As reported on this week's Westminster Hour, the Green Alliance has launched a project called "The Last Parliament" contending that the 2010 Parliament will be the last that might take action adequate to prevent significant climate change. Matthew Taylor suggested getting the party leaders together with the Queen to emphasize the importance and urgency of action. But that boat has sailed, guys! There isn't going to be any serious effort at mitigation, now - a fact that smarter environmentally-interested politicians such as Greg Clark have understood. Mitigation may always have been a hopeless concept, and was certainly (and obviously) always an inefficient one. We now need to try to understand adaptation, and government's role in it, much better.
Consider the following key conclusion from Chapter 18 of the IPCCs report from Working Group 2, entitled "Adaptation to Climate Change in the Context of Sustainable Development and Equity":
Current knowledge about adaptation and adaptive capacity is insufficient for reliable prediction of adaptations and for rigorous evaluation of planned adaptation options, measures, and policies of governments
Although climate change vulnerability studies now usually consider adaptation, they rarely go beyond identifying adaptation options that might be possible. There is little research on the dynamics of adaptation in human systems, the processes of adaptation decision making, the conditions that stimulate or constrain adaptation, and the role of nonclimatic factors.
There are serious limitations in existing evaluations of adaptation options. Economic benefits and costs are key criteria, but they are not sufficient to adequately determine the appropriateness of adaptation measures. There also has been little research to date on the roles and responsibilities of individuals, communities, corporations, private and public institutions, governments, and international organizations in adaptation
This is related to the famous "dumb farmer" hypothesis. The IPCC approach (duplicated also in the Stern Review) is to assume no adaptation. That is to say, all those numbers you hear about how much temperatures will rise and so on over the next century are based on models in which it is assumed that people do not innovate in terms of machinery or behaviour in response to climate change. In one sense this is easy enough to defend. The approach attempts to model for us what the effects would be if humanity continued on its current path with its current methods. That tells us something about how much we need to change.
Fine. But what is rarely appreciated is that this buys us a pure message concerning how much we collectively need to do at the expense of having zero, zero, policy significance. That's right. These models offer us no insight whatever into whether any government intervention of any sort is required or desirable, because they do not tell us how much of the innovation required will be delivered by market processes, and hence tell us nothing concerning how much (or what sort of) gap there is for government action to fill.
That's not to say that nothing could be said on that score. It's just that those models don't do it. We could look at historical norms for rates of innovation of various sorts and make some guesses about how much different degrees of future innovation might affect climate change and, though I shan't bother you with the numbers or the vast uncertainties around them, it won't surprise you that we'd naturally conclude that we'd need rather a lot of innovation to produce much effect - probably rather more than we have achieved in the past. Some people (particularly American Republicans and Australians) conclude that we therefore should subsidize research into adaptation technologies. But even that doesn't really follow. When the value of an innovation is very high, innovation tends to occur as a result of market forces for the obvious reason that the rewards to success are also very high. Someone inventing a whizz-bang technology that made adapting to climate change particularly pain-free would (if climate change were occurring on a large scale) presumably make vast returns. So why the need of subsidy?
There's certainly an argument to be made (and responded to) that because of some features of climate change (technical stuff to do with how some of the costs of climate change might be borne by people it would be hard to charge for any adaptive technologies), we might expect the incentives to innovate to be inadequate - that there would not be enough innovation. But "not enough" is not remotely the same thing as "none". So even this doesn't get us very far and even if government intervention of some sort is required, it is by no means obvious that doing anything in advance is helpful.
Suppose, for example, that it turns out that there is not enough innovation so a bit more climate change than is really optimal occurs and/or we don't all adapt to it quite as well as we might. Once governments can see where the innovation hasn't occurred and/or who hasn't received enough of the innovations that have occurred, they can subsidize research into the relevant areas and provide funds for those without access to have access to the relevant innovations. After the event, governments might have enough information to do something useful. Before the event, given the enormous uncertainties involved and the sheer lack of understanding of the relevant processes expressed in the IPCC WG2 quote above, it is hard to see why governments imagine they know much about how to do anything useful.
Perhaps further consideration will identify forms of innovation that market processes tend to be a bit less effective at producing and it might be a reasonable gamble to spend (perhaps waste) a little money subsidizing research efforts in these areas or perhaps even directly funding forms of behavioural change (if we can really show that we already know of something useful and cost-effective to do - Greg Clark's suggestions might well be precisely of this sort). A little pragmatism in such matters can go a long way, and leave the door open to having one's mind changed later (perhaps we might become convinced that markets are, contrary to current belief, bad innovation-drivers altogether? It might seem unlikely but who knows - stranger things have happened?); or perhaps we might stumble upon some genius with a fantastically-useful idea that happened not to be able to find private sector funding? And perhaps we might even imagine having some modest taxes - perhaps some kind of carbon floor tax to fund adapation research?
I'm not arguing for governments doing nothing. But humbler government is almost always better government. And that's particularly so when we are discussing things happening in a hundred year's time about which we already acknowledge that we understand very little - like adaptation to climate change.
