As I said last
week, the emergence of gridlock between the legislative and executive branches
of U.S. government is going to put political pressure on the unelected
components of government.
This isn't just a national phenomenon, however -- it's also an international
one. What happens if the big players on the global stage can't agree -- either
internally or externally -- on new arrangements to solve a mounting policy
problem? If the problem clearly needs fixing, then pressure inevitably builds
up to use a pre-existing mechanism to address the issue. Some elites in
gridlocked countries will welcome this kind of development, because it allows
them to bypass domestic impediments to policy change. Because this new
possibility is both suboptimal and less than democratic, however, it inevitably
builds up global resentments against unaccountable international institutions.
For exhibit A of this phenomenon today, let's wander over to John
Broder's New York Times story on the latest developments in
fashioning a policy response to climate change:
With energy legislation shelved in the United States and little hope for a
global climate change agreement this year, some policy experts are
proposing a novel approach to curbing global warming: including greenhouse
gases under an existing and highly successful international treaty ratified more
than 20 years ago.
The treaty, the Montreal Protocol, was adopted in 1987 for a completely
different purpose, to eliminate aerosols and other chemicals that were blowing
a hole in the Earth's protective ozone layer.
But as the signers of the protocol convened the 22nd annual meeting in
Bangkok on Monday, negotiators are considering a proposed expansion in the
ozone treaty to phase out the production and use of the industrial chemicals
known as hydro fluorocarbons or HFCs The chemicals have thousands of times the
global warming potential of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas.
HFCs are used as refrigerants in air-conditioners and cooling systems. They
are manufactured mostly in China and India, but appliances containing the
substance are in use in every corner of the world. HFCs replaced even more
dangerous ozone-depleting chemicals known as HCFCs, themselves a substitute for
the chlorofluorocarbons that were the first big target of the Montreal
process…
[T]he plan is not expected to be adopted this year. Large developing
countries, including China, India and Brazil, object that the timetable is too
rapid and that payments for eliminating the refrigerant are not high enough.
One advantage to using the Montreal protocol as a vehicle, supporters say,
is that negotiations over the treaty have been utterly unlike the contentious United
Nations climate talks that foundered in Copenhagen last year.
Negotiators say that without legislative action on curbing greenhouse gases by
the United States, little progress will be made when countries gather in
Cancún, Mexico, late this month for another round of climate talks.
In a post-election news conference, President
Obama noted that it was doubtful that Congress would do anything to
address global warming "this year or next year or the year after."…
Daniel A. Reifsnyder, the deputy assistant secretary of state for
environment and the nation's chief Montreal Protocol negotiator, said that it
might take several years to persuade the ozone treaty countries to back the
plan.
In addition to pace and cost issues, some countries say that HFCs have
little impact on the ozone layer and thus should be handled under the United
Nations climate change talks. Mr. Reifsnyder dismissed that as a legalistic
argument and said that the ozone treaty could and should be used to achieve
broader environmental objectives.
"What we've found is that the Montreal Protocol has been a very effective
instrument for addressing global environmental problems," Mr. Reifsnyder said
in an interview. "It was created to deal with the ozone layer, but it also has
tremendous ability to solve the climate problem if people are willing to use it
that way."
If I was the policymaker in charge of pushing action on climate change
forward, I'd be very tempted to agree with Reifsnyder. This might be a way of
achieving a deliverable that would simply not be possible under the Copenhagen Accord or
the United Nations effort to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
On the other hand… this is also an action that would inject political
controversy into what was a ridiculously successful accord. It will push
another governance process that's already in critical condition into hospice
care. Plus, I'm not sure it will work -- China and India are going to stoutly
resist this move.
My larger point, however, is that political paralysis in certain global
governance forums is simply going to trigger a search for more suitable global
governance structures. That search isn't going to change the underlying
disagreements, however, and it just might cause an erosion of faith in the few
multilateral structures that do appear to work well.
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