Looking beyond the “energy trilemma” – the role of energy industry goals in explaining climate policy ambition

To prevent dangerous levels of climate change, the Paris Agreement defined a target of limiting global warming to 2°C. This target can only be achieved through a rapid and deep decarbonization of the economy, and particularly the energy sector. What is needed is a technological transition from greenhouse gas emitting technologies to low or zero […]

Cut price air fares demand new more efficient climate policy instruments

Public understanding that air travel is problematic from a climate perspective seems to be increasing. One manifestation of this is that a new calculator, which was launched a couple of weeks ago, has already been used by over 10000 people. On the site you can calculate your air travel emissions for the past 12 months […]

TOP 10 DOWNLOADED PAPERS PUBLISHED IN 2018

The readership and impact of the Climate Policy Journal continued to grow in 2018, with article downloads reaching over 180,000

Bye, bye global carbon market?

Our new article with David Victor and Arild Underdal in Climate Policy looks systematically at the political economy of the diffusion of emissions trading system (ETS) designs and has sobering implications for the vision of global carbon-market linking. Ever since the middle 1990s when serious efforts were made to promote the use of emission trading […]

Including Animal-to-Plant Protein Shifts in Climate Change Mitigation Policy: A Proposed Three-step Strategy

In my new article published in Climate Policy, I outline the need for strong and rapid greenhouse gas reductions from the agriculture sector, and propose a three-step strategy for including animal to plant sourced protein shifts in climate policy. The article covers five main aspects: The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions strongly and rapidly […]

What Drives Adoption of Clean Technologies in Developing Countries?

The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report (SR1.5) finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide to fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Such reduction would require “rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including […]

Governance of Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage

Accounting, Rewarding, and the Paris Agreement In a newly published article in Climate Policy, I explore some governance issues associated with negative emission technologies, taking bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) as the case at hand. The article covers three main topics: Accounting for negative emissions; Rewarding negative emissions (and incentives for industry […]

What Could the Global Climate Regime Learn From Transitional Justice Experiences?

With the recent surge of nationalism across many countries, efforts to build solidarity in the global climate regime might appear excessively idealistic. But one continually re-emerging lesson is that those who have suffered injustice will, inevitably, seek to remedy it. Moreover, norms and judgments about what is or is not acceptable are constantly changing, mostly […]

Addressing Political and Technical Challenges of Measuring Adaptation

The Paris Agreement is widely recognised as an exciting step forward in the world’s fight against climate change. One element that sets it apart is its global goal for adaptation – the first time such a goal has been agreed. The international climate regime will measure collective progress of adaptation through the Global Stocktake, under […]

Learning From the Past to Bring the Paris Agreement Climate Goals Closer Within Reach

The Talanoa Dialogue in the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] negotiations extends a broad invitation to share low-carbon stories on how to move from ‘where do want to go?’ to ‘how do we get there?’. The aim is to ratchet up ambition in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to bring them in […]