The author looks at diverse concepts and roles of trust in the challenge of decarbonising energy systems, drawing on 25 years of personal experience in the fields of energy and environmental policy research. The paper focuses on three issues-public trust in science, institutional trust in making...

We face a problem of anthropogenic climate change, but the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 has failed to tackle it. A child of summits, it was doomed from the beginning, because of the way that it came into being, Kyoto has given only an illusion of action. It has become the sole focus of our efforts,...