The Global Commons
Climate change considered from both political and scientific perspectives
Eva Emerson
Spring 2005
The tale of global climate change follows the same general plot
line as the archetypal cautionary fable of the Tragedy of the Commons,
but writ large. In this case, the commons is global and the shared
resource that all depend on is a complex system ruled by multiple
factors and numerous feedback loops—the planet’s very climate and
ecosystem.
Just as nature doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of nations,
environmental problems do not stop at international borders. That makes
coming up with solutions to global environmental issues especially
challenging, but also critical in an increasingly interdependent world.
“Climate change is among the foremost issues facing the world today.
It’s been a quagmire,” says Sheldon Kamieniecki, a professor of
political science in USC College and one of the country’s leading
scholars of environmental policy and global environmental issues.
But some things are changing. After more than seven years of
negotiations, the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement to reduce the emission
of greenhouse gases linked to global warming signed by more than 30
industrialized nations—but not the United States—goes into effect Feb.
16, 2005. Last November, the international Arctic Council published a
report with irrefutable evidence of the observable effects of global
warming now hitting the Arctic region.
In December, the United Nations sponsored the 10th international
meeting on climate change, which was attended by more than 150 nations,
and where top environmental officials began to talk about beginning
negotiations to take the next steps to further curb emissions. Plus,
some businesses, long opposed to any climate change-related
regulations, have begun to join in efforts to address the issue, or at
least have stopped trying to argue whether climate change is real or
not, Kamieniecki says.
To this day, however, climate change remains the most contentious issue
within the U.S. environmental policy arena, Kamieniecki writes in his
soon-to-be-published book Corporate American and Environmental Policy:
Does Business Always Get Its Way? (Stanford University Press, 2005). He
devotes an entire chapter to how the debate on climate change over the
last two decades has been heavily influenced by business lobbyists,
including utilities, the oil and gas industry, the auto industry and
agricultural interests.
“It’s quite clear from looking at the success of the fossil fuel
industry in keeping the issue [of how to regulate the emission of
greenhouse gases] outside of public debate, that business interests
have had enormous power in setting environmental policy in the U.S. in
the last decade,” Kamieniecki says.
The result has been that very little actual policy has been enacted in
the United States, and that the U.S., despite being the largest emitter
of carbon dioxide, has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
“They blocked the issue from ever getting onto the formal agenda, by
shifting the nature of the debate from how to respond to whether there
is even a problem and questioning the quality of the scientific
research that shows global warming is taking place.”
However, Kamieniecki points out that perception of global climate
change has shifted. Recently, a handful of Fortune 500 companies who
previously supported efforts to refute climate change science and
policy, such as Ford, General Motors, Texaco, Daimler Chrysler and
DuPont, have left the lobbying organization formed for that purpose.
Other large corporations—including Boeing, IBM, DuPont, Royal
Dutch/Shell, BP, Alcoa, Intel, PG&E and Toyota—have joined with the
Pew Center on Global Climate Change to promote responsible corporate
leadership in climate change issues.
Scientists have shown that carbon dioxide and other gases in the
atmosphere maintain balmy temperatures on the Earth through the
greenhouse effect, but that excessive emissions of the gases from
vehicles and industry are driving at least part of the current global
warming trend.
Anthony Michaels, professor of biological sciences, says that the key
questions right now on global climate change are political, not
scientific.
“It’s unambiguous that the Earth’s climate is warmer now and that part
of this is due to human influence. This is no longer primarily an issue
of science,” says Michaels, director of the USC Wrigley Institute for
Environmental Studies, who studies how ocean processes affect climate.
“This is a policy issue.”
But that’s not to say that scientists have no more to learn about
global climate and the complex interactions that influence it. Nature
can still surprise us. In Michaels’ own research, done in collaboration
with biological oceanographer Douglas Capone and other colleagues in
the College, he’s focusing on better understanding factors that
influence how much carbon dioxide gas the ocean absorbs from the
atmosphere.
In a paper published in August in Nature, Capone, the Wrigley Chair in
Environmental Sciences and a professor of biological sciences, revealed
that small, single-celled microbes play a significant role in the
natural fertilization of the upper ocean.
Beyond confirming the role of the nanoplankton in the marine nitrogen
cycle, Capone’s study has broader implications for understanding the
movement of carbon dioxide between the oceans and the atmosphere.
This amount of fixed nitrogen provides a substantial boost to marine
life, supplying the key nutrient for new biological growth equal to
about 10 percent of the total global marine biomass. The greater the
biomass, the more carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere.
Michaels predicts that scientists still have a key role to play in the
plan laid out in the Kyoto Protocol to create a market-based strategy
to control emissions by creating a global “cap and trade” system, with
nations able to buy and sell credits for carbon dioxide emissions. “For
the system to work, it will need verification mechanisms and careful
monitoring. That’s something we can do very well,” he says.
For his party, Kamieniencki sees the need for political scientists and
natural scientists to work together on the global climate change issue.
“Together, I think we can accomplish a lot.”
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