“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 106

was an important step forward, even if not revolutionary, for climate
change. 47
h ere is lit le reason to equate rejection of a binding global treaty
detailing strict emissions cuts with rejection of action to deal with
climate change. Binding treaties are tough to conclude. As countries
pursue increasingly ambitious policies, uncertainty about those poli-
cies' outcomes will rise, because the farther away a country moves from
its past experience, the more dii cult it is to predict how things will
evolve. Uncertainty can be a deal killer when it comes to promising
specii c outcomes. Scholars of international relations generally agree
that countries are less likely to commit to outcomes over which they
have relatively low coni dence and control. 48
Moreover, certainty and legal strength aren't as neatly connected as
some might imagine. Even if countries had made strong commitments
at Copenhagen, that would not have ensured that emissions would be
satisfactorily reduced. People have taken too many lessons from the
history of negotiations over areas such as nuclear weapons, where gov-
ernments have enormous control over outcomes. If leaders promise to
remove a thousand missiles from active deployment, they can usually
deliver, even if they must sometimes deal with political and bureau-
cratic barriers. But when it comes to complex energy systems that are
largely not run by governments, the link between policies and out-
comes becomes far more tenuous. Execution mat ers at least as much
as intent. h e Chinese government, for example, has said it wishes to
reduce its carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent from 2005 to 2020,
but given the hodgepodge of policies being put in place to accomplish
that, no one knows for certain whether it will be achieved. h e failure
at Copenhagen to conclude a treaty did not change the future as much
as many people believe.
h ere is no reason to believe that successful international agreements
need to focus on emission-cut ing targets in the way that many nego-
tiators and advocates sought at Copenhagen. Instead, they could direct
their at ention toward specii c policies, such as tax credits for low-carbon
power, and narrower goals, such as boosting energy ei ciency by a par-
ticular amount. Commitments like these are easier for governments to