Viewpoint Achieving Comparable Effort through Carbon Price Agreements

of Action calls for the next agreement to ensure the “comparability of efforts ” across developed countries while “taking into account differences in their national circumstances.” Trends in national emissions and economic growth vary widely between countries, as do year-to-year fluctuations around those trends. This means that achieving similar reductions relative to historical base years can require very different levels of efforts in different countries. These differences have greatly hampered climate cooperation because it means that commitments that are similar in effort look inequitable. Further, divergent underlying trends make it difficult to know the effort that any particular commitment will require. The failure of the G-8 to set a base year for its agreed 80 percent reduction of emissions by 2050 illustrates the contention in formulating even collective targets. The presumption that binding commitments can take only the form of a percentage reduction relative to historical levels has dimmed the long term prospects for stabilizing the climate, not least because it alienates rapidly industrializing countries such as China and India. Parties could negotiate emissions levels rather than reductions relative to base years, but even then they are not assured of comparable efforts because many things that affect the burden o