Which climate policy works best? This new study provides clues. – Mother Jones
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This story was originally published by Ground material and is reproduced here as part of the Climatedesk Cooperation.
After publication Last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the “climate time bomb” was ticking when he released a comprehensive climate report. Standing behind a podium adorned with the symbol of the United Nations – a globe surrounded by olive branches – Guterres declared: “Our world needs climate action on all fronts – on all fronts, everywhere, at once.”
This call to action (possibly inspired by the film of the same name) is a good summary of what is needed to counter rising carbon emissions. According to a new study published Thursday in the journal ScienceCountries have succeeded in reducing their emissions by putting a price on carbon emissions, but the biggest savings have been achieved by introducing a combination of measures. 70 percent of the cases where countries achieved large results were due to several measures creating “synergies.”
“There really is no silver bullet,” said Felix Pretis, co-author of the study and an economics professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. “This goes a little bit against the conventional wisdom that carbon pricing is the only thing we should be pushing for.”
“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policy that nothing is really happening, but actually we’ve made quite a bit of progress.”
Pretis and researchers in Germany, France and the UK looked for large emissions cuts in each country and compared those results with the actions taken. Using machine learning, they analyzed 1,500 actions in 41 countries between 1998 and 2022 and found only 63 cases where countries significantly reduced their emissions. In total, these savings amounted to between 600 million and 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policy that nothing is really happening, but actually we’ve made quite a bit of progress,” Pretis said.
The fact that the study only found 63 success stories is partly because it set the bar very high in terms of emissions reduction, says Pretis. “But at the same time, we also see many measures that have been implemented but are not really having an impact.”
Governments are missing their climate targets from the 2015 Paris Agreement by around 23 billion tonnes of CO2. The problem is not only due to a lack of ambition, the study says, but also to a lack of knowledge about which measures work in practice.
Pricing carbon emissions, whether through a carbon tax or an emissions trading system, is “a notable exception” because it sometimes leads to large emissions reductions on its own, the study says. It works particularly well for emissions from industry and the power sector. However, “it works even better when it is complemented and packaged as a policy mix,” says Pretis.
The study does not take into account measures “that would have been extremely successful but were not adopted precisely because they would have been so effective.”
For example, the UK saw a 19 percent drop in emissions from the electricity sector between 2012 and 2018 after the European Union introduced a carbon price for electricity producers. Around the same time, the UK had implemented a number of other measures, including stricter air pollution standards, incentives for building solar and wind farms, and a plan to phase out coal-fired power plants. Similarly, China reduced its industrial emissions by 20 percent between 2013 and 2019. This was done through a pilot emissions trading program, but also by reducing fossil fuel subsidies and strengthening financing for energy efficiency investments.
To reduce emissions from transport and buildings, it is even better to combine several instruments, according to the study. Regulation is the most effective measure to reduce emissions from transport and can work well with carbon pricing or subsidies. The study also emphasizes that different measures can be effective in different contexts. The researchers found that carbon pricing is less effective in developing countries, where regulations to limit pollution and investments in green technologies may be more appropriate.
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said the study shows what measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions were politically possible, but it cannot necessarily serve as a guide for future policy decisions. “It does not capture measures that were never adopted – including those that would have been extremely successful but were not adopted precisely because they would have been so effective.”
Because of the study’s limitations, it also did not include some of the most important climate policies, Wagner said, pointing to the carbon taxes Sweden’s government passed in the early 1990s and the Inflation Reduction Act that President Joe Biden signed in 2022. The United States’ landmark climate law invests hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and tax breaks for low-carbon technologies such as heat pumps. The law is estimated to reduce emissions by 40 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.
“I would not be surprised if this exercise were repeated in five or ten years. Then it would become apparent that the Inflation Reduction Act leads to a significant reduction in emissions,” said Wagner.
