Fixing the climate, p.27
Fixing the Climate, page 27
35. Parson 2003, 190.
36. Parson 2003, 189.
37. The US Air Force was a member of the Industry Cooperative for Ozone Layer Protection too since fully half of CFC solvents usage was mandated by US military specifications. The US military’s participation meant changes for allies, and the US Department of Defense was soon coordinating technologies with militaries from Australia to Canada to the United Kingdom, and getting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to endorse the shift. With the help of the EPA, the Department of Defense also cooperated with the Soviet military to elicit similar changes in their alliance. Andersen and Sarma 2004; Parson 2003, 190.
38. In 1988, just a few months after Montreal, the keynote speaker at the first conference was Montana senator Max Baucus, a central figure in US national regulation of ozone pollutants. While the topics under debate, such as refrigeration compressors and CFC-free soldering, were obscure, the deliberation occurred under the shadow of regulatory policy. Baucus 1988.
39. Parson 2003, 188–90.
40. Parson 2003, 190.
41. Christensen 2016.
42. Formally, the exemptions are granted by the parties to the treaty because they are time-limited alterations of the treaty obligations. But in every case, the party-decided exemption process begins with (and is framed by) the expert assessment described here. Generally the TOCs and system of panels have this framing function with regard to “adjustments” and “amendments” to the treaty. Adjustments are needed when the existing rules are tightened or loosened; amendments are necessary to change the scope of the treaty, such as by subjecting new chemicals to regulation. In both instances, the parties defer almost completely to the judgments of the panels in deciding whether to formally consent to the proposals.
43. Victor and Coben 2005.
44. Parson 2003, 194–95.
45. Parson 2003, 193.
46. As the science evolved, it became clear that healing the ozone layer would require essentially zero emissions of any chlorinated or brominated compound. The ozone hole was triggered at even low concentrations of chlorine and bromine in the upper atmosphere.
47. Benedick 1998, 163.
48. Zhao and Ortolano 2003, 710.
49. Biermann 1996.
50. Benedick 1998, 152–57.
51. On the funding mechanism, see especially Biermann 1996; DeSombre and Kauffman 1996. In China, one initial estimate put the cost of ODS controls at $1 billion while a preliminary estimate for India imagined funding at double that level. Such numbers, anchored in no serious analysis, were far higher than donors were willing to pay. Benedick 1998, 187. The India estimate is reported in Parson 2003, 203, along with an estimate of $4 billion over a decade for all developing countries.
52. Greene 1998, 101–5.
53. Benedick 1998, 247.
54. Zhao and Ortolano 2003, 714, 717.
55. Zhao and Ortolano 2003, 717.
56. Benedick 1998, 247.
57. Andersen et al. 2018, 13–15.
58. Benedick 1998, 207.
59. Zhao and Ortolano 2003, 713.
60. Benedick 1998, 207–9, 220–30.
61. Parson 2003, 211, 218, 227–28. Among other things, the first full assessment of methyl bromide control options finished in 1994 revealed why the first TOCs had been so effective: they were generally smaller, more focused, and in the case of CFCs, didn’t include producers. The Methyl Bromide TOC, with a membership of sixty-five, included manufacturers and some users who steadfastly “fought to have the report conclude that there were no alternatives to [methyl bromide].” Quoted in Parson 2003, 228.
62. MBAO, n.d.
63. UNIDO 2015.
64. As climate diplomacy was gathering steam from 1989 to 1991, the Austrian diplomat Winfried Lang—known as the father of the Vienna Convention and the man who helped organize early European support for cooperation on the ozone layer—singled out the ozone depletion regime as the model to be emulated for the climate, though he allowed that progress on climate change would be slower. His account of the workings of the ozone regime did not mention the TEAP or TOCs; industry, where it figures at all, is noticed for its opposition to the regime rather than its engagement in the joint search for solutions. Lang accurately reflected what most architects of environmental cooperation thought at the time. Lang 1991.
65. A historian of climate diplomacy, Dan Bodansky, dates the end of Western nations’ dominance on the climate agenda to about 1990. Prior to that debate, much of global diplomacy was focused on control strategies and debates among Western countries. After that, developing countries were much more organized and influential. See Bodansky 2001, 28, 30.
66. Hecht and Tirpak 1995. For the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, see IPCC 1990. Still other countries saw the World Meteorological Organization, the host of the 1990 Second World Climate Conference, as a logical host for climate diplomacy. Bodansky 2001.
67. In addition to the traditional voice of developing country interests—the G77, which typically caucused and spoke in tandem with China—a new subset of these nations formed in 1990: the Alliance of Small Island States. The group, representing the countries most vulnerable to a changing climate, was so effective that it soon became recognized as an official grouping of nations within the UN system. Ronneberg 2016.
68. UNGA 1988, 1990.
69. Vogler 2007. On the relation of the newly independent developing countries to the former colonial powers and their place in the global economy, see Getachew 2019.
70. Bodansky 2001.
71. Bodansky 1993.
72. UNFCCC 1995.
73. The main decision from Berlin was called the Berlin Mandate, and it set out the process and expectations for those negotiations. UNFCCC 1995, 1/CP.1. Formally, targets and timetables were called, in the language of the Berlin Mandate, “quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives” (QELROs)—a reminder that even the simplest idea can be conveyed by mangled, complex language.
74. UNFCCC 1995, 1/CP.1. This exemption was celebrated by many because the Berlin Mandate thus gave precise, institutional meaning to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” introduced in the UNFCCC four years earlier. Rajamani 2013. The sharp distinction between country groupings was taken to the limit in Kyoto, which rejected proposals that would have allowed developing countries to make even voluntary commitments to emissions reduction.
75. For the Montreal language, see the operative provisions of Article 6 in UNEP 1987. For the UNFCCC, see the authorizing language for the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice in Article 9 in UNFCCC 1992. In chapter 6, we will show that even where technically oriented meetings have been held, the focus has been diplomacy, not technical analysis.
76. Indeed, these same groups had evaluated and rejected concepts like “pledge and review” that might have evolved into a more experimentalist system of governance for climate change. Targets and timetables—without opportunities for revisions and the coadjustments of pledges in light of implementation experiences, were the centerpieces of their demands at Berlin. Victor 2001.
77. For the origins of the enthusiasm for emissions trading starting in this period, see Hahn and Hester 1989; Boyd 2021. For a discussion of the limits of the market-based approach to problems of this type, see Sabel and Simon 2011, 53. For a discussion of market mechanisms when applied to the rigidity of US environmental law, see Ackerman and Stewart 1984.
78. On the real-world experience with bubbles and other early market-like concepts, see Hahn and Hester 1989. See also Stavins 1988. On the sulphur program, see chapter 4.
79. Boyd 2021, 460. Advocates of emissions trading were well aware of the hot spot problem and suggested that it could eventually be addressed through elaborate refinement of the basic scheme. Sabel and Simon 2011.
80. Stewart and Wiener 2004.
81. Yellen 1998.
82. Victor 2001.
83. Victor 2001; Cullenward and Victor 2020, 87–102.
84. Streck and Lin 2010.
85. While the problem of CDM quality attracted press attention in the United States as an example of a UN program gone awry, in Europe concern was even greater because CDM credits were flooding into the ETS and were one factor in eroding prices in the ETS—in effect, Gresham’s law. For work emblematic of the European Union’s investigation into CDM quality, see Cames et al. 2016. That study, while it appeared after the key decisions were made, is a good overview of the methods and issues that EU policy makers were grappling with, and that led to the conclusion that the CDM can’t be considered a single mechanism; rather, each project type and institutional setting required distinct analysis. Staff work summarized around 2010 outlined a series of reforms to the CDM itself that might have improved quality (we are skeptical because the problem of setting baselines is intractable, no matter how clever the reforms), but such reforms would have required changing the CDM itself (which would require diplomatic consensus) or erecting a parallel EU system to oversee the CDM (which would have been administratively impractical). European Commission 2010. For the EU policy that has curtailed usage of the CDM in Europe, see EU 2013.
86. Victor 2001.
87. Canada and Australia were in similar situations. Canada joined Kyoto, but then withdrew when its largest trading partner (the United States) did not join. Australian politics on climate change were similar to, if not more toxic than, those in the United States, which made joining Kyoto impractical.
88. Victor and Salt 1995.
89. Revkin 2009.
90. In China that decade, the carbon intensity of the energy system actually went up—coal grew disproportionately faster than all other energy sources—and emissions soared. Victor et al. 2014.
Chapter 3. Theory of Experimentalist Governance
1. Chandler 1993.
2. Christensen 2016.
3. On the distinction between mass production by specialized tools and flexible production using reconfigurable capital goods under the control of skilled workers, see Piore and Sabel 1984.
4. From this perspective, decarbonization is a key piece of the larger program of overcoming the dualist separation of the economy into an advanced sector—the knowledge economy—that thrives on innovation—and a stagnant, rearguard sector that creates dead-end jobs and blighted communities. The Green New Deal aims to connect the two projects, but details are scarce. For a proposal to create more good jobs, extending the scope of the advanced sector, in line with the thinking here, see Rodrik and Sabel, forthcoming.
5. But this illustration suggests that the incentive-design problem is easy to solve. In fact, it turns out to be formally unsolvable. The principal’s best strategy is to in effect bribe agents into disclosing one another’s true costs of alternative actions by offering them shares in the project’s returns. The only scheme that generates incentives large enough to induce disclosure, however, also leaves the principal with the discretion to cheat agents by withholding the promised payoffs, undercutting cooperation before it begins. See Holmstrom and Milgrom 1991; Holmstrom 1982. Actors in the real world solving principal-agent problems wing it.
6. Fama and Jensen 1983.
7. On stakeholder views, see Henderson 2020. On the failures of current corporate governance and the possible advantages of the private equity model, see Gilson and Gordon 2020.
8. The distinction between risk and uncertainty was developed by the economist Frank Knight in the 1920s. See Knight 1921.
9. Since the 1990s, a wave of “new” governance writing has called attention to the spread of loosely defined, posthierarchical structures, often in the form of networks, and frequently without explicit reference to the breakdown of principal-agent relations. See, for example, Rhodes 1997; de Búrca and Scott 2006; Scharpf 1997. Much of this literature focused on developments in the European Union, where the push to create the single market led to the creation of regulatory agencies that had to pool the experience of the member states and continue to learn from their differences while maintaining common frames for action. Experimentalist governance developed as a response to changes in the United States and was then applied to an analysis of innovations in the European Union. See Dorf and Sabel 1998; Sabel and Zeitlin 2008.
10. On the logic of mass production and its vulnerability to shocks, see Piore and Sabel 1984.
11. Smith 1976, 21–25.
12. Ben-Shahar and White 2006.
13. Trebilcock 2017.
14. Ward et al. 1995.
15. Womack, Jones, and Roos 2007.
16. Ausubel, Wernick, and Waggoner 2013.
17. For example, hazards to supply chains. See Kinghorn 2016.
18. For a prominent case study of the reaction of the US nuclear power–generating industry to the Three Mile Island disaster, see Rees 1996. On incident reporting in civil aviation, see Mills and Reiss 2014.
19. Holling 1978; Lee 1993.
20. Gilson, Sabel, and Scott 2009, 2014.
21. This section draws on Kessler and Sabel 2021.
22. The legal terminology is confusing. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 calls the traditional method of rule making by hearing, with presentation of evidence as in a courtroom, formal, and notice-and-comment rule making informal. In practice most rule making is of the notice-and-comment type and it has become the de facto standard of formality. In what follows we mean notice-and-comment rule making when we speak of formal procedures in contrast to the informality of guidance. See 5 U.S.C. §553.
23. Elliott 1992.
24. Vermeule 2016.
25. Parrillo 2019, 168–169.
26. See, for example, American Bar Association 1993. Nicholas Parrillo speaks in this connection of “principled flexibility.” See Parrillo 2019.
27. Parrillo 2017, 34.
28. Parillo 2017, 34.
29. Parrillo 2019, 167–68.
30. Lindsay 2018.
31. Kessler and Sabel 2021 suggests some doctrinal and institutional reforms in this direction.
32. Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009.
33. For a concise portrayal of this skeptical literature, see Fishkin 2018.
34. Sunstein and Hastie 2015.
35. For a concise description of how deliberative polling is organized and the role of experts in providing sound information to frame discussion, see Luskin, Fishkin, and Jowell 2002, especially 458–60.
36. On deliberative polling in the radically polarized circumstances of Northern Ireland, just after it emerged from outright violence between Protestants and Catholics, see Luskin et al. 2014. There is, as can only be expected, disagreement among those studying deliberation as to whether deliberative polling reliably proxies what public opinion would be under plausibly favorable conditions. See Neblo, Esterling, and Lazer 2019.
37. See, in general, Fishkin et al. 2021.
38. Ho 2017.
39. Ho 2017, 43.
40. To eliminate the possibility that background features of the situation—the participants’ length of service perhaps, or the experiences of one or another group—might in operationalizing the experiment come accidentally to shape the results as well as to enable the precise measurement of the effects of reform, the entire staff was randomly assigned to a treatment group that would conduct the weekly peer reviews and a control group that would continue inspection as usual. To further reduce the likelihood of accidental, extraneous influence, the peer pairings were randomly reassigned each week, with restrictions to ensure that pairs did not repeat and that assigned establishments were outside the pairs’ home inspection territories. Within each pair, the peers alternated in the role of lead inspector, who took primary responsibility for guiding the visit, and whose report, corrected in light of discussions after the inspection, became the official record of violations, while the “nonlead” inspector filed an unsigned report coded for the purposes of the experiment as peer review. A great advantage of this procedure was to allow Ho to trace the evolution of judgment inspector by inspector and week by week. Ho 2017, 31.
41. Ho 2017, 45, 54.
42. Personal communication, Daniel E. Ho, December 8, 2021.
43. Ho 2017, 93.
44. Ho 2017, 57.
45. Goodin and Niemeyer 2003 emphasize the role of exposure to new information, credibly presented, in promoting reconsideration of views.
46. Ho 2017, 92, 86, 67.
47. Ayres and Gertner 1989.
48. Hiscox and Smyth 2006.
49. Gunningham, Kagan, and Thornton 2004.
50. Copeland 2012.
51. Clean Air Act 1963.
