This article examines the recent changes of three central EU climate and energy policies: the revised Emissions Trading Directive (ETS); the Renewables Directive (RES); and internal energy market (IEM) policy. An increasing transference of competence to EU level institutions, and hence...

Contemporary environmental policy is marked by an emphasis on the fight against climate change. Technological improvements for energy efficiency and transition to a low carbon economy are seen as principal environmental policy measures. Has this been the case 40 years ago when modern...

This paper argues that the resistance to climate science from so-called deniers cannot be explained by drawing an imaginary line between two fields of science and politics and then investigating each for malfunctions. Instead, there is a need to understand the co-evolution of scientific...

The European Union (EU) has sought to lead the world in the adoption of ambitious climate change mitigation targets and policies. In an attempt to characterize and broadly explain the resulting pattern of EU climate governance, scholars have employed the term “multi-level reinforcement.”...

The slow progress of the international climate negotiations has generated calls for a shift from large-n multilateralism (inclusive multilateralism) to more streamlined negotiations that are confined to the major emitters whose support is crucial for an effective climate treaty (exclusive...

Environmentalism has long seen its job as protecting nature from human exploitation. Over the past few decades, it has become clear that this effort no longer makes sense. In the Anthropocene, humans exert global impact on the earth’s ecosystems and thus erase the divide between themselves and...

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive Public Choice framework to identify and categorize barriers to efficient public climate adaptation. Specifically, we distinguish three dimensions of public adaptation: extent, structure (form and timing) and organisation (vertical and horizontal). Within...

This volume was prepared by Rahel Aichele while she was working at the ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2012 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. The chapters investigate how, in a...

Countries have pledged to stabilize global warming at a 1.5 to 2°C increase. Either target requires reaching net zero emissions before the end of the century, which implies a major transformation of the economic system. This paper reviews the literature on how policymakers can design climate...