Even as the evidence of global warming mounts, the international response to this serious threat is coming unraveled. The United States has formally withdrawn from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol; other key ...nations are facing difficulty in meeting their Kyoto commitments; and developing countries face no limit on their emissions of the gases that cause global warming. In this clear and cogent book-reissued in paperback with an afterword that comments on recent events--David Victor explains why the Kyoto Protocol was never likely to become an effective legal instrument. He explores how its collapse offers opportunities to establish a more realistic alternative.
Global warming is one of today's greatest challenges. The science of climate change leaves no doubt that policies to cut emissions are overdue. Yet, after twenty years of international talks and ...treaties, the world is now in gridlock about how best to do this. David Victor argues that such gridlock has arisen because international talks have drifted away from the reality of what countries are willing and able to implement at home. Most of the lessons that policy makers have drawn from the history of other international environmental problems won't actually work on the problem of global warming. Victor argues that a radical rethinking of global warming policy is required and shows how to make international law on global warming more effective. This book provides a roadmap to a lower carbon future based on encouraging bottom-up initiatives at national, regional and global levels, leveraging national self-interest rather than wishful thinking.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is becoming irrelevant to climate policy. By seeking consensus and avoiding controversy, the organization is suffering from the streetlight effect ...- focusing ever more attention on a well-lit pool of the brightest climate science. But the insights that matter are out in the darkness, far from the places that the natural sciences alone can illuminate.
Though highly motivated to slow the climate crisis, governments may struggle to impose costly polices on entrenched interest groups, resulting in a greater need for negative emissions. Here, we model ...wartime-like crash deployment of direct air capture (DAC) as a policy response to the climate crisis, calculating funding, net CO
removal, and climate impacts. An emergency DAC program, with investment of 1.2-1.9% of global GDP annually, removes 2.2-2.3 GtCO
yr
in 2050, 13-20 GtCO
yr
in 2075, and 570-840 GtCO
cumulatively over 2025-2100. Compared to a future in which policy efforts to control emissions follow current trends (SSP2-4.5), DAC substantially hastens the onset of net-zero CO
emissions (to 2085-2095) and peak warming (to 2090-2095); yet warming still reaches 2.4-2.5 °C in 2100. Such massive CO
removals hinge on near-term investment to boost the future capacity for upscaling. DAC is most cost-effective when using electricity sources already available today: hydropower and natural gas with renewables; fully renewable systems are more expensive because their low load factors do not allow efficient amortization of capital-intensive DAC plants.
The Regime Complex for Climate Change Keohane, Robert O.; Victor, David G.
Perspectives on politics,
03/2011, Letnik:
9, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
There is no integrated regime governing efforts to limit the extent of climate change. Instead, there is a regime complex: a loosely-coupled set of specific regimes. We describe the regime complex ...for climate change and seek to explain it, using interest-based, functional, and organizational arguments. This institutional form is likely to persist; efforts to build a comprehensive regime are unlikely to succeed, but experiments abound with narrower institutions focused on particular aspects of the climate change problem. Building on this analysis, we argue that a climate change regime complex, if it meets specified criteria, has advantages over any politically feasible comprehensive regime. Adaptability and flexibility are particularly important in a setting—such as climate change policy—in which the most demanding international commitments are interdependent yet governments vary widely in their interest and ability to implement them. Yet in view of the serious political constraints, both domestic and international, there is little reason for optimism that the climate regime complex that is emerging will lead to reductions in emissions rapid enough to meet widely discussed goals, such as stopping global warming at two degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Policy makers are increasingly focused on strategies to decentralize the electricity grid. We analyze the business model for one mode of decentralization—microgrids—and quantify the economics for ...self-supply of electricity and thermal energy and explicitly resolve technological as well as policy variables. We offer a tool, based on the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM) modeling framework, that determines the cost-minimal capacity and operation of distributed energy resources in a microgrid, and apply it in southern California to three “iconic” microgrid types which represent typical commercial adopters: a large commercial building, critical infrastructure, and campus. We find that optimal investment leads to some deployment of renewables but that natural gas technologies underpin the most robust business cases—due in part to relatively cheap gas and high electricity rates. This finding contrasts sharply with most policy advocacy, which has focused on the potentials for decentralization of the grid to encourage deployment of renewables. Decentralization could radically reduce customer energy costs, but without the right policy framework it could create large numbers of small decentralized sources of gas-based carbon emissions that will be difficult to control if policy makers want to achieve deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
•We offer a modeling tool to study technology and policy variables for microgrids.•We construct comprehensive load profiles for three likely adopters of microgrids.•Investment in natural gas generators is key to enabling business models.•Solar PV and storage are optimal but as supplements to gas generation.•Business models are highly robust to sensitivity in technology and policy variables.
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