Greenhouse Gas Disclosure as a Nudge

Disclosing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

We propose an emissions-disclosure nudge that all countries could adopt to help address climate change. Governments should be creating a greenhouse gas inventory (GGI), requiring disclosure by all significant emitters. The GGI would permit people to see the various sources of greenhouse gases in their communities and elsewhere and track changes over time. Seeing that list, governments could respond by considering legislative measures. It is inevitable that interested groups, including members of the media, would draw attention to the largest emitters. To be sure, an inventory of this kind might not produce massive changes on its own. But such a nudge would not be especially costly, and it would almost certainly help. (Compiling information about emitters is also a necessary prerequisite to enacting economic incentives.)

At the time of writing, some kind of GGI was required in a number of nations, including the United States. Indeed, the Paris Agreement requires parties to provide a national GGI. But well before the Paris Agreement mandated it, the EPA formally did so starting in 2011, explicitly with the hope that it would nudge high emitters to make real reductions. This same idea has picked up traction in the form of voluntary programs in the private sector; for example, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) provides a standardized global disclosure platform that investors, companies, cities, states, and regions have used to document and manage their environmental impacts. At that time, CDP alone had disclosures from more than eighty-four hundred companies and eight hundred cities.23

At the time of writing, we were not aware of a careful study of the actual impact of GGIs. At least in the United States, the disclosure does not seem to have had the large impact of the Toxics Release Inventory, perhaps because it has not been sufficiently salient to the public or because greenhouse gas emissions are not as scary sounding as “toxic” emissions. But that could be changing. As we were writing this book, much of the American West Coast was experiencing horrific wildfires and smoky air. Australia had experienced similar events and they were impossible to ignore. At the same time, there were a record number of tropical storms in the Atlantic, so many that the agency that gives storms names in alphabetical order ran out of letters and had to switch over to Greek letters, eventually reaching iota, the ninth letter (if you have forgotten your Greek alphabet).24 Extreme climate events are becoming increasingly common, and a great deal could be done to draw attention to emissions trends, including which parties are part of the problem and which are creating solutions.