Letter to M. Pascal Lamy

Président de la Commission mondiale sur la réduction des risques climatiques liés au dépassement

Forum de Paris sur la Paix

le 24 juillet 2022

Monsieur:

Permettez-moi d’abord de vous féliciter d’avoir accepté la haute charge de présider la commission sur le dépassement fort probable du budget global de carbone. Le niveau et l’expérience des membres sont fort encourageants, dans un paysage chaque jour plus sombre. Bonne chance, pour nous tous.

Je poursuivrai en anglais, qui sera probablement la principale langue de travail de la Commission.

********************************************************************

I make no apology for addressing you and the other eminent members of the Commission, as an ordinary citizen without relevant professional qualifications. I do have long experience as an international civil servant, so I have some claim to a generic understanding of the political and institutional environment in which you will work. The success of your mission will depend, as did that of Paris in 2015, on listening not only to élite policymakers, experts and economic stakeholders, but also grassroots activists; many young, but some old fogeys like me who care about the future of our grandchildren. Besides, you will need all the help you can get.

So here goes. You may make whatever use of this letter you see fit, with or without attribution; it is not confidential and I intend to publish it on social media, along with any public reply you see fit to make.

I will not try to impress you with semi-scholarly references. You will need to set up a professional research staff and network. If my arguments interest you, you will need to check them all out, far more thoroughly than I can.

1. The Tower of Babel (See Genesis 11:1–9)

You are a good part of the world’s Plan B for the climate emergency. To save time, I will assume the consensus is correct that overshooting the 1.5 deg C / 450 ppm target is now inevitable. In any case this contingency is your working assumption. I will also assume for the sake of argument that the overshoot will be about 25 Gt CO2 a year in 2030 (IPCC) (https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-2/), declining to net zero in 2050. Taking 2030 as the baseline, this gives a ballpark estimate of a ≈250 Gt cumulative overshoot, which will have to be removed. At a guess of $50 per tonne, we have a total cost of ≈$12.5 trn. You will of course need to secure much better estimates through intensive research, but this will do as a ballpark number. Plan B will be the largest collective enterprise in the history of humanity.

2. What is the goal?

The 1.5 deg C/450 ppm target is itself somewhat arbitrary: it was adopted in Paris in 2015 as a stretch goal at the upper limit of the politically feasible rather than as an optimum recommended by the science. The 420 ppm we have now does not feel anywhere near safe, and 450 ppm will be much worse. You will need to take a position on the ultimate goal of climate stabilisation.

Rather than immediately picking a number like 350 ppm, I suggest you try to design a process for policy choice over time. This will be complex. One factor is that some climate impacts like the loss of ice sheets and biodiversity may be irreversible over horizons of a century or two. Another is that if the policies, technologies and infrastructure implementing Plan B are capable of hitting 450 ppm, they will be capable of a lower target, and probably at much lower cost as the infrastructure will already be in place, as will the political consensus needed to set it up. There is no need of an early decision on the ultimate goal, but it will be important to keep options open and signal hope for an ultimate return to the pre-industrial climate norm to which we are biologically adapted.

One arbitrary but resonant option for a baseline is the 400 ppm of 2015, the year of the Paris protocol. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels that year were ≈ 35 Gt. Adding 30 Gt a year for 15 years to 2030 adds another 450 Gt to remove, taking the sequestration target to ≈ 700 Gt and the cost to ≈ $35 trn.

3. A new paradigm

Plan B will be a very different animal from the net zero plan of the Paris protocol. Energy is valuable, and people will willingly pay for it. The transition from fossil to renewable sources has been slowed by the problem of unpriced externalities, and the absence of a carbon price to deal with them. But it is now clear that the scattershot, messy and incomplete measures that have been put in place - subsidies, publicly funded research, and other ad hoc incentives - have been enough to secure the development and deployment of low-carbon technologies to the point where they are widely competitive with fossil-based ones. There is good reason to think that this model of decentralised capitalism, tweaked by government policy, will get us the rest of the way to net zero.

The major problem that remains is the political resistance of vested fossil interests, but this will inevitably get relatively weaker from now on.

Carbon removal is different. It has no price reflecting scarcity, unless government creates one. It is a pure collective good. There are likely to be some exceptions – sustainably managed forests have commercial value, carbon sequestration in farmland soils may improve yields – but it would be irresponsible to hope these will do the job alone. The paradigm for large-scale carbon removal is a process driven by governments and funded by taxpayers.

4. War economies

There are historical precedents for this in the improvised war economies of the 20th century: Britain France, Germany and Austro-Hungary in WW1, Britain, Germany, the USA, Japan and the USSR in WW2. (My understanding is that in WW1 tsarist Russia failed to create a war economy and the USA did not need to. I don’t know about Italy at all.) All of them managed to shift production dramatically to the war matériel specified by the government, while leaving their peacetime institutional framework and management as little changed as possible. General Motors continued to be General Motors, except that it built tanks instead of cars. The capitalist countries developed ad hoc instruments of control, through rationing of key inputs and selective direction of labour (in Nazi Germany and the USSR, including slave labour). The Bolshevik experiments during the Civil War with using the practical exigencies to further a utopian restructuring of the Soviet economy were not emulated by anybody in WW2.

These cases are extreme, but show that a very large redirection of output under state direction is technically and socially feasible. US production of military aircraft was 3,611 in 1940. In 1944 it was 96,270 (x 26), including planes like the B29 bomber that were vastly larger and more complex than any made four years earlier. War-related production reached 40% of US GDP in the same year; the ratio was presumably higher in other combatants. In contrast, my guess for the total cost of sequestration to a 400 ppm target is $35trn over say 35 years, or ≈ $1trn a year. Gross world product in 2021 was $96trn. The annual cost of very ambitious sequestration would be under 1% of this, a small fraction of that of 20th-century warfare.

5. Versailles vs. Thélème

As I argued above, carbon removal will be a state responsibility, the greatest peacetime “grand projet” ever. The mindset of Colbert, still characteristic of French “grands commis de l’Etat” such as (I venture to say) yourself, is therefore an essential part of the solution. Political and financial obstacles will have to be overcome, vast resources assembled in the public purse, and channelled efficiently to complex and coordinated public projects. That is how it will have to operate, in the nearly 200 states of the international community. A good part of the work of the Commission will be in the spirit of Versailles. But not all.

Rabelais’ hero Gargantua created his Abbaye de Thélème under the motto “Fay ce que vouldras”, echoing Saint Augustine’s “dilige et fac quod vis”. It’s a paper Utopia, never implemented, though fairly successful efforts have been made over the centuries to create voluntary communities with high reliance on good nature and low levels of internal coercion. More to the point, the authors of the Paris Protocol, whether in hope or desperation, created an analogous scheme of collective action relying on national policy contributions freely chosen by each member state. They trusted that as in the dining halls and salons of Thélème, social pressures on each state, from the street, business, experts, the diplomacy of other Parties, technological progress, and élite amour-propre would over time increase the ambition of these policies. To the surprise of many cynical observers, and the delight of its protagonists, the scheme is working.

It cannot be assumed that the same model can be used for carbon removal. Nor can it be assumed it would fail. The Commission will need, I suggest, to strike the delicate balance between Versailles and Thélème in all aspects of its work. The success of Paris, after the failure of Kyoto, suggests to me that the starting-point could be the same as the former: create a strong coalition of the willing, then use the modern tools of the trade without compunction to bring round the unwilling.

6. Participation

Democratic participation by a great variety of stakeholders was crucial not only in the adoption of the Paris Protocol but to its implementation. As in any real democratic process, it has not been the search for facile face-saving consensus but the locus of vigorous and sometimes bitter disputes with high stakes.

This will continue to hold for carbon removal. For instance, green activists are typically hostile to proposals for subsidising new technologies in this area on the grounds that (a) they are put forward in bad faith by fossil fuel interests trying to preserve their doomed and antisocial business model for as long as possible and (b) they are a distraction from the urgent need to cut emissions now, and weaken the fragile commitment to net zero.

The Commission will need to win over the green activists to support the development and deployment of such technologies. This suggests a Thélèmist strategy of letting a hundred flowers bloom in research and exploring all possible avenues, including modest investment in eccentric long shots on the DARPA model. The Versailles element here is rigorous transparency and uniform evaluation ex-ante and ex-post, to cut the risk of capture by industry. This is a very real risk, and clearly happened already with the many failures of premature plants extracting CO2 from the flues of coal-burning power stations.

It will be much less difficult to win over business. The opposition of the fossil fuel industries to the energy transition through lobbying and dishonest agitprop has caused a disastrous delay to mitigation. But the transition is happening anyway, and is steadily reducing the political and cultural leverage of the sector. The hitherto oil-friendly car industry for instance still sells gasoline-powered vehicles, but it sees its future as electric. By the time the world is ready to deploy carbon removal at scale, the fossil fuel industry will have shrunk to insignificance, and in any case will have no reason to oppose it. On the plus side, $1 trn a year is an enticing pot of money, and plenty of entrepreneurs will vie for contracts to secure a fat slice of it. Interestingly, they will surely lobby for an ambitious target, alongside the activists.

Finally, public opinion is likely to swing behind carbon removal as the climate worsens and major weather disasters become more frequent. The problem is less likely to be lack of support, but irrational support for bogus solutions put forward by hucksters and charlatans. The challenge will be to stop wasting public funds on such cargo cults, and maintain public support for a programme that is soundly based in science, technology and management - Versailles principles again.

7. Free riders

The success of the Paris protocol was only partly due to its correct application of Thélèmist principles. It was also down to the disappearance of the free rider problem. This was a large part of the failure of Kyoto and later COPs up to Copenhagen. Why should the citizens of [insert name of rich country] agree to sacrifice their standard of living while those of [insert name of poor country] both get the benefit of this sacrifice, and stay free to increase their own polluting consumption? Cue for a sterile and insoluble zero-sum dispute.

By 2015, the secular decline in the cost of solar and wind power had rendered the free-rider problem in mitigation largely moot. The 5th assessment report of the IPCC in 2014 reported that in cash terms, that is without a real or virtual carbon price, renewable and fossil electric generation were already very similar in their total cost. Consequently, the net cost over time to individual states of an energy transition in electricity was negligible, whatever other states did. This good news on costs surely helped enable the agreement in Paris. The fall in renewable prices has continued, along with rapid technological progress in many other energy-using sectors (land and sea transport, steel, cement, hydrogen). These trends have made the transition a large net saving in many places.

This happy story will not be repeatedin carbon removal. This is of course likely to get cheaper over time as technologies mature and economies of scale kick in. But it will remain a public good with a significant net cost and only one serious purchaser, the state. Consequently the temptation for single governments to free-ride will always remain, for as long as the programme is in force.

This problem calls for Versailles methods, hardball and technocratic. One possible instrument of coercion open to the hypothetical coalition of the willing is carbon border tariffs. These have been mooted for mitigation, on a limited sectoral scale, especially with the EU for shipping. They will be far more central to carbon removal.

May I conclude with heartfelt good wishes to the Commission in its vital work.

Yours sincerely

James Wimberley