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

• Working Group II Report on ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, IPCC Fifth Report 2014: chapter headings:– 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):– 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 fuel-

efficient 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 withincountries– 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, short-termism 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’