Today is the eighth day of the Copenhagen climate negotiations. Representatives from 190 countries have come together to try and craft a political solution to the problem of climate change. It is, in many respects, the high-water mark of the environmental movement. Copenhagen is not the first time that countries have come together to attempt to solve environmental issues—this has happened with varying degrees of success many times—but it has received the most attention. With this attention come the highest expectations of an environmental summit to date.

Yet this summit is primarily political. In fact, to date, the environmental movement as a whole has been primarily political. It has embraced command and control protections, opting to direct actions rather than to change outlooks. Many of the solutions being discussed at Copenhagen fit this model. However, some representatives at Copenhagen do not represent countries. Instead, they are there to represent the world’s major religions.

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As the debate over energy legislation heats up in the Senate in anticipation of the Copenhagen negotiations, legislators on both sides of the aisle are turning toward models of climate change and the economic impact of new legislation. Ignoring the climate models for the moment—while they are important, I have neither the space nor the expertise to comment substantively on them—a deeper look at the economic models shows that members of both camps use these tools to support dramatically different conclusions. This underlines the only fundamental truth of models: Their results are entirely dependent upon the assumptions made during their creation. This is problematic, since the assumptions behind economic models do not include accurate costs of inaction.

This miscalculation is not a function of the models themselves; rather, it is an illustration of a larger problem with the system of costs (prices) in our economic system. This is neither a new problem nor an issue that only concerns environmentalists. In fact, it is the basis for an entire branch of academia. The economics of public goods, and more accurately the environment, are devoted to examining how a system based on private property can accurately price damage to public property. Consider a basic environmental example: water pollution. Before the Clean Water Act, companies could dump pollutants into waterways—a practice most people would acknowledge as a negative impact—but because no one in particular owned the rivers, no one could force the companies to pay for the damage their pollution was causing. Thus, the goods that company sold were under-priced due to the “free” disposal of waste. The CWA attempted to correct this by forcing companies to internalize the costs of water pollution, and, where it is enforced, it has succeeded.

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On October 18th, Harvard’s Environmental Action Committee will kick off its “Road to Copenhagen” with a convocation by climate activist Bill McKibbon at Memorial Church. Over the following five days, the organization will host a series of events that focus attention on the need to stabilize the atmosphere’s carbon concentration at 350 parts per million. The festivities will culminate on the 24th with the International Day of Climate Action. The brainchild of McKibbon, 350 intends to promote global community actions that can be recorded and presented to world leaders when they meet in December at Copenhagen to negotiate a new climate treaty. McKibben, along with many other environmental activists, hopes that these images will serve as evidence of global support for reducing carbon concentrations to 350 ppm.

All of this begs the question: What is so special about 350 ppm, and why should it be the target? The answer to the former can be found in a December 2007 paper by NASA scientist Jim Hansen (and others), which identifies 350 ppm as the concentration at which carbon levels would have to stabilize in order to minimize climate-change impacts. The paper cites potential “irreversible catastrophic effects” if we exceed the 350 ppm target for a long period. An article in Nature and the support of the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajenda Pachauri, have since corroborated their findings. Generally, the evidence suggests that sustained concentrations above 350 ppm will lead to drastic increases in global temperature, the complete melting of polar ice, and dramatic loss of biodiversity.

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When environmental issues come up in everyday conversation, the U.S. Supreme Court rarely figures in to the discussion. Most people, environmentalists and non-environmentalists alike, do not consider the court to be an important arbiter of environmental policy in the United States. This, unfortunately, underestimates—sometimes dramatically—the court’s role in shaping environmental laws and regulations. Like any other public policy in the U.S., this policy faces judicial review, and the justices often shape it very directly through their decisions.

As the justices return to the bench this fall, it is worthwhile for Americans to review its recent legacy in environmental cases. The two patterns beginning to surface after the first three terms of the Roberts era do not seem reassuring for environmentalists: relaxed regulation and weakening of historic policies. The only positive aspect of the court’s actions thus far lies in its seeming inclination to take “green” cases. The Roberts era has seen 12 of these already—nearly triple the number heard in the first three years of the Rehnquist or Burger Courts. However, if the justices continue to rule against green interests, this hardly qualifies as a positive.

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