Was Copenhagen's weak deal predictable?

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita predicted and the outcome is reasonably consistent with his prediction. He has a game-theoretic model built on the assumption that everybody wants to further their interests, and the outcome depends on three factors for each player - announced goal/preference for particular outcomes, power to influence the outcome, and salience/importance of the outcome. He has a model that combines them, and simulates the behavior across multiple decisions. He is still positive. His basic point is that once the big emerging countries grow richer, they will join the rest of the world. They will take the next major steps, he suggests, when the technology is ready - scalable, cheap, low carbon energy.

Recipe for Failure
Why Copenhagen will be a bust, and other prophecies from the foreign-policy world's leading predictioneer.

The trouble is, deals like Bali and Kyoto include just about every country in the world. To get everyone to agree to something potentially costly, the something they actually agree to must be neither very demanding nor very costly. If it is, many will refuse to join because for them the costs are greater than the benefits, or else they will join while free-riding on the costs paid by the few who are willing to bear them.

To get people to sign a universal agreement and not cheat, the deal must not ask them to change their behavior much from whatever they are already doing. It is a race to the bottom, to the lowest common denominator. More demanding agreements weed out prospective members or encourage lies. Kyoto's demands weeded out the United States, ensuring that it could not succeed. Maybe that is what those who signed on -- or at least some of them -- were hoping for. They can look good and then not deliver, because after all it wouldn't be fair for them to cut back when the biggest polluter, the United States, does not. Sacrificing self-interest for the greater good just doesn't happen very often. Governments don't throw themselves on hand grenades.

There is a natural division between the rich countries whose prosperity does not depend so much on toasting our planet and the poor countries that really have no affordable alternative (yet) to fossil fuels and carbon emissions. They have an incentive to do whatever it takes to improve the quality of life of the people they govern. The rich have an incentive to encourage the fast-growing poor to be greener, but the fast-growing poor have little incentive to listen as long as they are still poor. As the Indian government is fond of noting, sure, India is growing rapidly in income and in carbon dioxide emissions, but it is still a pale shadow of what rich countries like the United States have emitted over the centuries when going from poor to rich.

But when the fast-growing poor surpass the rich, the tables will turn. China, India, Brazil, and Mexico will then cry out for environmental change because that will protect their future advantaged position, while the relatively poor of one or two or three hundred years from now will resist policies that hinder their efforts to climb to the top. The rich will even fight wars to keep the rising poor from getting so rich that they threaten the old political order. (The rising poor will win those wars, by the way.)