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LSE: Public lectures and events
Investing in our future: COP30 and the sustainable growth agenda
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by.
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The London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Get ready to hear from some of.
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The most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Okay, welcome, everyone.
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My name is Robin Burgess and I'm one of the organizers of LSC Environment Week. So we're on our first day today. We're in the fourth iteration of LSC Environment Week. It goes across the whole week.
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So there's 27 academic presentations, four sets.
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Of keynotes, and then three big events.
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And this year, we're very proud to be coming under the auspices of the new Global School of Sustainability at the lse.
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And just two things I wanted to mention. The first is that the bulk of.
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The organization for LSE Environment week, throughout.
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Its four iterations is done by PhD students. So it's kind of trying to reflect the enthusiasm that the young students at the LSE have for this topic, and.
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They have been the key reason that.
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It'S grown so incredibly quickly.
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And then the second thing, which is.
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A little bit different this year, is.
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We have a very close relationship with.
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The COP30 process, which you'll be hearing about this evening. And I think that also reflects the fact that now people realize that climate change and environmental degradation is sort of the number one challenge out there.
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And we need to have economists and.
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Other disciplines bridge into that challenge. And it's great to have that happening.
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At the London School of Economics.
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So I'm going to introduce Susanna Morato, who will welcome on behalf of the school and gsoc. Thank you very much.
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Thank you so much, Robin. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm Susanna Morato. I'm a professor of Environmental Economics and Vice President of research here at lse. This gathering could not be more timely. Around the world, we've all witnessed environmental concerns slipping down the agenda. The net zero commitments are being rolled back. The wildlife populations are collapsing. We see ocean pollution choking our oceans, and now even the prospect of deep sea mining. So the warning signs are stark. Yet it is not too late. There are also powerful reasons for hope. The High Seas Treaty came into force on Friday. Finally, marine protected areas have doubled since 2012. And the deforestation in the Amazon appears to be slowing. Renewables are now providing 30% of the world's electricity. So progress is possible when evidence, ambition and collaboration come together. This is why Environment Week matters as we look ahead to COP30 in Brazil. As Robin said this November, a pivotal moment for the global climate agenda. The research and dialogue happening here can help shape the pathways for mitigation, adaptation and Transition over the coming decades. At lse, our new flagship institute, research Institute, the Global School of Sustainability that we inaugurated in January this year brings together world leading social science expertise to support this global effort. Environment Week is one of the key ways in which we showcase this expertise, connecting economics researchers and decision makers from around the world to drive practical solutions. It is therefore a particular pleasure to introduce tonight's chair, Sir Andrew Steer, professor of practice at LSE's new Global School of Sustainability and also the International Growth Centre. Andrew brings extraordinary global experience. From leading the Bezos Earth Fund to his years in the World Resources Institute. He has always pushed us to connect science, economics and policy in pursuit of practical solutions. Andrew will now guide what promises to be a rich and timely discussion with a truly distinguished panel. Thank you very much.
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Thank you, Susanna. Welcome everybody. Can you imagine a more important topic than we are discussing today? 33 years ago, I sat in Rio de Janeiro at the Rio Earth Summit and watched heads of state and heads of government walk up a beautiful carpet and sign the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Biodiversity Convention. And it was a time of incredible moral direction. It was a hard fought negotiation. But as they signed it, there was really a feeling that humanity can actually grapple with these big global collective action problems. Well, in the succeeding years, we lost that moral clarity. It's come back a few times. It certainly came in Paris, didn't it, in 2015? Came a little in some of the subsequent cops and so on. But my goodness me, we need it today more than ever. Looks like 1.5 degrees may be broken and we need to think very seriously about what to do. We face very serious political headwinds. Global problems need multilateral solutions. And yet the spirit of multilateralism is not what it was. And on the positive side, we see the most amazing developments in technology and knowledge that actually could transform things. So we have a cop 30 coming along with a wonderful host in a wonderful country. And we need to think big. When you have negative headwinds, you can do one of two things. You can say it's too difficult, so let's just be more gradualistic. And a lot of leaders right now are keeping their heads down for good reason and bad, mainly bad. Or you can say, because we have such a difficult situation, we now can break the rules. We can do things really differently. Think about the Bretton woods institutions. It was 1944. If it hadn't been those dark days of the war, we wouldn't have the World bank or the IMF or the wto. Maybe not even the United Nations. It is out of adversity that you get real breakthroughs. And this panel we're about to hear is basically going to make some big suggestions. And that's what tonight is all about. And so I want just to introduce our panel, first of all, first, Ms. Sherry Rutman, who is the former federal minister of climate Change of Pakistan. She's a parliamentary leader in the Senate of Pakistan. She's won the top 50 in the world in all kinds of surveys. And so she's going to speak first. It's a wonderful honor to have you here, Senator. Then we're going to go to Professor Jose Schenkman, who is the Distinguished professor of economics at Columbia University. And also if that's not enough, but also at Princeton, understand, then Professor Michael Greenstone. He's the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service professor in Economics. He's also at the University of Chicago. He's also worked for the Federal Administration and is the guy on shadow prices of carbon and so on. And then we're going to finally to Professor Patrick Bolton. He's the professor of finance and economics at Imperial College and Columbia University. His work focuses on kinds of interesting things related to corporate governance. So if we don't have a good time with these people, it's their fault. But the good news is when they finished, you're all going to ask questions or disagree. So that sounds pretty good. So I'd like Sherry, if you'd go first, that would be really great. Thank you.
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Good evening. Thank you very much for that generous introduction and thank you for convening this important meeting seminar at an inflection point in our lives. But isn't it always an inflection point? Every single year? I think we say that we also use the term unprecedented far too often. Now the very brilliant economists here and masters of their academic universe have done a number on me. You go first. So the real world begins with the boys. So don't worry, I attempt to woman splain this to you as best as possible. That's the name of my new book, by the way. So, well, what to expect from COP 30. Now, you know, we have distinguished people telling us what the agenda will be, how to shape it and who defines what. As usual, we will have, I'm sure, high ambitions, as one should because even in the face of adversity, well, the tough don't go shopping. They actually do some work. So here's what I think for my what's left of my seven minutes look, it sometimes feels like I am the token voice from the Global south, also very often the token woman. But we have to get past both those, right? And the Global south is at least 135 countries, but actually less. That's the group of 177. 77 rather. And in that context, COP30 has come under a cloud. It's come under a cloud from our side of the universe because we are facing down the front line of a surging and accelerated climate catastrophe. An environment that's changing faster than we can cope with or reset our resilience targets, let alone implement them. So executing change, matching up with fast accelerating technology, big picture goals, not easy in the trenches where you're constantly facing, for instance, a heat wave of 53 degrees. Now just for context, London declares an emergency at 40 degrees centigrade. Celsius. Whatever we are facing down three years running, fourth year now, 53 degrees in the summer. So that's, that's boiling temperatures. So from that context, I'm just going to say it very plainly. Cop 30 has to deliver much more than any other cop to rebuild trust and confidence in the Global South. It has to be less performative and more meaningful. It has to strike the grand bargain that we are all looking for that happened at the Paris Agreement. So 10 years ago we saw that. And 10 years ago the hope actually carried us forward into building complex and substantial agendas for change, for SDGs, for sustainability. Sustainability. We've blown all those. 1.5 is no longer alive. And from where I'm standing, we are looking at something like at least 2.5. Well, that's what it feels like when you look at your weather app. It tells you this is the temperature and this is what it feels like. I'll tell you what it feels like. It feels like 3 above pre industrial levels and by turn of century, at this trajectory, the scientists will tell you better or not, but it's looking like four degrees at this trajectory. This trajectory is not inevitable. Obviously nothing is inevitable. It's entirely in our hands. As someone said earlier very brilliantly, there is a policy of do nothing. If we did nothing, we'd be standing at around 2 degrees centigrade. Now you know, the trajectory of emissions is still, it's not even flattened. It's going this way. So global warming is this way. Every year you'll hear, oh, it's the hottest month of the year, the hottest.
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Day of the year.
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There are no surprises. It's going to come to your doorstep. The catastrophe will cross all borders and come to everyone's doorstep. So what are the big Ticket items you can do. I mean, why do we even go to COP if this is how we feel? We go to COP because it's the only multilateral forum in the world that still works. Well, at least halfway. It still defines the agenda, it makes the rules. But the big flaw at the heart of this agenda is that no one can implement it. No one can coerce anyone into staying there, meeting their targets, or providing a pledge that actually is auditable. The second thing I'd like to see here. So COP has to build trust. And how would it do that for all of us? It would build trust by bringing people and countries that are matching up to the promise. Now, the UK is coming up to its pledges, the EU is, and many countries are. But the big emitters have historic pledges that they have committed to. Which brings me to the piece on climate financing. We are told the last three, four cops, this is an implementation cop, this is a finance cop. Okay? They just become more expensive cops to attend. All right, so the implementation cops have to figure out a pathway, a roadmap, the transformative pathways that they promise that will lower the emissions. Because we do stop needing. We do stop, we do need to stop melting down. We are melting down where I come from. And we are facing cascade after cascade of crisis. What is the crisis? The crisis is from survival now to what we are told is scale. Now, that's the journey of most of our countries should be factored into your agenda. You know, it needs to be factored in that this is a Sisyphean journey. The rock goes up the melting glacier and it comes down less than two summers down. So a lot of our development, sustainability, resilience gains or adaptation gains are lost. What do we want from COP in this particular context? I'll tell you. Early warning systems that are brought into our countries because they're factored on technology we don't have and not take seven years to process. What do we want? And the UN Secretary General did call it a fundamental human right. We also want financing that's delivered as per the promise. Thirdly, we want adaptation to be taken out of its stepchild slot. Everyone makes commitments to adaptation, but most of the climate financing, 94% goes to mitigation. And look where mitigation targets have brought us. It goes to mitigation. And much of that 70% goes to the Global North. So where is the adaptation financing going? We need that because our houses are burning. Our house is burning. We will tell you that as micro emitters, we didn't create this Ball of fire that the earth is becoming. But we're in this together. Make us feel that we're in this together. Don't talk at us. Understand that the crisis is real, it's existential. And when fourthly, the cops say that we will leave no one behind, stop with the band aid on bullets and stop with the slogans that leave at least half the world behind. So the bumper stickers are fabulous, the PR machine is fabulous. It's got to mean something. Four billion people, or maybe three and a half, at least one month of the year, that's half the world is facing severe water stress. I'm very glad that Belem is going to bring up water as part of the agenda, but I'd like to see, and I'm very glad that the scientists here will actually give us models that work on climate financing. I would really like beyond adaptation. I would really like to see a definition of climate finance. It has yet to come. Why does it matter? Because countries, when they pledge, say after a big flood, $4 billion to Pakistan, we find that it's double counted as ODA or, or something else. So we would like a clear definition of climate finance at the UNFCCC from COP30. And lastly, I'm sure I'm running out of time, not. Lastly, we would like the stocktake process updated. I would like the stocktake process updated with clear definitions, transparency of data coming in from as many countries as are there, who have, who remain within the framework so that we know how much money is going where there are NDCs, nationally determined contributions called for every year with great power and clarity. And the UN puts its entire weight behind calling for those, matching those, and we made that pitch last year at a finance roundtable. Should be internationally determined contributions. What would those be? They would cluster around the quantified finance goals. They would cluster around announced pledges. They would cluster around getting financial flows aligned with the NDCs. A similar process, a similar mechanisms. Be clear on what you're delivering or what you can't deliver. We need to know what our carbon budget is and we need to know what our finance budgets are. Right now. They're unclear, they're fragmented. And by the time, say green financing gets to a developing country, it is projectized. We have to compete for it and it takes somewhere close to 18 months to 2 years to deliver on that. In that time, the facts on the ground have changed. The project that needed it, the terrain that needed it is no longer the same. That's how fast and accelerated the pace of climate Change is. And very lastly, quickly in this stocktake, I would like to consider a real carbon budget. What that means is that as we face down the highest number of conflicts in the world today since the Second World War, I need to know what is the carbon footprint? If you're making a realistic budget of all this conflict, it is extremely high. It is not budgeted into the Kyoto Protocol, it is not even budgeted into Paris Agreement. It's high time it was. Since the Second World War we have a lot of conflict going on from Europe to West Asia and of course Africa. So it's time that became part of the budget. You can't ask militaries to stop what they do. That's not your mandate. But you need to know what you're dealing with, right? There are many estimates, but obviously they're not confirmed and I won't toss those around. But they're all there in fragments, just like that. Our response is fragmented. So with those words, I'm going to say one last thing. Don't load developing countries with more debt as part of climate financing. The Bretton woods system is not working, not for developing countries anymore. I think France hosted an entire conference on changing the financial architecture of MDBs and IFIs. They were created for another world. The world has changed since then and I don't believe that adding to a debt burden of, of low and middle income countries should be the role of the MDBs or IFIs. Right now. That's what it is. Thank you very much.
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Thank you very much, Senator. Professor Jose Shenkman.
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Yes. It's a great pleasure to speak here and I want to thank the LSC for providing this forum and, and Professor Robin Burgess for organizing this event. As Andrew said, I'm a professor, but right now I'm wearing another cap. I am the chair of what we call the ad hoc committee to provide The President of COP30 with ideas related to finance and economics. And what you see there are many of the members of our group here sitting around, some in the audience, some in the, in the year with us. But so what I'm going to say are things that we're going to, we have suggested this is not the official position of the presidency of COP 30 yet the position is going to be, is going to be firm at some point, but it's just our contribution to this process. So to start with, who's going to project, where are the slides? How do I do to start the slides? Here it is, here we go. So to start with, I started a title that I really Love. That is copied from a report from United Nations Environmental Program. I claim no originality here, but I think it's tremendous. It's called no more hot air please. And there are many senses you can take that you can think of it the hot air being the production of CO2, but also the kind of discussions we've had for the last, some of the discussion we've had for the last few years. So the fact is that we know the greenhouse gases emissions continue to increase. I was going to mark this, but anyway continues to increase. And so we had a new record in 2024. There's also a record just of CO2 which is, you know, not counting the other gases, but that's also a record. And the NDC's nationally determined contribution that Minister referred to are not being fulfilled. That's number one. A lot of countries are not fulfilling their ndc, their nationally determined contributions. But if they are fulfilled, it's a recipe for disaster. Okay, so let me tell you why the two kinds of NDCs, the so called conditional, which is a little tougher but depend on money arriving and the unconditional ones, but both of them lead to 50% chance of receiving something like 2.6 or 2.8 degrees. Okay, so that's the first thing too. And that's really disastrous phenomena. I hear at least some things the scientists think could happen. But this is a risk we don't want to take. You know, one is the melting of a Greenland ice sheet, the seven substantial areas of the Amazon forest and perhaps even overturning circulation, the meridian circulation. So that's a problem. So we have been promised new NDCs for 2025, but I think we have to, in some sense we anchor these NDCs and we should anchor it in our trajectory to global net zero by 2050. Otherwise they're going to still have the problems that we have now. So the second thing is that global climate goals are not going to succeed unless the AMDs and the low income countries, the emerging market and low income countries, they have very little responsibility for the current accumulation of greenhouse gases. And they need to make large investments on mitigation too because right now they are responsible for a lot of the emissions. So these countries face substantial economic constraints, many of them. And the climate investments in these countries reach only about $190 billion in 2023. But the great majority from domestic sources and also some loans, these are not even counted yet. It's very hard to measure. That's one of the estimates. But they're all around the same number. Now in 2029 at Baku, they made a decision that to commit countries to increase public climate finance to developing countries, reaching 300 billion per year in 2035 and making agreement that sets a target of 1.3 trillion per year in combined public and private flows to developing countries in 2035. Now that's the target in this decision. There was no discussion of how to get there, of course, but also no discussion what to do with this money if we got it. If somebody dropped 1.3 trillion, what do you do with it? So it was really kind of a. But anyway, that's the goal. We have to cop 30 of the presidential. Cop 30 is in charge of finding a way of getting this money. So the first thing that's really important, and I noticed there are a lot of students here, you learned that in your first micro course. Since the place of emissions is irrelevant to climate change and we have scarce funds, we know that we must prioritize emission reduction and capture that have the lowest present value per ton. Okay, we must do the cheap stuff. That's the first thing we must do. So some countries say no, we want incentivize, we want to give incentives to our local clean industry development. They can use separate subsidies for that. But the question of climate, of emissions control, you have to follow this simple, simple recipe. So the best thing for this will be a single global market, okay? And it would be modeled more or less like the European UTS ets, but it should include negative emissions and in what's called capture sometimes. Okay, so that I don't think that's feasible, but there's a feasible alternative which is an open coalition of countries to coordinate on carbon prices and establish border carbon adjustments. Now that's one of the proposals. Everything in both phase means there is a proposal to that effect from our group. So in fact there was an announcement, a positive announcement by the Minister of Finance in Brazil, citing work of this committee, you know, proposing that they're going to be engaged on that. Now the second thing is that you have to integrate nature credits, okay? And on top of that, in some sense we know that the voluntary market has collapsed. So we need to expand the scope of emissions trading to include nature and make voluntary markets more credible. So we are proposing establishing a self cover governing central entity. Marvin, which you think about measurement. We've been tasked with measurements, accounting, risk management and verification for effective carbon accounting. Okay, now we have another proposal that has to do with nature that shows that if you do it at a jurisdictional level and we work on restoration of tropical forest at scale, we could potentially deliver almost 2 gigatons per year for the first 10 years. 1.8 is the exact number. And we did use the tailed economic data in Brazil where we have that, to show that there's a much cheaper way of reducing windhogasses in the atmosphere than the marginal cost of emission of oil SEU and by far the cheapest source of capture. Okay, so the next thing is that we need investments in R and D. We need investment in R and D made by the HICs, which are the place to have structure and money to do that. But they would have to make the technologies freely available to less developed countries. You know, economists have thought about questions like this using prices or patent buyouts. So that's very important. Now if we think of financing, there's going to be two parts. One part is going to come from the markets themselves. If you think about selling 2 gigatons of emissions, you get quite a bit of money, but it's not enough. We need more money than that to finance HICs, the LDCs, lower development countries and the EMDs. So we have to supplement that with what's called climate finance. Climate finance. There's a lot of climate finance that doesn't work. And so we want to think very hard about how we're going to do that. Okay? And keep two things in mind. There's no empirical evidence that investors are willing to pay relevant premium for green bonds. Okay? There's a lot of studies like that and there's no evidence for that. And also that financial engineering is not a miracle machine. Sometimes I read some of these proposals. They look like, you know, we're going to do everything with crazy financial engineering and everybody's going to buy, nobody has risk, et cetera. Okay, that's impossible. Economists know that very well. Now we also need to increase the supply of projects because these projects are going to have to come from the emerging markets and from the low income economies. So we have to provide expertise for them to generate these projects. You know, and then we have to provide support for decarbonizing the power sector of EMDEs, covering phase out of expenses and 25% of phasing. Petri is going to talk in detail about this. I don't have to explain to you, but that's an example, something that I like because you're building this, you're finding what you're going to do and how much it costs. Instead of starting with a number, they say we need this number. And you don't know what's going to come. You know, this is only 135 billion a year. It's a lot of money, but it's 10% of 1.3 trillion. Doesn't solve all the problems, but solve a substantial portion of the problems. So let me talk about climate justice. You know the low and middle income countries are going to need funds to deal with consequences from global warming including the adaptation needs that the minister mentioned. Okay. Now they're not guilty. Most of the gas, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere came from other countries. And here the proposal is what Michael will explain to you. But it's like an application of the principle that the polluter should pay. So applying this, Michael, talk about this grand bargaining that can occur that benefits both sides in which on the one hand the high income countries in particular the OECD another, you could include all high income countries and even China perhaps that in which they provide relief for the consequences of, for the consequences of global warming. The population in the low and middle income countries. Okay, he's going to talk about that in more detail. But that's a very important part of the framework. And in return these countries would help the decarbonization process which is something we need to do because right now, not in the past, but right now especially the emerging market countries are responsible for a good share of what's being put in the atmosphere. So they need help on this. And so that's the trade off. So the next thing has to do with climate disasters. We're seeing of course an increase in the frequency of climate disasters. The evidence shows that you have a new, you know, in economic statistics a new stochastic process which means has changed its character. We used to get maybe something that happened once every 100 years. Now it happens every 10 years. When you see three times something that could only happen once every 100 years. You think the world has changed and the world has changed. And so we think about two mechanisms which are important. The first is that when those disaster happens important adaptation tool used in developing countries come from remittances from people who are abroad from the same that originally from that country. And we have very high remittance costs at this point. And more than that we have crazy proposals to tax those remittances both by it's happening in the United States and Saudi Arabia and so on. And that would be really puts you on because you would eliminate these two, which is very important. We also think that we should create a debt for adaptation swap. Again it's what Part of this, this story in which external debt holders will offer modest haircuts in exchange of public adaptation investments in low and middle income countries. And again, what debt will help, what these countries will get in return is that these countries will have fewer crises, there may be fewer migration crises, et cetera and in fact they will be able to pay those things. So those countries are holding debt, that is the LMICs rich countries are holding debt that LMICs are not going to be able to pay. Okay, thank you. That was it. Wow.
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Well, thank you Jose, very much indeed. I coughed and you stopped instantaneously. Thank you.
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Yeah. That's so boring.
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That was fantastic. So it is Wonderful how the Cop 30 Host is Turning to experts on lots of subjects around the world and how cool that they should ask Jose to pull together some of the best economists in the world from all around the world to provide some really sort of really innovative ideas. So let's go to Professor Michael Greenstone.
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Thanks very much for having me. It's a great honor to be here at LSC Environment Week and talking on, participating in conversation on such an important topic. So I'm going to. I'm sad that Jose Slide had my proposal with Abhijit and Esther under climate justice. I don't want to think about it that way. If Esther were here, she would probably talk about it that way. I think I want to talk about a deal which we're calling a global climate grand bargain. So we're going to start by just level setting. I think that's always productive to do. Sometimes the news can be a little gloomy and so it's good to just establish facts. So this is just a graph of CO2 equivalent emissions. The full line is through the present. And then you can see these are projections out to the end of the century. And I think you could think of this as kind of half full or half empty, at least on the projections, not in the actual emissions. It looks like we're breaking the back of the upward trend and. But then you can see that it's not where the world is nowhere near a path to net zero. It goes down for a while and then eventually increased energy consumption kind of overwhelms it. So it's up to you to decide if that's half full or half empty. But that's our starting point on emission where the path for emissions have kind of everything carried on. What does that add up to with respect to temperatures? So this is a graph that comes from, as did the previous, from some very careful and laudable work from the rhodium group suggests we're kind of on a path to about 2.7 degrees. And you can see by the end of the century and you can see the confidence interval around that. And at 2.7 degrees, as other speakers have emphasized, there would be changes in the climate that would produce all kinds of damages, would be very challenging to deal with. But if you wanted to have full news, you only have to go back to the IPCC report in 2014 where there they gave you the 90% confidence interval that had a lot of probability mass or we would say in English, chances of temperatures of increasing by the end of the century by 3, 4, 5 degrees. And bringing that down is enormously helpful for human well being. The damages, each increment of temperature increase gets much worse as the temperatures get higher. And it now looks like due to a couple things, advances in renewables, advances in policy, some really dumb luck, which is that the climate scientists change their mind on how much warming we would get for a given amount of CO2. But all that added up together and we now have what we call a more manageable situation than we did a decade ago. Okay then what I'm going to call fact three is I think the incredible cruelty of the emissions arithmetic. And so let's just start with this is projected emissions at the end of the century. You can see it's not very different than it is today. As a previous graph two graphs ago showed you. The world is projected to be, you know, 45 billion tons of CO2 equivalent per year at the end of the century. The blue part is OECD countries contribution and the green part is the non OECD's contribution. So, and now I will, you know, it's, if I were better at animation I would have brought in the horizontal red line there. And what that horizontal red line is the level of emissions that the world that we would need to be at if the world were on a path to 2 degrees. So we can just play the game. Suppose the oecd, out of the kindness of their heart, just cut their emissions to zero, which they're not currently on path to doing. Well then we'd be stuck with the green thing. And if we want to get all the way down to the red. I think the LSC is known for its emphasis on quantitative social sciences. You'd have to have an 88% reduction coming from the non OECD countries. These are the countries that are relatively low income. These are the countries which are in the bullseye of climate damages. And I Think of this as really the cruelty of the climate, the climate math. So, but looking forward, what it's telling you is there's no path to reducing the risk from climate change that doesn't run through very large reductions in emissions from the OECD countries. And I'll come back to that. An extra little special treat for the non OECD countries, and I say that ironically, is that almost all of the damages from climate change, it turns out, didn't have to be this way, are projected to occur in the non OECD countries. So every ton of CO2 that is put up today, just from the mortality consequences, never mind the flooding and the variety of other things, the mortality consequence of Temperature does about $130 worth of damages, 127 or $98, 98% of that is projected to occur in the non OECD countries. So that means almost all the damages is coming into the non OECD countries. It also means, and I'm going to come back to this, that the OECD is damaged. The damages that the OECD is causing in the non OECD countries from its own emissions each year are about $1.8 trillion. And so I want you to hold that figure because that's going to be a marker as we think about how to outline a deal. Okay, so then fact five, I'm a little less comfortable. I like figures and numbers and things like that is this will be more qualitative. But I think it's important to keep this in mind, particularly as we're rethinking what international climate negotiations form they could take. So the first is there's no global climate king. There's nobody who's going to order Pakistan to emit this much. There's no one who's going to order the US to emit that much. Every country is on their own and that's probably increasingly so, but so all actions are voluntary and that's both on emissions and financing. I think a second fact, and I think we saw some of that from the first speaker, is that the low and middle income countries are not especially happy with the path of climate negotiations. The previous climate finance amounts are small compared to damages, needs and promises. As I learned this, I was astonished. Loans. When you see those numbers like 1.3 billion, if I lent you $100 and you'd pay me back tomorrow, that would be $100 towards the 1.3 billion. So like that's not how economists would normally think of it. And I think all of that and along with the need for growth means that they're unlikely to substantially reduce emissions on their own. It is also true in every bad relationship that the other side's pretty unhappy too. The OECD countries I think are pretty reluctant to cut their own emissions and they're very reluctant to provide climate finance, particularly if the non OECD countries are going to continue to emit. So I think this, and this is kind of characterized what I would call the last several decades of international climate negotiations. So my view, and given the headwinds and everything, is that it's time for a rethink. And the proposal that Esther Navigid and I are putting out there, this global climate grand bargain proposal has had that everything is voluntary. And it must be the case that it's every act or every country views it in their interest to be involved in this bargain. And so our outline of that bargain has really boils down to two things. The OECD agrees to compensate the low and middle income countries for the damages that their emissions cause each year going forward. Just think about it. It's not a radical idea. If I dump garbage in your backyard wouldn't be so hot. You probably want some compensation for that. And that's all this is. But here the garbage is, you know, shorter lives and a variety of other climate ills. So it's all, you know, it's really a moral issue. And Jose referred to it as a polluter pays principle. So that's one part. And absolutely the non OECD countries would be thrilled to get that compensation. But it's going to come with strings attached in our version. And those strings are that the low and middle income countries must institute carbon pricing. Remember, the only path to addressing climate change is through reductions in emissions to low and middle income countries. And so one is conditional on two and two is conditional one. It's like every good deal, no one gets exactly what they want. They have to give up something. And so that's our basic idea. Here's some characteristics of it that you might just use to describe has moral responsibility at its heart. I like to say, I think Esther sometimes thinks that's enough. I like to say it's moral responsibility combined with self interest. No compensation without mitigation. No mitigation without compensation. And I think there's not room tonight to go into the details of how we would, our proposal would structure that compensation. But there's writing a book and there's a longer version of that. Let me just now come to what you would get out of it so the low and middle income countries face carbon prices that are outlined here. The low guys would be $10 a ton, 30 for lower middle, 50 for upper middle. These are World bank categories. And all those prices would rise 5% annually in real terms. And in exchange, what would the world get? You would get about just between 2025 and 2050, you would get about 120 billion fewer tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. That would reduce climate damages around the world by $28 trillion. It would also provide tax revenue for the low and middle income countries that were doing this. So I guess to summarize the planet I think is asking for solution. It's asking as loudly as it knows how to. Our proposal has moral responsibility combined with self interest at its at its center. And I think this is very important and something that has not characterized the COP negotiations or international negotiations in many other forms is it completely respects self determination. This is something that could be built up country by country on the OECD and LMIC side and countries will decide for themselves whether or not this is a good deal. And that's the last point. So thank you very much.
- [48:22]
D
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSEIQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [48:51]
C
Thank you Michael. A very big idea. Be great to hear from others. I was just going to catch on. Professor Patrick Bolton.
- [49:04]
B
It's a great honored to be here today. Thank you for the invitation, Robin. I realize I'm the last speaker before the Q and A and you've already heard a lot of detail, some detail which is actually motivation for what I have to say. But I will try and keep it very brief. So in the spirit of what has just been presented to you by Michael Greenstone, the proposal I've been working on is one that involves getting high income countries to provide financial support, enough financial support to developing countries, emerging market countries to help them decarbonize their power sector. And we focus on the power sector because that's one of the main sectors responsible for carbon emissions. And it's also a sector where the technology that we have in terms of clean energy is working, is now working. It's taken a while to develop that technology, but solar plus wind, other combinations, electricity storage to batteries, all of that is now Technologically proven technology so you can decarbonize the power sector. The question is how much is it going to cost and how much support are we talking about in terms of climate finance? So the calculation we make is one where we, we put a constraint on the decarbonization for each country, which is that each country has to decarbonize its power sector fast enough so that we remain within a carbon budget limit. So the limit we've chosen is 1.5 degrees. We've heard that that may be unrealistic at this point, but you can increase the budget to maybe 1.6 degrees or 1.7, and then we're still talking about a feasible decarbonization, given where we are today. What that means concretely is that you need to phase out existing fossil fuel power plants that are economically viable, are able to operate, but you need to close them down before they run their economic lifetime. Because if you just let them run for their economic lifetime, we are going to go through the carbon budget and we're talking about global warming of 2.7 or 2.8 degrees. So you need to decarbonize fast. And then if you phase out fossil fuel power plants, you need to replace them with clean energy because nobody is talking about just producing less electricity. We know that that's not desirable and that's not politically feasible. So if you do the calculation of how much you need to phase out and how much you need to replace for all emerging market countries, excluding China, the number you come up with is that the total cost will be of the order of half a trillion dollars per year. That's the total cost just to do this. Then the question is, how do you finance this? And here's where climate finance comes in. And what we are taking as a working assumption for the financing is that there will be 25% of financing coming through from high income countries as catalytic finance. Think of this, ideally all grant money. This is very important. We are looking at a coalition of high income countries I.e. g6 plus Australia, plus South Korea and Norway. If you ask these countries to provide what amounts to $125 trillion per year over, you know, this is not forever. This is over the time it takes to decarbonize the power sector, which is 10 year period roughly, then we're talking about $125 billion per year for that coalition, which represents 0.3% of GDP of those countries. By the way, 0.3% of GDP is how much overseas development aid the UK gave. And that's being cut. So even 0.3% of GDP, that's a really tough number to come up with but it's still something that is realistic. And in terms of, this would be my last word in terms of, you know, what Michael was talking about in terms of grand bargain. If you ask these coalition of countries to come up with $125 billion per year and this leads to the decarbonization of the power sector in all emerging market countries, then the benefit coalition gets in terms of lower climate damages is greater than the financial cost. So it is a, it is a bargain but we still need to convince high income countries to see it as a bargain and, and to, you know, come up with orders of magnitude like that. 125 billion. Just to give you a comparison, South Africa in 2022 put together a just energy transition investment plan which involves financing of a coalition of high income countries that includes the European Union, other European countries. How much have they committed? 8.5 billion. How much of that comes in grants? 330 million. How much has been delivered? 2.5 billion. That's the gap we're trying to close up here.
- [56:07]
C
Thank you very much. That's a great set of presentations. We're now ready to take your questions. For rebuttals we've got some microphones going around. Let's see, why don't we go to the back here. First of all, if you want just to say who you are, that would be good too.
- [56:29]
A
I enjoyed the conversations. My name is Nimit Shroff, I'm part.
- [56:32]
D
Of the MIT Sloan School. I like all the situation.
- [56:37]
A
I guess the one question I had.
- [56:39]
D
Is before we get to the ideas.
- [56:42]
B
It seems like there has to be some agreement on the importance of climate.
- [56:46]
A
Change as an issue. And from what I see the country.
- [56:51]
D
At least the US is highly divided.
- [56:52]
B
On the importance of this issue.
- [56:55]
A
So without building consensus about how severe.
- [56:59]
B
The threat is, how do you get buy in from the high income countries?
- [57:05]
C
Great, thank you. Let's take when we take three other. Another question at the back.
- [57:11]
A
Thank you so much.
- [57:12]
C
My name is Geeta Brielle.
- [57:13]
A
I, I just left the Smith School.
- [57:15]
C
At Oxford and now I'm a consultant working on the just transition in South Africa.
- [57:21]
A
So I really liked the point that was made there.
- [57:23]
C
My question is for Professor Greenstone. When we have this grand bargain, I'm thinking of a country like South Africa where already we're a high emitter. So in theory we'd probably get less money than we'd have to give out. At the same Time we have a carbon tax that is something like $5 at the moment. So we'd have to triple our existing carbon tax. Most of that carbon tax would be levied on a state owned enterprise. So it's not even necessarily kind of a boost in government revenue. How do you, I guess convince a country like that? Where's the win for them? Especially when they've seen what happened with.
- [57:55]
A
The Just Energy Transition Partnership.
- [57:56]
C
There's all of this money promised, but then it trickles in and then you've already implemented a policy, but the money's not there yet.
- [58:04]
A
So, yeah, I guess a question about.
- [58:05]
C
Kind of the practicality of convincing a country like that. Thank you. Great question. Another one. It's a gentleman there. Hi, my name is Pedro. I'm a new master student here and.
- [58:17]
A
I just had a quick questions because.
- [58:19]
C
We were talking about making the polluter pay. But we very often see that China and the US which are both the biggest economies and the bigger polluters are not very willing to join this conversation. So my question is just how is that going?
- [58:37]
E
Like, how are they approaching these conversations?
- [58:41]
C
Thank you. Let's take a fourth since maybe come down the front here.
- [58:46]
D
Hi. Hello.
- [58:47]
C
Thank you for the presentations.
- [58:48]
A
I'm Joaquin Salzberg, I'm a diplomat from Argentina.
- [58:52]
D
My question is mainly there are very.
- [58:53]
C
Interesting ideas, but my. So Gil is cop 30. Right. So my question is these proposals, how do you envision them into the decision making process of the cop? Do you see them? How do you see them playing out in Berlin? Or do you see them in a process going forward?
- [59:12]
B
Forward.
- [59:12]
C
Thank you. Great. Thank you very much. May we start with you, Michael, and each of you? I'll ask each of you just pick one of them and go from there.
- [59:21]
E
Yeah. So there's question, the South African case. So the way we've designed this, the proposal, it's not a policy. Is that the oecd? Why would South Africa agree to it? Because it would unlock this flow of funds. And the flow of funds is not tied up. It doesn't require approvals from anything. It's just you calculate. Each of the rich countries would calculate their emissions each year. And that's publicly knowable, we know it for every country. And then South Africa would just get the damages that are being done to them right away. So there's no delays. You don't need approvals. It doesn't, it's not. You don't have to debate if it's a loan or a grant or anything like that. It's just money. And then at this I didn't get a chance to talk about it. At the center of the proposal is that 70% of the money would go right to people, not go through the government. And we would use. The idea is to use mobile money accounts for that.
- [60:15]
C
Jose, you could answer the one about Brazil.
- [60:19]
D
I think the one on what's happening. Yeah, sorry. So, you know, we just, we're writing these proposals. We've had a lot of support, both from the President, although none of those things are official, but he's very enthusiastic privately about some of those things and the Minister of Finance in Brazil. So those are the guys who have to push it. The way you have to think of COP is that COP 30 is the start of a process that lasts a year, which will be the process. The presidency of COP 30 by ambassador. He's president for years starting at COP 30. And you know, I've got to get a lot of decisions on top about the agenda we are proposing. But there is a lot of enthusiasm for them and I think they will push. First, let me give you an example. Brazil. When you look at the tropical forest, Brazil is by far the largest. The country that will produce more capture because the Amazon forest is so large and because they deforested a lot. Okay? So the combination of those two things means that Brazil is by far the largest beneficiary from a proposal like this. So it's cheap carbon capture for the world. We don't have anything like this. Plus Brazil is very interested in this. So I have hope that this will be central to the discussions. I'm actually sure that that will be a central part of the discussions that Brazil will propose.
- [61:55]
C
Great, thank you. Senator, I wonder if you've got any reflections on either the questions or the proposals.
- [62:02]
A
Yes, thank you very much. You know, I think a lot of the proposals are innovating on the side of one assumption, which is why we have constant reassessment and revisiting of proposals and policies that everyone's going to agree and we've addressed that. But carbon pricing will, in my view, spark controversy even in the non OECD countries, as said, because I mean, for Pakistan, the most vulnerable country in the world right now, according to Global Risk Index, we're very fractional emitters, so there would hardly be a serious impact. But I noticed along the way, I mean, it's a thought, it's something that you want to propose. But I think the breakdown is in the concept of voluntary agreements and concessions. The whole system has always been voluntary. The whole system is has been no king. So. And with multilateralism in receding, if you like its successes and no leadership there, this is not particularly, in my view, going to work. Nor are piling on further debt swap agreements. I mean there's still debt and that's seeming to not get through. And quickly, I want to say we do have a great deal of, I mean you're addressing decarbonization. I mean, I think the good news is that there are, there's double the investment going into renewables the world over. So it's 2 trillion in renewables still. The bad old fossil fuels are getting 1 trillion every year. But many countries are turning to renewables for the low investment, the capital cost and I mean Pakistan's gone 25% renewal entirely on our own. Photovoltaics are coming down. You still also have to address the combustion engine if you want to really go to the age of electricity. And that's quite doable. But. And quickly everyone asks, where's the money? Where's the money? Creative solutions. Well, let's just perspective. Money came up for Covid 1916 trillion was coughed up immediately for OECD economies by the OECD countries. So money is in the system. And again, 7 trillion goes in subsidies to the fossil fuels every year. IMF factoid. So money is in the system.
- [64:37]
C
Thank you, Patrick.
- [64:40]
B
Yeah, I want to very much echo what you just said. Money is there. Especially if you're thinking about repurposing fossil fuel subsidies. That's going to be a big contributor. I think what you mentioned about Pakistan on its own developing solar power, this is an extraordinary development. This was not something that you could have expected even a few years ago, in fact, and a few years ago Pakistan was building new coal fired power plants. And so that's, that's really the promise. But the promise needs still catalytic finance. And I also want to come back to the question that was asked about China and the U.S. so, so the logic of our proposal is looking at high income countries and making an agreement with developing countries and we just keep China aside. We keep China aside and the US aside. What's that?
- [65:54]
D
And you also keep the US aside.
- [65:56]
B
And we keep the US aside. But China is a country that could join a deal like that and that would be a huge promise at Belem, because China stands to benefit enormously from a deal like that because it has the technology, all the clean energy technology. It would, it would, you know, even if it provided its own share of financing, it would come ahead. It would also increase its standing in the Developing world and so on. So maybe that's where the promise of Belem is now, the idea that COP will deliver a unanimous agreement, you know, like Paris and so on, forget about it because we know the US is going to oppose every step, every single step forward will be opposed by the U.S. so you have to think in terms of the coalition of the willing. And this is what all our proposals have in common. We're taking a coalition of the willing approach to try and come up with very, very concrete solutions.
- [67:07]
D
I would like to add something which is I think that in the. And this is both appears in Michael's stuff, which is the OECD countries have already reduced a lot. The marginal cost of reduction is very high. So they are understanding this. If you go in France, the yellow vest movement that was generated by an attempt to reduce carbon footprint, okay, Prime Minister Carney had to do the same thing in Canada, get out of the taxes because you know, it's becoming very expensive to reduce there. So I think that we're in a climate where it would be easy to do the kind of bargains those to spoke about in others because like getting a market for nature like we are proposing because it's just too expensive to do it at home. And I really think that is something that's going to affect the political economy of the whole, the whole global situation.
- [68:08]
C
Yes, well said. So your point about China, very good. I mean China is actually doing some very remarkable things. The question is whether it would come into this kind of. That's all to be discussed. Last week at a launch of a major report, Al Gore said from now on the energy transition will have made in China stamped on it I thought was a good line. And in the United States, I mean we can't count on the federal government. I mean President Trump's been crystal clear about that. But. But nearly half the states accounting for more than 50% of GDP still actually are acting on climate change and they have targets and so on. They couldn't necessarily engage directly in these, but certainly on the carbon market side, some of them could. Let's take some more, some more questions from the back there. Yes, maybe you could just pass the microphone. Maybe you could give the one to somebody here so we can do it fairly quickly.
- [69:09]
D
I'm Noah Moorer, Ph.D. student at Imperial Business School. Before asking my question, I wanted to extend a heartfelt thank you to the whole panel.
- [69:21]
C
As a young person following the COP.
- [69:24]
D
Process and having been on the streets when there were the golden days of Fridays for future, I've Always wondered why.
- [69:30]
A
Aren'T the best proposal and the best.
- [69:33]
D
Signs fed into the COP process and peeking a bit behind the curtain and seeing this work and these proposals gives me quite a bit of hope. So thank you for doing that and.
- [69:46]
C
Coming here to present that and speak to us.
- [69:50]
A
And the question I had was since.
- [69:53]
D
Carbon pricing came up quite a bit, I was wondering whether you also considered.
- [70:01]
C
Mandates or subsidies as one economic tool. Especially because I'm aware of some of.
- [70:09]
D
The work at the University of Exeter and the work around positive socio economic tipping points. So we see it with EVs, we see it with solar that all the uptake has been much more exponential, much.
- [70:22]
A
Faster, much more product promising that we.
- [70:25]
D
Could have anticipated and that might be.
- [70:27]
C
The best shot at maybe not 1.5.
- [70:30]
D
But maybe staying below 2 degrees. So I'm wondering with this grand bargain whether the tool might be mandates to.
- [70:40]
C
Invest in renewables to what also Professor Bolton pointed to and not just surprising and whether that was considered. Thank you. Question. Thank you very much indeed down here. And then also. Oh, you've got something from online. Yeah, thanks so much. Do you want to give us one or two from. Because welcome everybody who is not in this room but is online. Tens of thousands of people are actually.
- [71:08]
E
Listening to us right now, breaking the.
- [71:11]
D
Internet we wish, hanging on every point.
- [71:15]
A
Indeed they are. So thank you. The first one comes from Samara at UCL who says several of the proposals seem to rely on state actors to take actions of the long term, leveraging their jurisdictional powers. This is vulnerable to within nation political cycles that are becoming increasingly volatile and polarized. How important is fostering cross party political buy in and how can this be achieved? And maybe I'll do a.
- [71:41]
C
Yes, could you hold it a little closer?
- [71:43]
A
Oh, sorry. Oh great, there we go. So the second one is from Shantanu Singh who asks how viable are proposals for debt as a solution at a time when low income countries and emerging market and developing economies are struggling with unsustainable levels of debt? And then a final one comes from Xi Wang who's an environmental commission consultant, who asks do you worry that weather triggered basic income will reduce incentives to migrate away from areas with high disaster exposure either domestically or internationally? Such migration is already subject to high barriers even though it can substantially reduce the economic and social costs of climate change.
- [72:25]
C
Great, let's take one more. Yes, there's a gentleman right there in the middle. Hi, can you hear me?
- [72:32]
A
Thank you.
- [72:34]
C
So I have a couple of quick questions. So the first one is that it.
- [72:39]
E
Seems to Me like we do, we.
- [72:40]
C
Don'T live in a moral world, we live in a transactional one these days. And so I heard a couple of times the, the moral framing that that.
- [72:48]
E
Was used and I was wondering is.
- [72:50]
C
That still something that we think is a productive framing or have we learned something from, from the backlash and perhaps.
- [73:01]
E
You know, framing it as the morals.
- [73:04]
C
Versus the immorals is actually not a.
- [73:06]
E
Very good way of talking about climate policy in general. So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that.
- [73:13]
C
The second one is. So you said, I think Professor Bolton, you said that one of the proposals.
- [73:22]
E
Or one of the main proposals would.
- [73:23]
C
Be in China's interest to join potentially. Have, have you talked to Indian economists and Chinese economists and, or politicians to understand their level of buy in. Is there anything going on in those terms of scientific dialogue between economists and political economists to try and get this thing off the ground before the COP actually, actually begins? Thank you.
- [73:51]
D
Great.
- [73:51]
C
Who'd like to just, maybe just go along the road you wanted to start?
- [73:55]
E
Okay, I'd like to take on the moral thing. I think the people have different ways of getting there to be in favor against something. But I think one thing that, from this group that Jose has put together and seems a common across the proposals is there's an emphasis on trades where you get access to something only if you do something. And I think bringing that to the center of the international climate negotiations and kind of in its own way getting away from some of the morals is a really important element. That's true across certainly Patrick's, but several of the other proposals as well, I guess. And then I'll make one small stand for morality which is I think at the end of the day we all have to own that the emissions we're doing that we cause that you're responsible for, that I'm responsible for are doing great harm to people around the planet. Now that has to be a winning argument. No, but I think sometimes it's, it's very convenient to forget that. And I think that shouldn't be lost in all that. But as I tried to say, at least in our proposal, we like to think of it as moral responsibility combined with self interest.
- [75:20]
A
Oh, don't get me started. I mean here I think we, somebody you mentioned, the vertebrates are not who are doubling and so that's us obviously and the rest are sort of slowly getting 64,000. Is that it? Are getting less lower and lower in their, in their replication. So we are doubling and we are populating the planet hugely and now we want to see that. I mean human beings are not. And therefore the COP process and therefore any negotiation can't be premised on a binary process. It's either morality or self interest. It's got to be both. I mean it's not a Hobbesian versus a Rousseau word, it's just got to be both. You have to dangle the self interest lever to, to mobilize things. Having said that, I mean, without morality you will probably lose all the non OECD countries in the process. And that's not going to hold much water. You'll just be talking amongst yourselves. And then the poverty, the migrations, the backlash all then lands up at say, Europe's doors and other doors. So then you wonder where the conflict came from. Coming back to, I don't think you can do without either. But the carbon pricing suggestion frankly won't fly. It just won't. And I really don't want to delegitimize it. I think a lot of work's gone into it, but perhaps with a bit of tweaking and I mean, you know, many things can work, including the, the holding people's feet to the fire. That's what you all are suggesting, basically.
- [77:04]
E
In plain words, why would carb pricing network in exchange for money? Just to be completely blunt, because in.
- [77:11]
A
Exchange for money a lot of countries will distrust the process. The money never shows up.
- [77:17]
E
So in a new system where the money flows immediately, right away.
- [77:20]
A
So who would agree to this? Why would the OECD countries agree to that?
- [77:25]
E
Because they have reductions in emissions.
- [77:27]
A
Yes, you're assuming they want reductions in emissions.
- [77:31]
E
Well then if that's not true, then.
- [77:32]
A
Other than China, which is plotting a path ahead to plateauing, right. Say by 2030 or 2035 they'll be peaking. At least that's their target. Other than China, if they move this mountain, then you see some movement, otherwise it will be very difficult and quickly on nature. And you're talking about, that's something that you mentioned. As far as the Amazon is concerned. I mean countries are trading on the voluntary market their carbon. Well, I mean we just traded all our delta mangroves which sequester four times more carbon than any normal tree. So. And it's, it's going to 350,000 hectares of mangrove forest. Very dense.
- [78:21]
D
No, I agree there's a voluntary market that's occurring, but the scale is very different. For instance, the number we have, you know, you think about 2 gigaton per year for 10 years, right? And then you multiply that by A price of carbon, whatever, 130. You talk about hundreds of billions of dollars. Those voluntary agreements, the problem that they tend to be very small because part of it, they're being financed by people who, you know, we're talking about trade, we're talking about the same thing that Michael say, look, this is a cheap way, much cheaper than do it at home and you can do it it. Okay, so that's what we're talking about. That's why the emphasis is always on trades which are advantageous to both parties. You know, I don't think France wants another yellow vest movement. So they're not going to agree to do things inside their countries. And that's just one example. I mean that happens all over Europe right now. So I think that there is a chance that they will say, okay, there's all, we can do the same things with much less money. You know, the computation is that what you spend now on in the marginal emissions in Europe, which is about €75, you know, will buy more than depending on, you know, there's a bargain that will make money for countries like the countries that have tropical forests, including India and China and Brazil and the rest of Latin America. That's in the Amazon. You can do that three times. So here's the question you have to ask. Are you going to put a tax on diesel again and have a revolt on your hands or are you going to say you're going to buy carbon in countries which are much cheaper to produce?
- [80:11]
C
We've just got three more minutes, so we'll take three very quick questions and then absolutely go to your first. Patrick, after these. There's a lot down there. Can you hear me now?
- [80:22]
B
Yep.
- [80:23]
D
I'm Cameron, I'm a master's student, Imperial.
- [80:26]
E
Patrick, in your proposal you mentioned that over time there's a cost benefit analysis for nations investing or like contributing to the energy transition in other countries. What are the primary factors stopping that from happening? What's deterring countries from going ahead with that? If there's a clear cost benefit, like benefit overall over time.
- [80:54]
C
And then what are the strategies that.
- [80:58]
D
We could try and use to persuade.
- [81:00]
C
Countries to overcome these barriers? Thank you. Down here. Yes. And then one in the middle. There's a lady in the middle there. Yes. Could you pass it along to this?
- [81:12]
D
Could you put your.
- [81:13]
C
Keep your hand up?
- [81:14]
D
Yeah.
- [81:15]
A
Hi, I'm Sylvia Kapadia, I've worked in the floods in Pakistan. 2020, 2010, 2022. In the hottest region, which Sherry mentioned, where it felt like 54 degree when I was out in the sun making shelters. Thank you so much. First of all, to bring these kind of innovation, innovative ideas on the table, that line from Michael's presentation that three decades of failure stuck in my head. And simultaneously, I'm also thinking, instead of bringing climate to the security conversation, why not have securitization, have the kind of core principle of climate added hard because of these emissions. And we have seen over the last two, three years specifically that these emissions.
- [82:08]
B
Are.
- [82:11]
A
Doing ecocide, which are contributing to those emissions. So any kind of numbers that you would put, any kind of science that you would put will not do, will not undo all of that. So I just don't know. Even the electrification electrifying age or electrification or the EV batteries are based on the critical rare earth minerals, which are the cost, like the point of conflict. I'll stop here because I can continue a lot, but it's just a thought that, you know, all of these numbers are great, but, you know, we are not doing anything new. This is all three decades of failures.
- [82:48]
C
We'll have a reaction to that. Thanks back there.
- [82:51]
A
Hello. Thank you so much for this panel. I guess question really quickly. There's been a lot of different perspectives within this panel itself. And you know, COP is a much, much larger scale than, than the room of people over here. And I guess that since the agenda of COP changes every year and the kind of proposals that you're bringing need to have sustained buy in, what is the role of COP almost in, in kind of actioning and creating an agenda that's lasting as opposed to changing with every presidency.
- [83:24]
D
Thank you.
- [83:25]
C
Good. Thank you so much. Just quickly, we'll ask each of the panelists to say a final word, starting with you, Patrick.
- [83:32]
B
Yeah, I think I'm best placed to answer the first question on the obstacles. So our thinking has been when we started on this particular proposal, that too much emphasis is put on the costs of the energy transition. And in the discussion, the benefits of the energy transition are lost and not emphasized. And we started thinking about this when the agreement to phase out coal and COP 26 in Glasgow failed. It failed narrowly. It was very unfortunate. It was so close. And one reason potentially why it failed in our thinking was that nobody emphasized the benefits. It was all about, oh, it's going to be expensive, it's going to cost a lot, it's going to be terrible, can we afford it? And so on. And once you start saying, actually if you think of it in terms of a financial return or an economic return from the investment, these returns are Very, very high. These are some of the best investments you can make currently. So that's the mindset, change you want. This is not enough because we're going to struggle to convince high income countries to contribute significant climate finance. And so here I think the one, one, one way of thinking about this, trying to get over obstacles in my mind is that you want to be maybe a little vaguer about how much money you put on the table and when and maybe focus the discussion more on buying, commitment, sponsoring and so on. And that could be a fruitful discussion.
- [85:29]
C
Thank you so much, Jose.
- [85:31]
D
Well, I don't want to excuse the fact that we work in this group, has been working very hard on these new proposals. We're not proposing to change the agenda. What we're proposing is to have more effective ways of implementing the agenda. The agenda continues to be, you know, reducing climate change. But the fact of the matter is that there's a lot of, you know, that happens, I think in every important topic. There's a lot of bad proposals, there are a lot of proposals that won't have the effect or a lot of agreements that are not having a big effect on climate. And what you see is the graph that Michael showed or that motivated my initial discussion. Things are not going well. So you can have the idea they could have gone worse. And that's what Michael said, said I agree with him, things could all go well, but they're not going well enough. So we need new ideas or new ways of implementing the agenda of cop.
- [86:31]
C
Well said. Thank you, Michael.
- [86:33]
E
I think one thing that has struck me, most of my work has not been about international climate negotiations is there's this whole like, I think of them as big words that I have a hard time understanding. Big phrases, common but differentiated responsibility, the green transition, green growth, sustainability, blah blah, blah, blah, climate finance, climate finance, a whole series of words. And then you start to put them together. My head starts to swirl and I think what has come across from this set of proposals and certainly Abhijit and Esther and I, we're really trying to focus on, is to sweep all that away and make two simple points. You can trade money for tons. Tons is the thing the planet cares about and money is the thing that the rich countries have and that trade can take many different forms. But getting rid of all the big words and getting down to will actually are there fewer tons? And to Sherry's point, as critical that it be proven, not just stated that the money actually comes, it doesn't go through some 47 step process of approvals. And things like that, but it flows directly and it doesn't. Loans don't get count as money. And I think there's one point I wanted to make, it's that the whole thing should be reframed as there's really only two things that matter. It's money and tons.
- [87:59]
C
Thank you very much, Sherry.
- [88:02]
A
Yeah, well, money and tons is already trading and there's a level of carbon pricing countries are using, obviously to trade money and tonnes. So you're widening the circle to a broader framework that still speaks to one part of the problem. The fundamentals remain for one half of the world. Not just a conversation, conversation on mitigation, it remains a conversation on how to build resilience from the houses, the. The part of the world that's already burning. So I will bring you all back to that as my agenda. And it's not mine alone, it's one half of the world. So please keep coming back to that. This is not just a mitigation problem. This continues to dominate COP discourse and this is one of the problems and I am not willing to push aside. I mean, my head's not spinning at climate finance and yours is not either. That's disingenuous, if I may say so, because climate finance is a very general term and differentiated responsibilities is the core and heart of the agreement on which the non OECD countries come to the table. You are saying it's not working, but that doesn't mean we want to dispense with it. Yeah.
- [89:27]
C
Thank you. So look, this is a very important week, most important because it's LSE's Environment Week, but it's also the General assembly of the United nations. And I think, Jose, you're flying to New York tomorrow, so am I. You've got a much bigger job than I do. Jose is going to be speaking with the Brazilian, I guess President Lula will be speaking on Wednesday together with lots of other heads of state. So far, only, I think 24 countries have issued their NDCs, which, remember, it's 10 years after Paris, so they have to do that. There'll be a lot more, we hope, by the end of this week. But more important almost is, is will the Brazilian incoming presidency sort of really show the kind of vision which it seems that this group, and I understand they are showing. So just occasionally things happen that everybody says they'll never work and sometimes it does work and we've no idea whether whether COP30 is going to be one of those. But remember, as Jose was saying, the Brazilians only take over the presidency on the first day of the cop and then they have it for a year. So the hard work starts in the lead up to probably Australia, but maybe Turkey will head the next cop. Somebody said what's the point of the cops? That's a good question. Lots of people ask that. There's two purposes of the cop. One is negotiation, which everybody has to agree, almost has to be not unanimous, but it has to be consensus. So that's hard work and it's commas and exclamation marks and it's but perhaps more important in today's world is sort of the so called action track. We're moving, as you were saying, from a multilateral government to government universal solution process to a plurilateral multi stakeholder process where actually it will be coalitions of the willing. That's what we were talking about today. And it's only then, as a gentleman back there doing his PhD on tipping point points, it's only then if you look at the real tipping points that are coming along, they're coming out of these really edgy public, private, scientific, NGO university partnerships. And that's what we're really trying to get going here. And I think that there's real hope that we will make some progress. So look, Sherry, Michael, Jose, Patrick, fantastic group of people at. Give them a round of applause. Thank you. Thank you for listening.
- [92:01]
A
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- [92:06]
B
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- [92:14]
A
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