Winners And Losers In An International Carbon Regulation Protocol

From the World Bank's Country Stakes in Climate Change Negotiations:

Country stakes in a global protocol on greenhouse gas emissions involve tradeoffs among positive orientation (hypothesized to include the availability of renewable energy sources, sequestration potential, potential impacts from sea-level rise, and weather damage) and negative orientation (assumed to be related to nonrenewable energy sources and employment vulnerability). While it is difficult to generalize about “typical” conditions confronting individual countries (especially as additional dimensions are added), a clear regional clustering of vulnerability warrants attention to regional strategies.

[...]

Research based on these hypothesized relationships shows that countries with positively oriented stakes are concentrated in Latin America and West Africa, while Eastern Europe and Central Asia have a large number of countries with unfavorable stakes. Other regions have mixed conditions, but individual countries within those regions often have persistently favorable or unfavorable stakes.

Unfortunately, countries with unfavorable stakes (using the composite measures obtained in this research) include some of the largest emitters of CO2 (e.g., India and China). Together, the states with unfavorable stakes account for almost one-half of all CO2 emissions from World Bank partner countries. In contrast, countries with favorable stakes account for about 19% of total emissions.

Put bluntly: the countries with the greatest incentive to join an international regulation regime amount to a hill of beans, emissions wise. Which means that any negotiations are going to have to take into account the fact that many large emitters will take a substantial economic "hit" if they join up.

Countries that use alot of coal, for example:

A global emissions reduction protocol will impose a greater carbon shadow price shock on countries with significant hydrocarbon resources that provide locally consumed energy and may also be a primary source of export earnings. The highest source-vulnerability countries are scattered across all world regions, with coal particularly important in Eastern Europe, and oil and gas concentrated in Russia, Norway, the Middle East and other OPEC countries.1

...which may mean that "many countries may resist a global protocol unless they are compensated for disadvantages associated with source vulnerability."

...which means more cries of "we're redistributing Western money to corrupt third-world regimes".

Nevertheless, the paper concludes that successful negotiation of a global protocol will likely require compensation and cross-subsidy mechanisms.

As they say, good luck with that.