SPECIAL REPORT: LOOKING AHEAD TO COP26: CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE COMMONWEALTH
FROM THE PANDEMIC TO THE PARIS AGREEMENT, PARLIAMENTARIANS ARE MISSION CRITICAL TO CHANGE Ahead of COP26, the Chair of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank & the IMF writes about the critical role of Parliamentarians in global development. We now live, not in an era of change, but in a change of era. Over the next ten and half thousand days, the brief arc of time between the pandemic and Paris agreement deadlines, we must change the way billions of people take trillions of decisions each and every day. It is the biggest political challenge the human community has ever confronted. Which is why Parliamentarians must be centre stage. There is an old maxim once penned by the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes; ‘hell is the truth seen too late’. Today, we can see the truth of climate change; but acting on that truth will depend on politics, politics depends on votes and votes in the year ahead will go to those who offer a very different kind of ‘GIG economy’; an economy of Green Inclusive Growth. Success will require Parliamentarians helping to make the trade-offs to win five arguments with citizens. First, Parliamentarians must explain a plausible plan to increase the pace of change. The IPCC reports are clear. We are running out of time. Things are worse than we thought. The pace of change must accelerate and the chorus line of powerful voices urging our constituents to demand ambitious targets is wide and strong. This is a good thing. But politicians have to translate those ambitions into practical programs of change, or hold governments to account for delivery. But, here’s the challenge; although evidence is building,1 the design of practical programs is still in its infancy. Voters are not stupid. They know the difference between a soundbite and a strategy. Designing programs that actually make an impact is so complicated that Parliamentarians will need to radically improve the way we learn from each other, and draw on both World Bank and IMF thinking and experience to help avoid the time-consuming and expensive business of reinventing the wheel. Second, Parliamentarians will need help squaring the bargain between winners and losers. The call for a ‘just transition’
championed by trade unions and civil society, underlines how, in any big public policy change, some will gain and some will lose. But the ‘losers’ have votes. But how do we measure who is gaining? How do we share those gains? How do we measure who is losing? How do we craft the compensation needed? And how do we make sure that compensation arrives in time, before the next household bills are due? Governments will fall unless just transition is a reality. The debate about carbon taxes is a useful example. IMF leaders rightly explain that carbon pricing is now widely accepted as the most important policy tool to achieve the drastic cuts to emissions. By making polluting energy sources more expensive than clean sources, carbon pricing provides incentives to improve energy efficiency and to re-direct innovation efforts towards green technologies. Of course, carbon pricing needs to be supported by a broader package of measures to enhance its effectiveness and acceptability including public investment in clean technology networks (like grid upgrades to accommodate renewables) and measures to assist vulnerable households, workers, and regions. Nonetheless, at the global level, additional measures equivalent to a carbon price of US$75 per ton or more are required by 2030.2 The distributional impact of this on millions of low paid workers will be political suicide if mismanaged and implemented without simple, failsafe, real-time means of providing compensation to those at risk of experiencing seismic impacts on the cost of living. Third, Parliamentarians will need to prove the potential for creating new jobs in the local green economy. New vacancies must be real, local and decently paid. This is especially important given the loss of a quarter of a billion jobs around the world in 2020, a shock the UN International Labour Organization (ILO) says is four times the number lost during the 2009 global financial crisis. Investments to cut carbon
Rt Hon. Liam Byrne, MP is Chair of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank
& the IMF and Gwilym Gibbon Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He was first elected as a Member of Parliament in 2004 and during his time in the UK Parliament, he has served in many Ministerial roles including as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He has written over twenty books, chapters and pamphlets on economic development and foreign policy, including a major history of British capitalism.
238 | The Parliamentarian | 2021: Issue Three | 100 years of publishing
