Developing countries reject meaningful emission targets (recent intensity caps are no exception), while many industrialized countries insist that developing countries accept them. This impasse has prevented the Kyoto Protocol from establishing a global price for greenhouse gas emissions. This...

“Hopes are fading that a strong treaty will emerge from next month’s negotiations in Copenhagen,” according to Nature Geoscience (2009/11). This short book starts from Nature’s critique of the “targets and timetables” approach to international agreement and describes an international...

The Kyoto Protocol’s approach of assigning emission targets, or “caps,” exacerbates problems with international cooperation and commitment. This has caused the developing countries, which account for the fastest growing half of emissions, to reject caps. Global carbon pricing addresses...

This paper solves the global cap-and-trade game exactly as the public-goods game is normally solved and finds a problematic outcome. Abatement of greenhouse gas emissions is a global public good, and supplying a public good is a game with strong incentives to free ride. Adding a cap-and-trade...

The Kyoto summit initiated an international game of cap and trade. Unlike a national policy, the essence of this game is the self-selection of national emission targets. This differs from the standard global public-goods game because targets are met in the context of a global carbon market. This...

Displacing gasoline with a new source of biofuel, as California’s low-carbon fuel standard proposes to do, will reduce the global demand for oil. This will reduce the world oil price, which will cause an increase in oil use outside of California - the global rebound effect. Conventional wisdom...