).
The Paris Agreement embodies the conventional thinking that no nations will voluntarily reduce emissions if others can benefit just as much without any effort, as seen in conservative objections that it would require the US to make sacrifices but not China.
The differences between the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, and the identical ways in which certain parties responded to them, is key evidence for the explanatory power of distributive conflict over collective action. Opposition to the Kyoto Protocol was formalized by the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which centered on the Protocol’s distinction between developing and developed countries. In essence, it’s a rejection of the perceived free-riders of countries that didn’t have to do as much as the US and others (who contributed the most to the problem), and makes the US a free-rider on global emission reduction efforts.
But the Paris Agreement was designed specifically with that objection in mind, and required all countries to make an effort, complete with transparency measures, in order to avoid running afoul of the Byrd-Hagel resolution. So if it really was a free-rider concern that motivated the opposition, then they would’ve been on board with the Paris Agreement.
And of course, they weren’t. Because it was never about the free-rider problem. That’s just the excuse they trotted out, because “reducing fossil fuel use would hurt my campaign donors” doesn’t sound quite as respectable.
“To the extent that distributive conflicts are the main constraint on effective policies,” Mildenberger and Aklin write, “international agreements may be more successful if they instead focus on empowering key pro-climate interest groups and neutralizing veto players, such as fossil fuel interests.”
Using the past few decades of climate policy as evidence, they show that international agreements are determined more by domestic politics than they are true international concerns.
Because within each country, the fossil fuel industry and others that profit from climate change are able to wield political power. This power, along with its money, creates a more compelling and concrete reason for political opposition to climate action than the diffuse benefits of international negotiations.
Which is both good and bad news for whatever next week brings. Because either the US will continue down the likely lonely path of anti-Paris denial in a way that will rely on others, both internationally and domestically, to pick up the slack, or it will rejoin and reinvigorate the process.
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