_{Review of the global climate change policy Contraction and Convergence}
by James Greyson, November 2007

Contraction and Convergence (C&C) is a compelling policy; Greenhouse gas emissions do need to contract and it would be fair to provide for convergence between and within nations, so that some people do not shiver and starve so that others can pursue decadence. However the approach is meeting political resistance, due to its association with mandatory emissions capping and rationing of 'entitlements'. C&C might take off if it was instead associated with sustainable economic reform, which can provide contraction, convergence and the economic growth that politicians depend upon.

Address the symptom (climate change) or the cause (unsustainable economics)?
There is an instinctive temptation to address the market failure that causes climate change by setting limits for carbon. Emissions do need to be drastically cut and this is an obvious way to do it. Less obvious is how the same market failure is responsible for all aspects of unsustainability. A global deal to set mandatory limits on emissions would be a way to tell markets they have failed with carbon but to let them off with everything else. Carbon-limited capitalism is not equivalent to sustainable capitalism. Whilst some problems may get better, others would get worse - notably conflict, destruction of nature and nuclear waste. Conceivably the minuses could outweigh the pluses and leave global society and its economy less able to handle anything, including the climate.

Sustainable economic reform has been kicking around as theory for more than 35 years so people could be forgiven for thinking that it can't be done. Governments haven't exactly been sweating to work hard on this and most of the academic research just tells us more about what won't work. More optimistically, the multitude of problems of unsustainability are now so blindingly obvious that only the most hardened deniers can continue to look the other way. And new research, including work available here (see briefing or full papers), offers new hope for solutions on the scale of all the problems - not just emissions. This means that climate change need not be seen as a climate-only problem with emissions-only solutions. Climate change can be seen as a historical opportunity to raise political momentum for a serious attempt at a genuinely sustainable economics. Fix the economics and you get an increasingly sustainable society with an increasingly stable climate.

How would this work? Given that the necessary scale and speed of response is so massive, beyond what most people can even imagine, we need mechanisms of change which are sufficiently powerful. The carbon capping version of C&C would be as powerful as the political process for agreeing caps plus the carbon-markets and top-down regulation that would follow, assuming political success. The capping mechanism would fight against the forces of unsustainable economics which would still fail to account for most 'externalities' (damage). The economic reform version of C&C would harness the full power of local and global markets with politicians only needing to agree targets rather than caps. These targets would set the 'accelerator' of contraction and the investment flows of convergence.

Contraction, convergence and capping OR contraction, convergence and sustainability?
Given that there is no time to waste, how could a broad sustainable economic reform outpace a narrow climate-only reform? Intuitively it may seem that the 'smaller' problem should be faster to solve. Political resistance to capping in many countries underpins international emissions reduction agreements, which has been entirely ineffective over the past 15 years. Removing the obstacle of capping could allow agreements to surge ahead. The underlying cause of political resistance to capping is also fixed, since economic growth could proceed in a sustainably-functioning economy. Investment in solving problems is more productive than investment which causes problems. The message to the economy would be to do more, not less. More investment, more paid work, more innovation and more effort based on market signals supporting people's innate desire to do something worthwhile. A capping and rationing version of C&C might appear as a 'do less' message, affecting the human spirit differently - "How can we avoid this constraint?, How can we bend or break these rules?

Climate science is revealing, predictably, that things are worse than predicted. Acceptable risks to humanity now take us out out of the realms of what is easily imagined. Perhaps we need to be thinking about how to run society with the reverse of the usual expectations. What would it take to reverse the progressive loss of nature, to have nations compete to reduce arms spending, to actively lower existing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations over time? These things are not conceivable with either economics-as-usual or carbon-capped economics but they can be discussed as outcomes of a sustainable economic reform version of C&C.

C&C links
Global Commons Institute www.gci.org.uk
Simpol forum about C&C. www.simpol.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=16.0
C&C has been presented alongside the carbon rationing scheme TEQs - see review.

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