Don't count on long-term success in climate policy, warns paper in ‘Decision Analysis’

Science Daily: Long-term climate change policy in the U.S. and abroad is likely to change very slowly, warns a researcher who calls for stronger short-term goals to reduce carbon emissions, according to a new study.

Lead author Prof. Mort Webster writes that climate policy decisions are normally made as sequential decisions over time under uncertainty – given the magnitude of uncertainty in both economic and scientific processes, the decades-to-centuries time scale of the phenomenon, and the ability to reduce uncertainty and revise decisions along the way. Although staging climate change policy decisions over time would seem to make sense, he points out that the tendency of U.S. and international policy to change extremely slowly requires front-loading the painful decisions.

Applying decision analysis in the context of idealized government decision makers over a century raises the question of how to deal with the fact that political systems tend to exhibit “path dependency,” a force that makes large policy shifts difficult and rare, and limits most decisions to small incremental changes. In his paper, he argues that consideration of path dependence in the context of climate policy justifies greater near-term emissions reductions in what amounts to a hedging strategy….

…Decision making in public policy, he writes, is complicated by the reluctance of leaders to reverse course after they have made important policy choices. “A large-scale international policy issue such as climate change is especially vulnerable to path dependencies. If significant global emissions reductions are required in the long-run, this will be an extremely difficult problem to coordinate across nations,” he writes….

In honor of the birthday of the theory of evolution, we illustrate this article on path dependence with Charles Darwin's "Thinking Path," which he regularly walked for exercise of body and mind. The photo is by Tedgrant at en.wikipedia, who has generously released it into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Thank you, Tedgrant