The views expressed in these articles are those of the individual authors.
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media is grateful for the generous financial support of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and of individual Yale University alumni.
BALI, Indonesia, December 10, 2007 - “What comes next?”
It’s a question that has haunted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 13th Conference of Parties.
Will the Bali talks result in a new global framework for tackling climate change? Will they lead to new commitments for a third compliance period for the Kyoto Protocol? An extended Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)?
Journalists reporting on the United Nations Bali negotiations and ongoing plans for addressing climate change need to appreciate that the term “tradable permits system” does not imply a one-size-fits-all single strategy.
Rather, numerous and diverse policy design considerations would go into shaping a tradable permits approach. Many of them involve considerable controversy - Who pays? Who benefits? What are the costs? And more.
An emerging consensus among economists, environmental organizations, and policy makers holds that policy solutions to the climate change problem must incorporate economic mechanisms so that social costs of climate change damages are reflected in prices of carbon and other greenhouse gases.