Climate Conversations S1E13: Brokering International Climate Deals

[00:00:00:14] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:04:08] SPEAKER 1: To have people who are working on the environment, professionals in science and engineering that really deeply understand the social and governance aspects of these problems, is really a valuable thing, because so many of the solutions will succeed or fail based on social factors and not just technical factors.

[00:00:23:13] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Welcome to Climate Conversations. I'm Rajesh Kasturirangan. And we have--

[00:00:28:22] LAURA HOWELLS: Hi, I'm Laura from ClimateX.

[00:00:30:24] CURT NEWTON: And I'm Curt Newton from MIT's Office of Digital Learning and ClimateX.

[00:00:34:24] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: And we are going to talk today about chemicals that move across boundaries.

[00:00:40:17] CURT NEWTON: And policies to block them.

[00:00:42:22] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Yes.

[00:00:43:13] CURT NEWTON: Or manage them.

[00:00:44:10] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Yeah. And we have Professor Noelle Selin from the Institute for Data, Systems and Society who's going to tell us all about how international treaties are arranged to solve those problems.

[00:00:56:15] CURT NEWTON: Yeah, what really goes on at some of these things. I think we're going to get some interesting insights from somebody who's been directly involved in a bunch of these things.

[00:01:04:07] LAURA HOWELLS: Absolutely. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in some of those rooms.

[00:01:07:04] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: And I believe that MIT students are going to get a little glimpse of that with the new minor.

[00:01:12:24] CURT NEWTON: Yes. Yes, indeed. And we'll hear more about that from Noelle as well.

[00:01:16:13] LAURA HOWELLS: Let's take a listen.

[00:01:18:12] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: We are so happy to have Professor Noelle Selin off the Institute for Data, Systems and Society here at MIT and also with EAPS at MIT.

[00:01:28:18] NOELLE SELIN: I'm happy to be here.

[00:01:29:13] LAURA HOWELLS: Welcome. How are you?

[00:01:30:15] NOELLE SELIN: Good. Thanks for inviting me.

[00:01:32:00] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So Noelle, how did you get to MIT?

[00:01:35:01] NOELLE SELIN: Wow, how did I get to MIT?

[00:01:36:07] [LAUGHTER]

[00:01:37:20] CURT NEWTON: It was right up the road.

[00:01:39:03] NOELLE SELIN: Yeah. So my work at MIT really bridges several disciplines. So it's linking atmospheric chemistry and policy. So my background really is in both. I was an undergrad. I did all my degrees up the street at Harvard. I was an undergrad in environmental science and public policy, and really focused more on the public policy end of research, and did a lot of work on chemicals policy, worked with the US EPA, spent a year working with the European Environment Agency on chemicals policy. And then when I went back to graduate school, I really focused on the science end of it and thinking about chemicals that cross borders.

[00:02:19:09] And so I studied in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at Harvard and then joined MIT first as a post-doc. And MIT was the place where I could actually link those two things together. So I was on post-doc with the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. And in that group, really, it's half social sciences and economics and half atmospheric sciences. And the research really integrated the two things. So at MIT, I really found I had a place where I could address these coupled challenges that involve society and the environment together.

[00:02:54:00] CURT NEWTON: So it sounds like you were interested in that sort of merger of the science and the policy as an undergraduate from a young age.

[00:03:00:13] NOELLE SELIN: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:03:00:28] CURT NEWTON: What was that like, trying to do that sort of interdisciplinary work as a youngster?

[00:03:05:19] NOELLE SELIN: I was in an interdisciplinary major. It's very similar in conception to the interdisciplinary minor that we're just launching at MIT, which is the Environmental Sustainability minor that links governance, policy, and science. And so we had to take classes in both the science of the problem, but also in government, public policy, sociology, and other aspects of environmental problems. So it was really an integrated, holistic treatment of environmental problems. And that's really necessary because when you're dealing with the environment, you're dealing with a system that's influenced by people.

[00:03:38:22] CURT NEWTON: Yeah. What got you interested in, say, pollution initially?

[00:03:42:15] NOELLE SELIN: I really initially was sort of a policy person. I grew up in the Boston area and was always interested in government and local politics. And I also had an interest in science. And those two things really merged in a very clear way in the environmental area, where the decisions that we were making as a society were really affecting the environment.

[00:04:06:05] LAURA HOWELLS: And you talked about the challenges that occur when the science and the policy meet for you. What kind of challenges do you face in that area?

[00:04:14:28] NOELLE SELIN: So one example is chemicals, which is sort of one of the first areas that I explored. And you're thinking about toxic chemicals that are so persistent in the environment that they last for a really long time both in the air and in environmental systems-- in the land and the water. So you can see chemicals that are human-made that transport globally that are present in the Arctic and that bio-accumulate in the Arctic food chains and then pose threats to people there.

[00:04:43:23] CURT NEWTON: What's an example of one of those things?

[00:04:45:11] NOELLE SELIN: So chemicals like DDT or PCBs, so-called persistent organic pollutants. And one of the first areas where I got interested in the intersection of science and policy was working on these substances. And at the time, they were the subject of increasing international regulation. So there was a regional agreement with the US and Europe and then eventually a global treaty. And so starting when I was an undergrad, I was working with the US Environmental Protection Agency team that was doing research on these substances, but in order to inform the global treaty negotiations. So I was able to see that process through and really understand how the substances travel, but also the efforts to regulate them, and then think about what human actions, and human policy actions, and what effects those policy actions could have.

[00:05:33:12] LAURA HOWELLS: And do you find that policy normally follows on quite well from science? Or is there a big disconnect for you in where those two meet?

[00:05:39:26] NOELLE SELIN: Well, I think what research teaches us is really there's no clear boundary between policy and science. So what's defined--

[00:05:46:25] CURT NEWTON: Really?

[00:05:47:03] NOELLE SELIN: --as policy and what's defined as science really is negotiated. And on a case-by-case basis in every area, that negotiation is really what's interesting-- what gets considered as something that policymakers get to decide and what's considered the domain of scientists.

[00:06:05:01] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So can you give us a specific negotiation that either you have participated in or that you have found fascinating?

[00:06:11:22] NOELLE SELIN: So one negotiation that I've participated in and actually took students to a few years ago was the negotiations of the Minamata Convention on Mercury. So I did a lot of work on mercury as a graduate student. I continue to work on mercury here at MIT. And in 2013, negotiators worldwide were finalizing a global treaty on mercury. And the interesting part was that was the first global environmental treaty since the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. So that was a 12- or 13-year span from the finalization of the Stockholm Convention.

[00:06:43:27] So it was the first time that countries of the world had gotten together and negotiated a new standalone environmental treaty. And this regulated mercury worldwide. And I had 10 students from MIT with me at the final negotiating session, which was in Geneva. And we went. It was during [? IAP. ?] So it was a great opportunity to witness the negotiations, but also present some of the latest science, and thinking about what that science was, what the negotiators really needed to know at that point, and also seeing the process of how the final treaty text got negotiated and got finalized overnight at 4:00, or 5:00, 6:00 in the morning on the day after it was supposed to be finalized.

[00:07:26:26] LAURA HOWELLS: Wow, that is exciting.

[00:07:28:02] NOELLE SELIN: So it was a few years before the Paris Agreement. And that experience of taking students-- and it was funded by an NSF career grant. And the experience of taking students to negotiations really prompted me to say, how do we get this feeling of getting students to understand what goes on in these international rooms when negotiators from all these different countries are talking about policy and making decisions that will affect the environment?

[00:07:57:10] CURT NEWTON: I've heard it said that, especially in the context of, say, the Paris Agreement, when people are complaining about how hard it is to get international agreements to work, that these much more specific treaty agreements-- whether it's about ozone, or mercury, or one of the recent refrigerant chemicals-- those are places where it seems to work. I wonder what your perspective is on where these kind of agreements can be successful.

[00:08:24:01] NOELLE SELIN: I think it's always hard. And if you watch the process of negotiations, one of the things that students are always surprised about is how slow they are, and how long it takes for people sitting in the room together to actually come to agreement, and the rituals of those negotiations when people have to thank the host government and make political statements first before you actually get to negotiations. That's particularly hard often for science and engineering students who really want to get right down to the nitty-gritty. But there is a ritual involved. And that kind of getting to know one another and really building that rapport over time happens in all of these different areas.

[00:09:05:18] Obviously, climate is a particularly difficult area, because it touches so many different sectors. So if you think about negotiations when countries come to the table, they have to make sure that things are OK with transportation, and energy, and all sorts of other different sectors in their economies. And they're constrained by all of those things when they're talking to another country who is, in turn, constrained by all of those things.

[00:09:32:21] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So this is fascinating. And maybe it's kind of glacial when you're watching it on the sidelines. But do you think that people are already prepared to make certain kinds of concessions and it's just a ritual to get there? Or are there things that are actually being negotiated on the spot?

[00:09:50:28] NOELLE SELIN: I really do think, in a lot of these cases, people are making compromises on the spot, especially in the very last bits of the negotiations. That's why people are sitting in these rooms. And that's why there's back and forth with governments at the very last minute to see what you can and can't agree to.

[00:10:13:17] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So let's say I'm a negotiator and I feel like I'm ready to make an offer. What kind of legal authority do I have? Because I'm, after all, ultimately responsible to my national government and its needs. So can you tell us a little bit about what people are bringing to the table when it comes to their social or national authority to negotiate these things?

[00:10:38:22] NOELLE SELIN: Well, the authority is very prescribed, of course, in terms of a national government and what each national legislation allows negotiators to do. But what I can say is that the personal connections really do matter, and the ability to get to know the person on the other side of the table, and put a face to a name. It's not just the United States negotiating with China.

[00:11:00:03] It is individuals who are getting to know each other over the course of these two-week meetings that happen twice a year and intersessional meetings that happen often. So when you think about the science that is informing these negotiations, thinking about that on the personal level is really important. Who do these people call upon when they have a technical question? What kind of process goes into making these reports? It's often a matter of the people, not necessarily just the science.

[00:11:32:12] CURT NEWTON: So this sounds like one of the last places that we should be pressuring people to stop flying to. We want them to get together physically.

[00:11:41:21] NOELLE SELIN: Well, yeah. Being there in person really is important. But that actually leads me to one of the things that followed up on me taking students to negotiations. And one of the things I wanted to see was if we could actually sort of mimic that experience by not flying. And can we mimic that experience in a normal, everyday MIT class and get students the idea and the feeling of being at negotiations?

[00:12:07:23] So in the last several years in my classical [INAUDIBLE] [? environmental ?] negotiations, I've had students virtually following the negotiations. So they watch the webcast, and they engage with negotiators on social media, on Twitter, and follow what's going on by watching what's available online. And of course, that's not exactly the same as being there, but I've found that watching the negotiations in real time and actually being able to engage through social media and other tools really does help students understand what it is like to be in those rooms.

[00:12:42:18] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So you mentioned social media. I remember reading recently that social media has actually changed international negotiations enormously, because people are tweeting things that earlier were somewhat secret.

[00:12:57:17] NOELLE SELIN: Oh, absolutely. So when I was a graduate student, I worked for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin. And they are an organization, a nonprofit, that does daily reports of environmental negotiations. And for me, it was a good way to keep going to environmental negotiations while I was doing a science graduate degree and sort of keep my hand in these two different pots. But back when this was started, this was really the only way to find out about what's going on in negotiations, because they weren't webcast.

[00:13:26:22] And any information that came out was maybe a long-form email that somebody wrote. But especially for negotiations, which aren't heavily covered in the media, it was really hard to get information about what was going on. These days, there's a hashtag for pretty much every negotiation. You can follow along. And observers have a way to put information out there on what's going on. So it really has increased the transparency.

[00:13:51:16] LAURA HOWELLS: And do you think that's a helpful thing or a harmful thing in terms of-- does it ever have negative effects on the negotiations themselves when information is leaked that maybe people aren't ready for yet, that the people involved in the negotiations aren't ready to be released yet?

[00:14:04:01] NOELLE SELIN: I think, in general, it's a helpful thing. I think having the transparency that allows observers and people who have an interest in the issue other than countries to understand what's going on and to have an opportunity to influence is a positive thing. In some cases, there are closed meetings. And in those cases, sometimes the final negotiations are done behind closed doors. But in the majority of cases, I think that transparency really helps people's understanding of what happens and also the ability of an agreement to really stick and to work.

[00:14:39:28] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: I want to come back to the science. You mentioned that you've studied chemicals that cross borders. So tell us how you study that. There's, I'm sure, the actual diffusion processes. There's also the social boundaries. So just give us a sense for what modeling looks like.

[00:14:59:29] NOELLE SELIN: Right. So I use global models to understand where pollutants are coming from and where they're going. And this is really one of the ways that we can try to understand, in the context of a negotiation, for example, which countries are affected by which other countries and which emissions from what places are affecting other places downstream. So for example, I constructed, as part of my graduate work, a global model for mercury. And inputs to the model, you have to understand what the emissions are, where those emissions are happening.

[00:15:30:20] The really interesting part about mercury is that you then not only have chemistry in the atmosphere and transport with wind patterns and meteorology, but once mercury is then deposited to the surface, it can then pop back up. Mercury is a volatile element. So there's cycling between the surface and the atmosphere that you have to capture in a global model and that affects where that mercury eventually ends up.

[00:15:55:10] So that's what makes it a complicated science problem. And of course, we need measurements. So my group collaborates really closely with people doing measurements of mercury all over the world and uses those measurements to help constrain our model to help understand both the chemistry, the cycling between the land and the atmosphere, as well as whether we're getting a reasonable answer that could be useful in the policy context.

[00:16:17:10] CURT NEWTON: I saw you give a talk a year ago or so about the co-benefits of dealing with a particular form of air pollution sort of rippling into other places and how, for instance, taking on mercury can affect, say, global warming emissions. Could you say a little bit about that?

[00:16:31:28] NOELLE SELIN: Sure. And my interest in things like co-benefits really spawned from my interest in these really toxic chemicals. And it's really broadened to address any air pollutants of damage to human health. So one of the big ones and a big global problem is PM 2.5, so particulate matter less than two and a half microns in size that's small enough for you to inhale in your lungs and causes cardiovascular and other kinds of health damages, respiratory damages.

[00:16:59:10] CURT NEWTON: Where does that stuff come from?

[00:17:00:11] NOELLE SELIN: So most of it is produced in the atmosphere. Some of it's directly emitted, but some of it also is the product of chemical reactions. So one example is the so-called inorganic particulate matter-- so sulfate and nitrate aerosols. And what we can do in our models is we can understand how they form, where they go, and which sources are more important in that chemistry of formation. So others include black carbon and organic carbon. And so when you think about the kinds of sources that are influencing these sorts of pollutants, they're often the same sources that lead to emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. So cars, power plants.

[00:17:46:21] And so this idea of co-benefits is that if you regulate for CO2, you might get an extra, added bonus that you reduce these other sorts of pollutants, which are heavily regulated. And ozone is another pollutant that, again, is produced in the atmosphere from oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds. So these are things that we know are a problem. They're a local problem. So the idea that we might see some benefits locally from something that we're doing globally is really attractive in the negotiating context as well.

[00:18:18:04] So some of my work is thinking about, how do we quantify those? How do we understand how much would happen if we just regulated CO2 and got these air pollution benefits for free? So what we found is that previously, a lot of people had thought, well, this might be the case in some developing countries where they have a lot of dirty sources, but we're not sure about the United States. Because the United States has relatively clean cars and relatively clean power plants, because we've heavily regulated the emissions from those sources of the precursors to particulate matter and ozone, if not from CO2. So regulating the CO2 wouldn't necessarily lead to improvements in local air quality, because our air quality has gotten a lot better over the past several decades. And one of the studies we did-- we actually found that, in fact, we did find co-benefits in the US. There's a long way to go in terms of really cleaning up our air quality.

[00:19:14:23] CURT NEWTON: I wonder about going the other way too, thinking about, say, a polling about attitudes in the United States. People are much quicker to say, I support clean air, irrespective of how they feel about climate change as a thing. And so can things like regulations that support clean air be kind of a doorway into helping climate change?

[00:19:35:06] NOELLE SELIN: Absolutely. But you have to be smart about it. And the challenge is to find those win-win strategies and not the win-lose strategies.

[00:19:41:22] CURT NEWTON: Yeah, that's [? what. ?]

[00:19:42:13] NOELLE SELIN: So then not the areas where you can clean up the air, but actually have a negative for CO2. And a good example of that is the recent case of the Volkswagen diesels, where the technology that made nitrogen oxide emissions lower was actually hurting fuel economy. So that's the reason why they had this cheat that actually turned it off. The underlying technology was a win for air quality and a lose for the climate.

[00:20:10:15] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So MIT now has a new minor in environmental sustainability, and you are one of three teachers of the first class ever.

[00:20:20:00] NOELLE SELIN: Right. So the minor is an opportunity for students to focus on environment and sustainability questions in a multi-disciplinary way in a way that isn't available in any current major for undergraduates. So there are two core classes that will be required for anyone who's engaged in the minor. And I'm co-teaching one of them along with Professor Susan Solomon also in EAPS and John Sterman from the Sloan School.

[00:20:44:26] So our task in this class, which is linking the science piece of environment and sustainability with governance and policy. And the other class will link historical pieces and engineering aspects, and will focus on an applied case study. So our class really will try to get students to understand how policy decisions and governance really affects the planet we live on. And that's why we've called the class People and the Planet. And we're going to do three case studies this year. One case study is the ozone hole. Another is mercury in the environment, and another is climate change.

[00:21:26:21] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Very nice.

[00:21:27:22] LAURA HOWELLS: Awesome. What are the big takeaways you want students to come away with when they finish this course?

[00:21:33:16] NOELLE SELIN: I really hope that students understand how we live in an Earth system that's really dominated by the human influence, and that the decisions that we're making as a society really affect the Earth on a global basis, and that they are also long-term decisions. So take, for example, climate change. The decisions that we make now are controlling the Earth's climate for generations, centuries into the future. And just understanding those timescales and how the dynamics of the system works in combination with how societies actually make decisions about these topics, and what the different interests are, and why it isn't a simple problem.

[00:22:15:05] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So last but not least, we always end our podcast with a magic wand question. So the magic wand question is, if you had a magic wand, and you could wave it, and it would solve one challenge, problem, puzzle that matters to you and matters to the climate, what would that be?

[00:22:36:17] NOELLE SELIN: That is a really hard question.

[00:22:37:25] [LAUGHTER]

[00:22:40:19] I think I struggle with it, because it's such a thorny problem, that it really will take a lot of negotiation. And it's easy to think about the magic wand as a particular technology or a particular solution. But in fact, what will be needed for actual change that affects the climate is not only that magic wand, but a lot of work, and compromise, and activity globally. I think one area that would help is if there could be an increased awareness of the risks of climate change. And we could just wave the magic wand and say, we're all going to agree that this is the best available science if we all could have similar goals. But of course, that's not--

[00:23:30:08] [LAUGHTER]

[00:23:31:03] LAURA HOWELLS: That's why it's the magic wand, I guess.

[00:23:32:04] NOELLE SELIN: That [? couldn't ?] happen.

[00:23:32:20] CURT NEWTON: Yeah, exactly. If it could bring us to a change of heart like that, that would be magic.

[00:23:38:03] LAURA HOWELLS: I think that's a very warming answer. I quite like that one. Well, thank you so much, Noelle.

[00:23:42:18] NOELLE SELIN: All right.

[00:23:43:05] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Yeah. Thank you.

[00:23:44:05] CURT NEWTON: Thank you.

[00:23:46:10] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Chemical boundaries. Yeah.

[00:23:48:11] CURT NEWTON: Yeah.

[00:23:49:02] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: I find these international negotiations around chemicals fascinating.

[00:23:54:17] CURT NEWTON: No kidding. No kidding.

[00:23:55:28] LAURA HOWELLS: Really, it painted a picture of how intense and frustrating it must be watching these policy negotiations go on, sometimes for months, and then not to be enacted until years later. I think that would be something I'd find pretty tough.

[00:24:08:07] CURT NEWTON: Yeah. And I loved the statement that, actually, people are really negotiating and thinking on their feet at the 11th hour--

[00:24:15:14] LAURA HOWELLS: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:24:16:01] CURT NEWTON: --under those pressures. All of this stuff just keeps coming down to people and relationships. We can't cut that out of the equation.

[00:24:24:09] LAURA HOWELLS: No, absolutely not.

[00:24:25:04] CURT NEWTON: Thank god.

[00:24:27:04] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: People and relationships. I think that we're going to be engaging with that for a long, long time.

[00:24:33:16] CURT NEWTON: Yeah, the human side of this equation.

[00:24:35:20] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Yes.

[00:24:36:12] CURT NEWTON: It's more important all the time.

[00:24:37:29] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: For the human side of our equation-- Laura.

[00:24:40:27] LAURA HOWELLS: Yeah, please do reach out to us. You can email us at feedback_climatex@mit.edu. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or you can come directly to ClimateX.MIT.edu. And please do write and subscribe on iTunes if you get a chance. We really appreciate the feedback.

[00:24:58:02] CURT NEWTON: Thanks so much for listening.

[00:24:59:27] RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Thank you.

[00:25:00:09] LAURA HOWELLS: Bye.

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