Aula Inaugural do semestre 2024-2: prof. Thomas Pogge (Yale), “Accelerating the green transition in the global South”
Convite: aula inaugural do semestre 2024/2
While the rich account for a vastly disproportional share of it (Oxfam), pollution impacts poor populations the most: through contaminated air and food as well as through climate-related heat, extreme weather events, sea level rise, and spread of tropical diseases. While governments spend some $7 trillion annually to subsidize fossil fuel burning (IMF), the use of greener alternatives is impeded by a global innovation system (TRIPS) that makes innovators reliant on monopoly rents. As a complement to the patent regime, I propose an Ecological Impact Fund (EIF) that would provide new incentives by enabling originators of any patentable new green technology (“greenovation”) to permanently forgo patent-based monopoly privileges in the lower-income countries (the “EIF Zone”) in exchange for six annual reward payments based on the emissions averted with deployments of their greenovation in that EIF Zone. Patent privileges outside the EIF Zone and of unregistered innovations would remain unaffected.
Reward payments would come out of pre-announced annual EIF disbursements, each divided among registered greenovations according to emissions averted with them in the EIF-Zone in the preceding year. This principle of division ensures fairness among participating originators, remunerating them all at the same reward-to-benefit rate ($/tCO2e).
Because registration is optional, the EIF reward rate emerges endogenously and predicably equilibrates to a level that is stable over time and fair between participating originators and the funders of the EIF: when originators find the going rate unattractive, registrations dry up and the reward rate rises as older innovations exit at the end of their reward period; when the reward rate is seen as generous, registrations multiply, and the reward rate declines.
The EIF would greatly increase the impact of green technologies in the Global South: the avoidance of licensing fees, royalties, and monopoly markups would lower the price of registered greenovations; and the additional reward payments would motivate their originators to promote their wide deployment and effective use. Through enhanced profit prospects, the EIF would moreover stimulate development of additional greenovations that – tailored to prevailing needs, cultures, circumstances, and preferences in lower-income countries – would be especially impactful there. By thus stimulating diffusion and innovation in and for the Global South, the EIF would also expand local capacities to develop, manufacture, distribute, deploy, operate, and maintain greenovations.
