Fixing the Climate with Experimentalist Governance? How?

Official climate data tell us with a very low degree of uncertainty that global temperatures for the months of September and October 2023 represent the highest anomaly ever recorded. The challenge before us, of large and timely phasing out of greenhouse gas emissions is enormous in scale and complexity. There appear to be no ready and fast solutions but there is a need for profound technological changes in several different production sectors. Finally, these solutions must be adopted quickly and promptly to reduce the magnitude of irreversible changes to the planet’s climate. The good news, the most reputable studies tell us, is that the technical knowledge available to us allows us to have real solutions. In the latest International Energy Agency report, World Energy Outlook 2023 released just a few days ago, institute director Fatih Birol writes in the preface that ‘[t]oday, solar power, wind power, efficiency and electric cars are all well established and readily available. We have at our disposal the lasting solutions to today’s energy dilemmas.’ We can thus truly aspire to have the opportunity to be the first generation to have transformed their lifestyles into fully sustainable modes. On October 26, 2023, the Law department of Roma Tre University hosted a special event within the ‘Inequality in Rome Seminar Series’, hosting Prof. Charles Sabel of Columbia University School of Law to discuss his new volume Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World, co-authored with Prof. David Victor of the University of California San Diego. This special event was organized in collaboration with the Forum Disuguaglianze and Diversità, an Italian organization that brings together researchers and civil society members to design and advocate for public policies that aim at reducing the levels of inequality in the country. Sabel and Victor’s book proposes an innovative method that can work in the context of radical and pervasive uncertainty about the solutions to be undertaken to make the energy and ecological transition more affordable. How? The core of the book lies in the model of global governance of climate change that it promotes. The overall premise is clear – no response to climate change will succeed without international cooperation (p. 153).The problem is what type of cooperation international law should embrace. The answer is, according to the authors, ‘experimentalist governance’ (hereinafter EG), a system that goes beyond the Paris Agreement (2015). They argue that such Agreement has failed to achieve its goals. The book instead puts forward the model of governance endorsed by the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer – a history of success, as the Authors rightly maintain (see pp. 4 to 7 and Ch 2). The book forcefully suggests that we need to reward those who innovate and destabilize the status quo and penalize those who do not want to change through experimental and concrete processes of collaboration between business, between State, business, and citizens, and between States. The states should set ambitious standards and broad goals that are able to incentivize economic agents to act. Moreover, those who set standards interact with those who must solve problems on the ground and implement solutions, following an iterative process of mutual correction of the roadmap and concrete goals to achieve. Such solutions aim at complementing classical marketbased approaches. Indeed, the experimentalist governance approach operates in a decentralized manner, coordinating myriads of individuals, institutions, and economic agents just as happens in markets but not by means of prices, but by setting standards that are continually revised by accumulating new information, if necessary, through deliberative and discussion processes. A form of deliberation that uses doubt, disagreement, and a peer review process to advance the technological frontier even in an environment of profound uncertainty. In this article, we propose the main issues and questions that were raised during the seminar by the panelists Prof. Barbara Annicchiarico, Prof. Roberto Baratta, Prof. Tommaso di Marcello, as well as from the coordinator Prof. Salvatore Morelli. Prof. Charles Sabel provides his responses in turn.