Beyond Politics Webinar at the Environmental Law Institute
Michael Vandenbergh and I participated in a webinar hosted by the Environmental Law Institute on our book, Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change. Cassie Phillips (director of the Private Environmental Governance Initiative at ELI) moderated. Stephen Harper (Global Director of Environment and Energy Policy at Intel) and Jackie Roberts (Chief Sustainability Officer at the Carlisle Group) provided private industry perspectives.My book reviewed in Nature Climate Change
Time to Re-Think Solutions
For people working to address climate change, there is certainly no viable alternative to reading this book. Beyond Politics presses readers to think beyond their current conception of climate change solutions and, while laying out a reasoned private governance response accompanied by a realistic assessment of its limitations, provides the groundwork for future research and initiatives to reduce emissions.
Dangerous Assumptions Revisited
Comparisons of observed trends of energy and carbon intensity in the global economy to trends implied by emissions scenarios used in policy analysis suggested that those scenarios were severely over-optimistic about the rate at which the world would spontaneously decarbonize its economy.
I update these analysis, using global emissions since 2005, and find that observed rates of decarbonization are not far behind those implied by the RCP 4.5 policy scenario. This suggests that the policy challenge may not be as difficult as previous work has reported.