Building an Effective Climate Regime While Avoiding Carbon and Energy Stalemate

The world needs a new approach to achieving international progress on climate change. Despite prodigious diplomatic efforts over two decades aimed at limiting emissions of climate change pollutants, relatively little in the way of effective global governance has been achieved. In Part 1, I argue that this is due to a narrow legal, economic, and political focus on the hardest part of the climate change problem – energy related carbon dioxide emissions. Part 2 explains key scientific developments over the past two decades and how these have reshaped the scientific view of human impacts on climate. Studies aimed at resolving the remaining uncertainties in climate projections have resulted in a dramatically improved understanding of the importance of short-lived climate pollutants in causing current and medium-term climate change. In Part 3, I argue that such a shift in focus to short-lived climate pollutants could produce more effective outcomes. In Part 4, I provide an account of how short-lived climate pollutants might form a path toward more comprehensive international greenhouse gas limits in the future. In the long run, a multilateral agreement limiting energy related carbon emissions is essential to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. But simply repeating the failed strategies of the last twenty years is unlikely to accomplish that end. This article aims to provide a plausible path forward to deep cooperation that is consistent with current scientific knowledge, technical ability, and international law and relations theory.