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What good is a norm if it will be breached?

My cousin by marriage, Bill Caplan, is an engineer and former hi-tech business owner. After selling his business, he dared in retirement to get a master’s degree in architecture. He has devoted himself for years to unraveling the mysteries of energy conservation in buildings and how the world should respond to global warming. He is convinced that our current efforts are inadequate.

Smarter and better

But he is not urging faster and more. He is urging smarter and better.

Watch the video above. Bill argues that just constructing a building that uses less energy is pointless by itself, and even sometimes counterproductive. This is because production and transportation of the building materials emit so much carbon dioxide even before construction starts. That’s my crude account of his argument. Best to listen to him.

I have no doubt that he is correct on the merits. But I doubt that his proposed solution is adequate. He has devoted himself to raising the consciousness of practicing architects. That merits applause. They could correct some of the worst abuses. But you would have to give a lot of American Institute of Architect lectures to reach any significant number of them. We can hope the video embedded here gets lots of viewers.

The solution

A carbon tax can be more widely effective. It could raise the cost of materials whose production and transportation uses carbon and discourage at least some of the practices Bill cites. The European Union is implementing a carbon tax in 2026. Canada and twenty of the EU member states had already levied carbon taxes by 2023. Here are the European numbers:

I don’t know if these taxes are high enough or sufficiently well-designed to avoid unintended consequences. But the US would be well-advised to figure it out and follow suit. Our national habit of bemoaning high energy prices and avoiding gasoline taxes slows the transition to non-carbon fuels. Refusal to tax carbon also incentivizes subsidies to wind, solar, and nuclear. Better to make the polluter pay and allow the market to drive carbon reduction.

A norm is better than none

Bill is discouraged, as he sees the breach of the 1.5 degrees centigrade norm looming soon. That is bad. But I still think we are far better off than in the past. We knew the mechanisms and prospects of global warming when I worked on the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. Nothing was done to prevent the consequences for decades thereafter.

Now at least we have an agreed global norm that virtually every country on earth accepts, with the notable exception of Donald Trump’s America. Knowing that we are going to breach a norm is better than not having a norm at all. Avoiding 1.5 degrees of warming has mobilized a great deal more effort to slow global warming than previously. It might even eventually motivate a carbon tax in the US.

For more from Bill, see his Environmental Law Institute book Thwart Global Warming Now: Reducing Embodied Carbon Brick by Brick. For more on international norms, see my own Strengthening International Regimes: the Case of Radiation Protection, which discusses the 1.5 degree norm.