The “Patchwork Strategy” of Climate Security
Posted March 23, 2010 at 8:38 am 
Filed in: This morning, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) held a panel entitled “Resurrecting the Patchwork Strategy: Top-Down or Bottom-Up Approach to Energy and Climate Policy?” However slowly climate policy may evolve, it has important repercussions for energy security.
A top-down approach from an international perspective is a binding global treaty involving all major emitters with a quantifiable goal and responsibilities for each country. At the national level, it’s a federally mandated price on carbon, either through a tax or a cap-and-trade system. The “Patchwork Strategy,” according to Senior CSIS Fellow Sarah Ladislaw, is a more bottom-up approach. It developed in the United States in the 2000s at the state level, in response to local demand for climate policy butting heads against an Administration uninterested in regulating carbon. Internationally, a patchwork system would involve each country voluntarily signing up for reductions that met its domestic policy needs.
Elliot Diringer, a former Clinton Administration official now at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, argued that we ultimately need a blend combining the flexibility and domestic policy alignment of a bottom up approach with the international “bindingness” of a top-down strategy. By starting with local policies to reduce emissions, it will be easier to transition to an internationally binding system. This, obviously, is easier said than done, but Diringer cited other international regimes that have similarly evolved. One such example is the global trade system – the largely voluntary and loose GATT is today the much more stringent WTO.
From the perspective of the private sector, said Bill Tyndall, a Senior Vice President at Duke Energy, what is needed is long term certainty. He remarked that if Duke Energy were a country it would be the 41st largest emitter. Though Duke has been a steady advocate of efforts to mitigate climate change, without a certain price on carbon, the economics of renewable and nuclear projects are simply unviable.
An alternative approach has been to engage in partnerships with Chinese companies. No matter what Europe and the United States do, addressing climate change will depend on solving the China coal problem. Duke is working on clean coal and alternative fuel technologies in China – where, according to Tyndall, things are moving considerably faster on both traditional and non-traditional solutions. These sorts of on-the-ground partnerships are a good example of a patchwork approach that can ultimately feed into internationally binding carbon constraints.
In a separate CSIS Issue Brief called “Managing the Transition to a Secure, Low-Carbon Energy Future,” Sarah Ladislaw and others draw connections between energy security and climate security. A comprehensive approach to energy security cannot be limited to efforts to reduce dependence on imported fuels – our energy system is far too intertwined with that of the rest of the world. One of the highest return-on-investment paths to energy security is efficiency, or conservation. If we reduce driving by a barrel’s worth of gasoline, it equates to saving around 6 barrels upstream at the oil field. This is because of all the energy and costs involved in getting the oil out of the ground, refined, and transported. Tyndall from Duke Energy described the company’s Save-a-Watt program, which seeks to make efficiency equivalent to building a new plant from the company’s point of view – that is, investors will get the same return on their money if Duke saves energy than if it uses more.
Conveniently, the Issue Brief points out, energy efficiency is a “double win” for energy security and climate change interests.
More generally, many initiatives to enhance national security through reduced oil dependence, such as electrification of transportation, have considerable climate co-benefits. Even if powered solely by a conventional coal plant, electric vehicles still have a superior emissions profile to conventional vehicles. As we move to renewable, nuclear, and natural gas powered electricity, an electrified transportation sector would clean up in tandem. The rapid deployment of electric vehicles that we will see over the next few years represents the bottom-up patchwork approach to dealing with energy and climate challenges – they are not part of a grand international plan.
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