The Case for Intensity Targets

Both China, the nation with the largest emissions of greenhouse gases, and India, the fifth-largest emitter, announced in the week before the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) in Copenhagen that they would offer for the purposes of negotiation "intensity targets" at the COP. (Carbon intensity is the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of GDP.) Neither country had offered any potentially internationally-binding target prior to these. China offered a reduction target of 40–45 percent by 2020, over the 2005 intensity. India, a few days later, announced a "voluntary" target of 20–25 percent over the same period. High on the list of topics discussed in Copenhagen will be the relative value of intensity targets versus absolute emissions-reduction-targets, which most industrialized countries, including, also very recently, the United States (17 percent over 2005—provisionally until Congress enacts domestic climate legislation) have offered.

William Pizer, in this 2005 Discussion Paper published by Resources for the Future, anticipates this important debate. Dr. Pizer is a Harvard Project author and a former Pre-Doctoral Fellow of the affiliated Harvard Environmental Economics Program. He is now Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy and Environment, United States Department of the Treasury.

The Harvard Project does not advocate any specific policy approach to global climate change policy, and the paper in no manner represents the views of Dr. Pizer's current employer.