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.