What policies have worked to fight climate change? Answer: When the polluter pays.

To find out what really works when nations try to fight climate change, researchers looked at 1,500 ways countries have tried to reduce heat-trapping gases. Their answer: Not many did the job. And success often means someone has to pay a price, either at the pump or elsewhere.

In just 63 cases since 1998, researchers found policies that led to significant reductions in carbon pollution, a new study in the journal Science found Thursday.

Moves to phase out fossil fuel consumption and gas engines, for example, have not worked on their own, but are more successful when combined with some sort of energy tax or surcharge system, have concluded the authors of the study in an exhaustive analysis of the global. emissions, climate policies and laws.

“The key ingredient if you want to reduce emissions is that you have prices in the policy mix,” said study co-author Nicolas Koch, a climate economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “If subsidies and regulations come alone or in a mix with each other, you won’t see major emissions reductions. But when pricing instruments come into the mix, such as a carbon energy tax, then they will deliver those substantial emissions reductions.”

The study also found that what works in rich nations does not always work as well in developing ones.

Still, it shows the power of the purse when fighting climate change, something economists have always suspected, said several outside policy experts, climate scientists and economists who praised the study.

“We’re not going to solve the climate problem in richer nations until the polluter pays,” said Rob Jackson, a climatologist at Stanford University and author of the book Clear Blue Sky. “Other policies help, but they nibble at the edges.”

“Carbon pricing puts the onus on the owners and products that are causing the climate crisis,” Jackson said in an email.

A great example of what works is in the UK electricity sector, Koch said. The country has instituted a combination of 11 different policies since 2012, including a coal phase-out and a pricing scheme involving emissions trading, which he said has almost halved emissions – “a huge effect”.

Of the 63 success stories, the biggest reduction was seen in South Africa’s construction sector, where a combination of regulation, subsidies and appliance labeling reduced emissions by almost 54%.

The only success story in the United States was in transportation. Emissions fell 8% from 2005 to 2011 thanks to a mix of fuel standards – which amount to regulations – and subsidies.

However, even the policy tools that seem to be working have barely made a dent in ever-increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Overall, the 63 climate policy successes reduced 600 million to 1.8 billion metric tons of the heat-trapping gas, the study found. Last year, the world emitted 36.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide while burning fossil fuels and making cement.

If every major country somehow learned the lesson of this analysis and implemented the policies that work best, it would reduce the United Nations’ “emissions gap” of 23 billion metric tons of all greenhouse gases by about 26 percent , the study shows. The gap is the difference between how much carbon the world is about to blow into the air in 2030 and the amount that would keep warming at or below internationally agreed levels.

“It basically shows that we need to do a better job,” said Koch, who is also head of the policy evaluation lab at the Mercator Research Institute in Berlin.

Niklas Hohne of the New Climate Institute in Germany, who was not part of the study, said: “The world really needs to make a change, go into emergency mode and make the impossible possible.”

Koch and his team looked at emissions and efforts to reduce them in 41 countries between 1998 and 2022 — so that doesn’t include the nearly $400 billion US climate spending package approved two years ago as a cornerstone of President Joe Biden. environmental policy—and recorded 1,500 different political actions. They grouped policies into four broad categories—prices, regulations, subsidies, and information—and looked at four distinct sectors of the economy: electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry.

In what Koch called the “reverse causal approach,” the team looked for emissions declines of 5 percent or more in different sectors of countries’ economies and then figured out what caused them using observations and machine learning. The researchers compared emissions with similar nations as control groups and took weather and other factors into account, Koch said.

The team created a statistically transparent approach that others can use to update or replicate, including an interactive website where users can choose nations and economic sectors to see what worked. And eventually it could be applied to the 2022 Biden climate package, he said. That package was heavy on subsidies.

John Sterman, a management professor at the MIT Sloan Sustainability Institute who was not part of the research, said it’s easier for politicians to enact policies that subsidize and promote low-carbon technologies. He said it wasn’t enough.

“It is also necessary to discourage fossil fuels by pricing them closer to their full costs, including the costs of the climate damage they cause,” he said.

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Photo: Vehicles travel along Interstate 76 before the Thanksgiving holiday in Philadelphia, Nov. 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

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