Utopia, you are standing in it!

It is a stretch to say that New Zealand Greens have accepted that adaptation is the only proper response to the threat of global warming.

Nonetheless, their call for a plan for adaptation is an acceptance that more must be done than hoping for the best that a massively expensive international public good will be provided through a climate change treaty.

It is time for the environmental movement to face up to the fact that there never will be an international treaty to restrain carbon emissions.

The practical way to respond to global warming is healthier is wealthier, richer is safer. Faster economic growth creates more resources for resilience and adaptation to a changing environment.

Source: Energy Policy & the Environment Report | Leading Nowhere: The Futility and Farce of Global Climate Negotiations.

Tom Schelling has been involved with the global warming debate since chairing a commission on the subject for President Carter in 1980.

Schelling is an economist who specialises in strategy so he focuses on climate change as a bargaining problem. Schelling drew in his experiences with the negotiation of the Marshall Plan and NATO.

International agreements rarely work if they talk in terms of results. They work better if signatories promise to supply specific inputs – to perform specific actions now. Individual NATO members did not promise to slow the Soviet invasion by 90 minutes if it happened after 1962. NATO members promised to raise and train troops, procure equipment and supplies, and deploy these assets geographically. All of these actions can be observed, estimated and compared quickly.

The Kyoto Protocol commitments were made not about actions but to results that were to be measured after more than a decade and several elections.

Climate treaties should promise to do certain actions now such as invest in R&D and develop carbon taxes that return the revenue as tax cuts. If the carbon tax revenue is fully refunded as tax cuts, less reliable countries, in particular, have an additional incentive to collect the carbon tax properly to keep their budget deficits under control.

As for the chances of a global treaty, Schelling has said:

The Chinese, Indonesians, or Bangladeshis are not going to divert resources from their own development to reduce the greenhouse effect, which is caused by the presence of carbon-based gases in the earth’s atmosphere. This is a prediction, but it is also sound advice. Their best defence against climate change and vulnerability to weather in general is their own development, reducing their reliance on agriculture and other such outdoor livelihoods. Furthermore, they have immediate environmental problems — air and water pollution, poor sanitation, disease — that demand earlier attention.

The costs of global warming to New Zealand are small. For developing countries, their best protection against global warming is rapid economic development through capitalism and freedom.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group II has concluded that global warming of 2.5˚C would cost the equivalent to losing between 0.2-2.0% of annual income.