The Pledge Problem

Photo by Sofia Lavlinskay on Unsplash

You may remember my essay of a few weeks ago on Carrots and Sticks. A number of you who read it commented that it laid out the policy dilemma of trying to make progress on climate action while not putting too much weight on the “sticks” side of the see-saw. There is one thing about sticks I think I may not have emphasized enough, however.

Certainty.

If you assume that a sticks policy has sufficient penalties - monetary and/or incarceration - then you can expect a lot of certainty with respect to the policy objective. With carrots, it is more challenging. You hope that the incentives have been designed correctly and are high enough to induce the level of action desired. You have some certainty of outcome, but not a very precise one.

But when it comes to action on climate change, neither sticks nor carrots have been the predominant form of climate action. Pledges are. And pledges have no certainty until whatever has been pledged has been delivered.

When pledges to reduce emissions first started being made by corporations and countries in the 1990’s and 2000’s I was willing to believe them. It was a different time then, especially in terms of belief in government and overall trust in institutions. It was also early enough in the emissions reduction battle to think that we had a lot of time to act on and achieve the necessary reductions. The CO2 PPM was already above the 350-degree stabilization level but not that far above, and the pledges being made seemed to put us on track to get things under control.

But I also had another thought then – what if these voluntary, non-binding pledges were not met? What if the entities making the pledges got to the point of delivery and said “sorry – we tried but for a number of reasons we were unable to do it”. If that happened there would be no “do over”. The opportunity would have been lost. The emissions happened instead of being avoided.

Unfortunately, that minor rumbling in my gut back then has proved to be the operative scenario.

In 2015, at COP 21 in Paris, a major accord was reached, and each country signing it put forth an emissions reduction pledge. These were called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and were voluntary – a country could name its own level of contribution. The pledges in total were not as high as necessary to match the level of reductions needed, but countries said they would ratchet up later. When later COPs (27, 28, etc.) rolled around and there was a scheduled “stock-taking” of how the countries were doing, it became clear that no one was on track to meet their NDCs, let alone “ratchet up”. Some countries did not even submit any information on what they had done.

Outside of the COP Process, many countries, as well as the EU, made a big deal out of their announcement of a pledge to reduce emissions. But now those pledges are falling by the wayside, as affordability has taken over as the main issue. And climate pledges and spending have been seen as an acceptable item to trade-off.

The same is true with States. Affordability is winning in the battle over the short-term economy without consideration of what the long-term economy will look like if emissions are not reduced.

But after all – politics usually prevails over policy …

Companies are pulling back on what they promised they would do. Microsoft has pulled out of a carbon-removal project that was seen as proof that we could count on pulling CO2 out of the air as a solution.

The companies building the data centers are ones that have to date been among the most demonstrative in addressing emissions and climate change. But now as they struggle to ensure they have power for those facilities are turning to gas-fired generation to ensure that electricity is available.

But after all – business is business …

But maybe I have looked at pledges more seriously than I should have. Maybe I should have looked at them more as aspirational, and a sign that things were moving in the right direction.

And maybe I should be giving more credit to the “Green Hushing” that is said to be happening off the radar screen. This new term in the climate vocabulary refers to the fact that many companies have not abandoned their efforts on climate action and sustainability. They are simply not touting or even talking about them based on the current political situation. I have not seen any numbers on how many fall into this category but I hope it is large.

But the problem remains that what we are doing is not working. Over half the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has gone there since 1990, i.e. since we first listened to the scientists and knew we had to act and since countries and companies started to make pledges.

Maybe things will work out. Maybe the falling cost of solar, batteries and other technologies will carry the day. The numbers and milestones being reached are looking good. Maybe the perverse market effect of the Iran War will be the stimuli we have been looking for on electrification (with hopes it will not be fossil-generated).

Maybe this, maybe that ….

The fact is we are “freestyling” when it comes to climate action. We are doing a lot of good things, but they are not of sufficient magnitude nor are they being done fast enough. There is essentially no plan – and where there are plans, those plans are easily and quickly being pulled back and/or adapted to take care of present issues instead of future issues that are not going to go away.

If pledges are all we have, they are better than nothing. But they are nothing we should really count on with any certainty - and that makes the future all the more uncertain.