Carbon Politics and the Failure of Kyoto charts the framework and political evolution of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations and examines the ensuing failure of the international community to adequately address climate change. The focus is not on the science or consequences of climate change but on the political gamesmanship of the major players throughout the UNFCCC negotiation process. More than an updated history of the subject matter, this book provides a detailed study of the carbon targets which became the biggest influencing factor on the reaction of nations to Kyoto’s binding agreements. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the leading nations’ motives, including the US, China and Germany, in entering the negotiations, in particular, their economic interests. Despite the effort to combat climate change in politics that the negotiations represent, the book concludes that an agreement which requires almost 200 very different nations to agree on a single protocol is doomed to failure. The book offers a novel contribution to our understanding of this failure and suggests alternative frameworks and policies to tackle what is arguably the most complex political issue of our time.

Even as the evidence of global warming mounts, the international response to this serious threat is coming unraveled. The United States has formally withdrawn from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol; other key nations are facing difficulty in meeting their Kyoto commitments; and developing countries face no limit on their emissions of the gases that cause global warming. In this clear and cogent book-reissued in paperback with an afterword that comments on recent events--David Victor explains why the Kyoto Protocol was never likely to become an effective legal instrument. He explores how its collapse offers opportunities to establish a more realistic alternative. Global warming continues to dominate environmental news as legislatures worldwide grapple with the process of ratification of the December 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The collapse of the November 2000 conference at the Hague showed clearly how difficult it will be to bring the Kyoto treaty into force. Yet most politicians, policymakers, and analysts hailed it as a vital first step in slowing greenhouse warming. David Victor was not among them. Kyoto's fatal flaw, Victor argues, is that it can work only if emissions trading works. The Protocol requires industrialized nations to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases to specific targets. Crucially, the Protocol also provides for so-called "emissions trading," whereby nations could offset the need for rapid cuts in their own emissions by buying emissions credits from other countries. But starting this trading system would require creating emission permits worth two trillion dollars--the largest single invention of assets by voluntary international treaty in world history. Even if it were politically possible to distribute such astronomical sums, the Protocol does not provide for adequate monitoring and enforcement of these new property rights. Nor does it offer an achievable plan for allocating new permits, which would be essential if the system were expanded to include developing countries. The collapse of the Kyoto Protocol--which Victor views as inevitable--will provide the political space to rethink strategy. Better alternatives would focus on policies that control emissions, such as emission taxes. Though economically sensible, however, a pure tax approach is impossible to monitor in practice. Thus, the author proposes a hybrid in which governments set targets for both emission quantities and tax levels. This offers the important advantages of both emission trading and taxes without the debilitating drawbacks of each. Individuals at all levels of environmental science, economics, public policy, and politics-from students to professionals--and anyone else hoping to participate in the debate over how to slow global warming will want to read this book.

In the midst of human-induced global climate change, powerful industrialized nations and rapidly industrializing nations are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Even if we arrive at a Hubbert’s peak for oil extraction in the 21st century, the availability of technologically recoverable coal and natural gas will mean that fossil fuels continue to be burned for many years to come, and our civilization will have to deal with the consequences far into the future. Climate change will not discriminate between rich and poor nations, and yet the UN-driven process of negotiating a global climate governance regime has hit serious roadblocks. This book takes a trans-disciplinary perspective to identify the causes of failure in developing an international climate policy regime and lays out a roadmap for developing a post-Kyoto (post-2012) climate governance regime in the light of lessons learned from the Kyoto phase. Three critical policy analytical lenses are used to evaluate the inherent complexity of designing post-Kyoto climate policy: the politics of scale; the politics of ideology; and the politics of knowledge. The politics of scale lens focuses on the theme of temporal and spatial discounting observed in human societies and how it impacts the allocation of environmental commons and natural resources across space and time. The politics of ideology lens focuses on the themes of risk and uncertainty perception in complex, pluralistic human societies. The politics of knowledge lens focuses on the themes of knowledge and power dynamics in terms of governance and policy designs, such as marketization of climate governance observed in the Kyoto institutional regime.

The adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in December 1997 was a major achievement in the endeavour to tackle the problem of global climate change at the dawn of the 21st century. After many years of involvement in the negotiation process, the book's two internationally recognised authors now offer the international community a first hand and inside perspective of the debate on the Kyoto Protocol. The book provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of the history and content of the Protocol itself as well as of the economic, political and legal implications of its implementation. It also presents a perspective for the further development of the climate regime. These important features make this book an indispensable working tool for policy makers, negotiators, academics and all those actively involved and interested in climate change issues in both the developed and developing world.

At the recent UN Climate Change Conferences in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban, the developed nations promised hundreds of billions of dollars in financial aid to help developing countries overcome global climate change dangers. The developed nations will need to spend many more billions to limit their own greenhouse gas pollution, the main cause of global warming and climate change. Will all this money and effort be wasted? This book argues that nearly all of the world's climate policy makers and expert advisors have been making tragic mistakes that ensure the failures of climate change mitigation attempts.The great majority of climate change programs, from American congressional bills to cap-and-trade economic incentive schemes to the Kyoto Protocol and other international treaties, rely on greenhouse gas emissions-reduction targets that will prove “too little, too late” by deferring strict pollution controls too far into the future. The inadequate emissions-reduction measures also will not be able to bridge the gap between the highest priorities of developed and developing nations. Vast discharges of greenhouse gases authorized by weak emissions-reduction programs in the next several decades virtually guarantee that the cumulative concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will keep increasing while climate change continues to grow worse.Rather than adopting ineffectual emissions-reduction programs that cannot limit the cumulative concentration of greenhouse gases in the air, this book proposes a shift to a “clean” technology-replacement strategy that could support current lifestyles and expanding economic development without further damaging our climate. The only way to reduce the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere enough to decrease climate change hazards is to replace large pollution sources as rapidly as feasible in as many industrial sectors and geographic regions as possible with “clean” alternative technologies, processes, and methods.

A concise and authoritative guide to the evolution, terms and implications of the Kyoto Protocol, this book provides an economic and political account of key policy debates and their outcome. It also explains the meaning of provisions on emissions trading and other flexibility mechanisms, and provides a quantitative analysis using the emissions trading model devised by the RIIA's Energy and Environmental Programme.

"The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 draws on the troubled and uneven COVID-19 experience to illustrate the critical need to ramp up resilience rapidly and effectively on a global scale. After years of working alongside public health and resilience experts crafting policy to build both pandemic and climate change preparedness, Alice C. Hill exposes parallels between the underutilized measures that governments should have taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 -- such as early action, cross-border planning, and bolstering emergency preparation -- and the steps leaders can take now to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Through practical analyses of current policy and thoughtful guidance for successful climate adaptation, The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 reveals that, just as our society has transformed itself to meet the challenge of coronavirus, so too will we need to adapt our thinking and our policies to combat the ever-increasing threat of climate change." --

Governments have failed to stem global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases causing climate change. Indeed, climate-changing pollution is increasing globally, and will do so for decades to come without far more aggressive action. What explains this failure to effectively tackle one of the world's most serious problems? And what can we do about it? To answer these questions, Paul G. Harris looks at climate politics as a doctor might look at a very sick patient. He performs urgent diagnoses and prescribes vital treatments to revive our ailing planet before it's too late. The book begins by diagnosing what’s most wrong with climate politics, including the anachronistic international system, which encourages nations to fight for their narrowly perceived interests and makes major cuts in greenhouse pollution extraordinarily difficult; the deadlock between the United States and China, which together produce over one-third of global greenhouse gas pollution but do little more than demand that the other act first; and affluent lifestyles and overconsumption, which are spreading rapidly from industrialized nations to the developing world. The book then prescribes several "remedies" for the failed politics of climate change, including a new kind of climate diplomacy with people at its center, national policies that put the common but differentiated responsibilities of individuals alongside those of nations, and a campaign for simultaneously enhancing human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. While these treatments are aspirational, they are not intended to be utopian. As Harris shows, they are genuine, workable solutions to what ails the politics of climate change today.

Shows readers how we can all help solve the climate crisis by focusing on a few key, achievable actions.

This major new handbook provides the definitive and comprehensive analysis of the UN and will be an essential point of reference for all those working on or in the organization.