Newswise — “I don’t see any chance that we can have enforceable national limits on greenhouse gas emissions,” says University of Maryland Nobel laureate, Thomas Schelling in a newly published paper, released as delegates meet in Copenhagen at a UN conference on climate change. http://www.publicpolicy.umd.edu/facstaff/faculty/SchellingCV.htm
“People talk about ‘binding commitments’...but who is going to enforce the United States’ living within a certain quota?”, says Schelling, a retired University of Maryland professor who won the 2005 prize in economics for his work in game theory. “Nobody is going to propose military force, I doubt anybody’s going to threaten economic boycott. We are talking about what is inherently a voluntary system.
“I know of no peacetime historical precedent for the kind of international cooperation that is going to be required to deal with climate change,” Schelling adds. “My only historical example of cooperation on the scale that is likely to be required is the North Atlantic Treaty.”
Schelling’s paper appears in “Changing Climate, Changing Economy,” published by the Cournot Centre for Economic Studies (Paris, France).
Among the points his paper makes:
• “Developing countries are vulnerable to climate change…in a way that Americans, Canadians, French, Australians or Israelis are not,” he asserts. “The impact of climate on GDP per capita in the developed countries is not likely to be large.”• “The situation is more acute in developing countries, where as much as half the population can depend on agriculture, much of it subsistence agriculture.”• “It is going to be hard to get people in my country, the United States, to take climate change seriously, if they are made to believe that the vulnerable parts of the world are someplace else,” Schelling writes. “Al Gore probably exaggerated the threat to people in my country, and I don’t know how to get them to take it seriously unless we do exaggerate the threat to them, or else persuade them that peace and security in the long run depend on the successful development of the parts of the world that are still poor and vulnerable to climate change.”• “If in the developing world, in the course of the next 50 years, we can reduce the incidence of childhood hunger and malnutrition, the impact of climate change on health, on longevity in the developing world, will be hugely attenuated. I mention all this to suggest that the best defense against climate change for the vulnerable parts of the world – meaning the so-called developing countries – is going to be their own development, so they become less dependent on subsistence agriculture and less vulnerable to the various kinds of diseases that can afflict them if they are undernourished to begin with.”
AUDIO: Schelling discussed his paper, “Climate Change: A Bundle of Uncertainties, at a media briefing on Dec. 3, 2009. His comments can be heard online: http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/audio/2009/Copenhagen/Schelling.mp3 or at http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/AudioArchives/Page01.cfm
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