Climate Policy

[kandrathe]

Since the Socialized Health Care thread descended into Cap & Trade and climate discussion, I thought it might be good for the topic to have it's own thread. I was reading in the BBC today that a group of academics have written a letter to the G8 nations calling for a new direction in Climate Change policy, since the current policies (Kyoto, EU Cap & trade) are not reducing carbon emissions. From the Institute on Science, Innovation, and Society from Oxford University, How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course. Which is the sequel to their prior paper called, The Wrong Trousers; Radically rethinking climate policy. <blockquote>"The Kaya Direct Approach improves efficiency and reduces costs. These are happy outcomes which reliably translate into greater profitability. These will therefore always be policies that will not be regretted, even if the relationship between CO2 and global warming turns out to be different from that which current politics assume."</blockquote>This is the type of societal thinking that examines the consequences of policy changes rather than setting emissions targets, which result in squishing the big global economic bag in one direction without heeding the net consequences.