Climate change negotiations

I want to call attention to a paper just published by Marco Grasso and J. Timmons Roberts in which the authors propose a possible way forward for climate change negotiations.  The paper is published in Brookings' policy paper series and is available here.  I would guess that the authors hope the paper will be discussed at this week's meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) in Washington, D.C.

Grasso, who's on the faculty of the University of Milan-Bicocca, and Roberts, who's at Brown University, are not optimistic about the current U.N. process, by which 195 countries are supposed to produce a new agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2015.  Generally, they see an impasse between the U.S. and developed economies on one side and developing economies, especially China and Brazil, on the other.  Each side is unwilling to commit to reducing emissions unless the other side also does so. 

From what I read, this seems entirely accurate.  So Grasso and Roberts are looking for "a fair and feasible way to break the impasse."  The way past, they say, depends on "determining a country's fair share of the required emissions reductions in a way that is politically feasible."  No small matter, obviously.

But they propose an interesting, and for me, new way of assessing a country's emissions.  They argue for a "consumption-based," as opposed to a "production-based," method of measuring emissions.  A consumption-based approach "measures the amount of emissions associated with the final consumption of goods and services, and it is calculated by adding to territorial emissions those generated for producing imported goods and services and subtracting those associated with exported goods and services."  Apparently, recent technical improvements now make it possible to calculate a country's emissions in this way.  A purely production-based accounting method, they maintain, penalizes work-shop countries like China and India that produce goods massively consumed in Europe and the United States.

They favor discussion of this approach within the MEF, as opposed to the U.N., because it's a smaller group (12 countries plus 27 from the E.U.) and yet their green house gas emissions still account for 81 percent of the total emissions during the 1990 - 2010 period.

Red River flooding, again

The New York Times reported this week that Fargo and other towns along the Red River in North Dakota are again facing the likelihood of flooding.  This will be the fourth time in five years.  At the moment, it seems every available person has been mobilized to fill sandbags.  Understandably, people may be getting tired of this kind of emergency response and may be looking for less last-minute ways to avoid flood damage.

© Donald P. Schwert. Dept. of Geology, NDSU

Equally understandably, it seems they're giving most attention to familiar measures -- levees and spillways and diversionary channels.  The Times reports that 14 miles of levees have been built in Fargo in the last four years.  Plans are also well under way for a much bigger project.  This is a design for 35 miles of channels to divert flood waters away from the city.  Total cost, $1.8 billion.  A little over $300 million is supposed to come from North Dakota state and local sources; the rest -- about $1.2 billion -- would come from the federal government.

Fargo has purchased and cleared out a few houses located in the floodplain.  But the Times article doesn't mention any plans to make broader use of this tactic.  It doesn't appear, for example, that there's been any consideration given to applying the funds for levees and diversionary channels to buying up homes and businesses in floodplain areas.  Levees and channel systems will inevitably require maintenance.  An open floodplain, left as a park or nature preserve, doesn't. 

Admittedly, I suspect this approach of "sustainable floodplain management" may be more complicated in the Red River Valley.  Apparently this part of North Dakota and northern Minnesota in the U.S., and Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada, was an immense inland glacial lake as recently as about 10,000 years ago.  Today, the Red River descends very gradually across this old lake bed on its way north to Lake Winnipeg.  Because of this geology and history, the river has etched very little in the way of a valley.  This means that when waters rise they spread out across a wide area, across a very wide floodplain.  It is also why an approach to floodplain management that would apply in other areas may be harder to apply here. 

Even so, when close to $2 billion is likely to be spent on engineered solutions to flooding -- solutions that will require additional money every year for maintenance -- it would seem reasonable to ask if there aren't less costly, more environmentally rational, alternatives.