Environmental Policy
Top Paper: Oversimplifying climate-change policies
“Air Quality Impacts of Climate Mitigation: U.K. Policy and Passenger Vehicle Choice” by Eric A. Mazzi, Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Canada; and Hadi Dowlatabadi, Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Canada, and Resources for the Future, 2007, 41 (2), 387–392.
Hadi Dowlatabadi and graduate student Eric Mazzi freely admit that they intended to make a strong comment on the dangers of politics dictating regulations with their research on how a U.K. climate-change policy for vehicles created local air-pollution troubles. Their paper, published online in December 2006, is an analysis of the steep growth in diesel-vehicle market share in the context of the U.K.’s CO2 tax on vehicles. The increase in the number of diesel cars on the road unintentionally released higher amounts of ambient particulate matter (PM), so that as many as 90 additional people each year could die from illnesses related to air pollution. The ambient air pollution could have been lower if U.K. policy makers had “more carefully balanced their focus on climate-change issues with air quality,” Dowlatabadi says.
“I’m surprised by the level of attention the paper is getting in such a short time,” says coauthor Mazzi, who while a graduate student at the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia (UBC) studied climate-change policies, economics, and atmospheric sciences to develop the paper.
Dowlatabadi, who is Canada Research Chair and professor of applied mathematics and global change at UBC and is also with the U.S. think tank Resources for the Future, was delighted by the paper’s impact. “I’ve learned from working with Hadi on this research about the potential power of having a simple and clear message,” Mazzi says. The two researchers carefully made decisions about how to keep the paper’s scope focused and the analysis straightforward. For example, they had calculated the societal costs of the climate policy but decided to keep that out because “it could lead to confusion” about the paper’s message, Mazzi says.
Yet, the authors are quick to point out that they are in favor of climate-change policy that limits CO2. What their research illustrates is the complexity of environmental policies. Dowlatabadi had been pushing his viewpoint since the mid-1990s, when he urged members of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to modify their position to reflect the complexity of pollution-related troubles throughout the world. In its third report, the IPCC emphasizes that climate-change policies will have unequivocal ancillary health benefits. “Greenhouse-gas mitigation is really a problem of the industrialized world,” Dowlatabadi says. Focusing only on global warming ignores the underlying problem in developing countries, which is poverty, and takes money away from programs that could help people improve their livelihood, their environment, and ultimately the capacity to adapt to climate change, he says.
The U.K. CO2 tax is a clear example of what really happens when policy makers focus only on climate change. The U.K. eventually put in place a new regulation for diesel fuel that emits lower PM levels, after the climate policy was implemented. The regulators might have avoided the increase in air pollution by better coordinating their greenhouse-gas reduction plan with EU standards on PM and NOx emissions, the authors say. The research reflects well on the U.S. and California proposals, the authors say, which include new air-pollution standards that put diesels and gasoline vehicles on the same footing. California will now pursue policies that lower greenhouse gas emissions.
“Politicians are always looking for an angle that will engage the public,” Dowlatabadi says, admitting his frustration. “But oversimplifying things is not the way to do it.” Mazzi agrees and suggests a solution: “A portfolio of policies implemented at different levels of government, at different times, and aimed at different parts of the energy system is more likely to make decarbonization a reality than [is] a simple carbon tax.”
