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While the future of whether and how to globally govern climate change has been left in limbo in the aftermath of the December 2009 and 2010 conferences of national governments in Copenhagen and Cancun, the overarching challenge remains whether a transition to low-carbon economies - and principally a massive decline in all greenhouse gases - is possible. This article makes a range of contributions. First, by building on existing studies regarding the link between democracy and environmental performance, it clarifies the long-term impact in the context of per capita carbon emissions. Second, it demonstrates that democracy as well as political capacity each have political effects on carbon emissions, and that the configuration of these two factors differs across various levels of per capita income. Most interesting are the different patterns of interactive effects of different levels of wealth via both democracy and state capacity on carbon emissions. Third, we employ a time series of nearly half a century of observations for more than 100 countries, thereby overcoming a range of shortcomings associated with cross-sectional analyses and much shorter time-series analyses of only the last one to two decades. And fourth, by employing an error correction model, we innovate methodologically by focusing on the short-and long-term effects of our variables of interest on the long-term carbon trajectory. Our focus throughout the article is on the long-term effects of political variables. In combination, we offer a political extension of the proposition of an environmental Kuznets curve for the case of carbon emissions and test it empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do political variables influence long-term environmental emissions? The discussion about the Environmental Kuznets Curve hitherto concentrated primarily on economic factors. By contrast, we outline both conceptually and empirically how political factors can affect long-term carbon trajectories. Our findings for carbon emissions suggest that political factors are an important explanatory variable for pollution trajectories in over 100 countries during the period 1972-2004. Our core political variablesâ??political capacity, political constraint, as well as political and civil libertiesâ??show substantial effects in OECD countries, whereas the carbon emission trajectories of non-OECD countries are only influenced by political capacity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the theory of two-level games, negotiators will tailor the agreement at level I so as to be ratifiable at level II in all major countries. This did not happen in the Kyoto negotiations as far as the United States is concerned. We interviewed 27 German, Norwegian, and U.S. participants in and observers to the climate change negotiations regarding their views on three explanations of why the United States did not become a party to the Kyoto Protocol. Explanation 1 argues that delegations in Kyoto mistakenly thought the U.S. Senate was bluffing when adopting the Byrd-Hagel resolution. Explanation 2 contends that the Europeans preferred a more ambitious agreement without the United States to a less ambitious agreement with the United States included. Finally, explanation 3 suggests that in Kyoto the Clinton-Gore administration had already given up on achieving ratification by the Senate, and essentially pushed for an agreement that would provide them with a climate-friendly face. All three explanations received at least some support from people we interviewed. However, explanations 1 and 3 received more support than explanation 2. Moreover, while explanation 1 received most support in Germany and Norway, explanation 3 received most support in the United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the history of transatlantic climate policy and relations. The U.S. is the major emitter of greenhouse gases that are having an impact on the climate system as well as a potential leader in developing technologies to deal with the causes and effects of climate change. Among the potential consequences of such climatic changes are increase in malaria and dengue infections. An overview of the U.S. and European policy on climate change is also provided.

International regime research has pioneered a measurement concept to answer the question whether international institutions matter. Yet this approach is merely concerned with international institutions and not with performance at large. It could well be the case that international institutions are effective, but miss the overall point of making much of a contribution as compared to domestic and European actors in a particular policy domain. This paper builds on the original measurement concept for (relative) regime effectiveness and extends it to the triad regulatory domains of domestic, European, and international. By using absolute lower and upper bounds, this concept of absolute effectiveness allows for the separation of performance across the triad of national, European, and international actors and the derivation of potential cross-actor interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International regimes rarely operate completely independent of each other in world politics. To capture the effect of multiple regimes, we further develop the ?Oslo Potsdam solution? to measuring regime effectiveness. In particular, we develop a methodology on how to separate and aggregate the effects in a particular policy domain, incl. institutional interaction. To demonstrate the empirical feasibility of our methodology, we show how time-series cross-sectional analysis of the regulation of sulfur emissions under the auspices of the UNECE Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution can help us in the computation of the refined effectiveness scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is an extremely important and challenging long-term policy problem, which consists of two main challenges. The first is to determine ? under considerable uncertainty ? a plan for the optimal allocation of resources over time to mitigation of climate change, acknowledging that adaptation will to some extent be an alternative option. The second is to implement and stick to this optimal plan over time once it has been determined. This paper argues that the latter challenge might be divided in (at least) three analytically distinct, yet tightly interrelated commitment problems. First, even for an individual it might be tempting at any given point in time to devote fewer resources to mitigation of climate change than it considers optimal for the long term (the time consistency problem). Second, for a government it might be tempting to allocate a sub-optimal amount of resources on mitigation of climate change whenever this would increase its chances of re-election (the domestic politics problem). Finally, the logic of international negotiations makes it difficult to design and enforce an international agreement that corresponds with the optimal long-term plan (the anarchy problem). This paper discusses these commitment problems in some detail, considers how they relate to each other, and explores institutional designs to limit their significance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]