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This tension between the collective desire to do something and the individual resistance against doing anything explains much of the policy paralysis in the climate change file over the past decades, both internationally and within Canada. Successive governments have felt public pressure to do something — or at least be seen to be doing something — but it’s been a challenge to obtain public support for these efforts. Too often, these initiatives degenerated into complicated schemes of regulations, special preferences and exemptions whose goal was to lead people to believe that someone else would bear the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It is on this last point that the Paris Agreement offers some grounds for optimism: all countries are taking part. A fatal weakness of the Kyoto Protocol was that it exempted developing countries, China in particular. Even if all countries had respected their commitments — as Canada famously did not — these improvements would have been largely cancelled out by increased emissions from the rest of the world. Bringing developing nations into the framework and broadening the base of emissions policy was a necessary step for any credible process.

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A broader application doesn’t mean reducing emissions uniformly. One of the advantages of policies that put a price on carbon is that it doesn’t reduce all emission activities, just the ones where the benefits from producing emissions aren’t large enough to justify their costs. A price on carbon forces out marginal, low-value activities, while allowing high-value activities to continue. The language in the Paris Agreement that softens the anticipated contributions from developing countries plays a similar role. For example, building power generation capacity for the 300 million Indians without access to electricity is the sort of high-value project that should still go through.

The usual way of dealing with collective action problems is for the government to impose and enforce a solution. This option is still unavailable at the international level, so not much should have been expected of the Paris meetings: the real decisions will be made at the national level.

People hoping for action will no doubt be disappointed by an agreement that reads like a list of talking points. But at least this time, environmental policy-makers around the world will be working from the same script.

National Post

Stephen Gordon is professor of economics at Laval University.