From Rio to Rio: A global carbon price signal to escape the great climate inconsistency

Two decades after the 1992 Rio Conference,we must admit to collective failure in combating human induced climate change. We cannot escape serious climate disruption if we keep going down that road. We must change direction, and we must move quickly. To this end, we call in this paper for a fine tuning of the international negotiations on climate. We propose refocusing these international efforts on negotiating a global carbon price signal, harmonized in principle but flexible in practice, instead of doggedly spending the next few years attempting to convince countries to accept stricter national targets for quantitative reduction of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.