Climate Protection vs. Economic Growth as a False Trade Off Restructuring Global Warming Mitigation

Abstract

The project asks how to derive and then promote a balanced portfolio of climate policies and technologies currently under discussion as efficient means to avoid (‘mitigate’), or at least limit, global warming. Thereby, the agenda responds to the emerging consensus within the climate research community that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions – such as generated during combustion – would induce global warming with serious potential consequences. The ongoing climate debate about how much global warming should be mitigated serves as a starting point. While ‘climate environmentalists’ opt for strict emission reductions, influential economists proposed – at least at the beginning of the project – that the requested reductions would severely hamper the world economy. The ‘metamethod’ of the project disentangles the deterministic and normative arguments of the debate. Within that setting, the methodology of the project displays two main characteristics. Firstly, robust deterministic knowledge about the climate system and the energy technology sector is captured by mechanistic models. This ‘deterministic branch’ would allow us to represent the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global warming as well as the effects of investment decisions on the competitive advantage of renewable sources over greenhouse gas emitting technologies. Secondly, the project distills the present line of normative settings involved in the climate debate – what impacts of global warming on the one hand, and of strict emission reduction targets on the other hand, are acceptable. A further normative issue is how to decide, under present-day uncertainties that modulate our knowledge, about the causal links from potential political actions to their impacts. The approach of the project is to search for climate policies that would observe the minimum requests of each of the two major disputing ‘camps’ and to thereby maximise the chance for societal consensus. The minimum request of the ‘environmentalists’ is to guarantee that global warming shall not transgress 2^ˆC. The minimum request of economists is that welfare loss due to climate protection should be somewhat below 1%. As a primary result, the project has qualified the systems dynamics, enabling the identification of investment paths that are likely to observe the minimum requests of both parties. Key transdisciplinary challenges of the ongoing project are as follows: distilling the major epistemic (knowledge on systems dynamics) and major normative arguments, and alleged disagreements, as the two are intimately entangled within economic theory; finally, keeping track of assumptions and desires of major players to ensure that the project’s stylised solutions will in fact catalyse a societal consensus.