[Editors] MIT expert: Don't bank on long-term climate policy success

[Greg Frost]

For Immediate Release
FRIDAY, JULY 11, 2008

Contact: Greg Frost, MIT News Office
T. 617-258-5401   E.: frost at mit.edu

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MIT expert: Don’t bank on long-term success in climate policy

-- Says ambitious short-term goals needed as hedge against catastrophe
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Long-term climate change policy in the United  
States and abroad is likely to change very slowly, warns an MIT  
professor who says the lack of future flexibility argues for stronger  
short-term goals to reduce carbon emissions.

In a study in the current issue of Decision Analysis, a journal of  
the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences,  
Assistant Professor Mort Webster of MIT’s Engineering Systems  
Division tackles the complex problem of global climate change policy  
with a new approach.

Specifically, Webster’s analysis incorporates the theory of “path  
dependency.” In its most basic form, the theory holds that how  
something evolves in the future depends heavily on the path it was on  
in the past.

Webster says that because policy-making for climate change involves  
sequences of decisions over very long time periods, it is possible to  
reduce uncertainty and revise decisions along the way. But political  
systems can exhibit path dependency, a force that makes large policy  
shifts in the future difficult and rare, so most future decisions may  
only offer relatively small, incremental changes.

“Although staging climate change policy decisions over time would  
seem to make sense, the tendency of U.S. and international policy to  
change extremely slowly requires front-loading the painful  
decisions,” Webster says, arguing that greater near-term emissions  
reductions are needed as a hedge against long-term catastrophe.

Webster challenges the Bush administration, which has cited  
uncertainty about future climate change among the reasons that it  
calls for the postponement of stricter mandated emissions reductions  
until the next decade.

The White House approach raises central questions for near-term  
climate policy, both in the United States and abroad, he writes:  
whether or not regulations of greenhouse gas emissions can be  
delayed, and whether some level of mitigating effort is required at  
once. Countering those who say the dust should settle before  
committing to big decisions, he points out that when a decision will  
be irreversible – as is likely the case in climate policy – delaying  
the decision is probably not the best option, according to research  
in decision analysis.

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.

Climate policy optimization models typically assume that some  
fraction of baseline emissions can be reduced in each period, ranging  
from none to nearly 100 percent, he notes. But, he notes, the range  
of reductions considered in any period is independent of any choices  
made in previous periods.

“The question posed in this study is: Does accounting for path  
dependency in political systems change the first-period (today)  
optimal choice from a sequential decision model of climate policy?”  
he writes. “ If it does, then this would argue for a more aggressive  
hedging strategy with greater emissions reductions for near-term  
climate policy. This action would allow for greater flexibility if  
significant reductions are required later in the century.”

Note: This text was adapted from a news release originally issued by  
the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

Greg Frost
News Manager
MIT News Office
77 Massachusetts Avenue,
Room 11-400
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307

Office 617.258.5401
Fax    617.258.8762




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