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Deep decarbonization of the global energy system will require large investments in energy innovation and the deployment of new technologies. While many studies have focused on the expenditure that will be needed, here we focus on how government has spent public sector resources on innovation for a key carbon-free technology: advanced nuclear. We focus on nuclear power because it has been contributing almost 20% of total US electric generation, and because the US program in this area has historically been the world's leading effort. Using extensive data acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, we reconstruct the budget history of the Department of Energy's program to develop advanced, non-light water nuclear reactors. Our analysis shows that—despite spending $2 billion since the late 1990s—no advanced design is ready for deployment. Even if the program had been well designed, it still would have been insufficient to demonstrate even one non-light water technology. It has violated much of the wisdom about the effective execution of innovative programs: annual funding varies fourfold, priorities are ephemeral, incumbent technologies and fuels are prized over innovation, and infrastructure spending consumes half the budget. Absent substantial changes, the possibility of US-designed advanced reactors playing a role in decarbonization by mid-century is low.

China is the world's top carbon emitter and suffers from severe air pollution. It has recently made commitments to improve air quality and to peak its CO2 emissions by 2030. We examine one strategy that can potentially address both issues—utilizing long-distance electricity transmission to bring renewable power to the polluted eastern provinces. Based on an integrated assessment using state-of-the-science atmospheric modeling and recent epidemiological evidence, we find that transmitting a hybrid of renewable (60%) and coal power (40%) (Hybrid-by-wire) reduces 16% more national air-pollution-associated deaths and decreases three times more carbon emissions than transmitting only coal-based electricity. Moreover, although we find that transmitting coal power (Coal-by-Wire, CbW) is slightly more effective at reducing air pollution impacts than replacing old coal power plants with newer cleaner ones in the east (Coal-by-Rail, CbR) (CbW achieves a 6% greater reduction in national total air-pollution-related mortalities than CbR), both coal scenarios have approximately the same carbon emissions. We thus demonstrate that coordinating transmission planning with renewable energy deployment is critical to maximize both local air quality benefits and global climate benefits.

Average global temperature is not a good indicator of planetary health. Track a range of vital signs instead, urge David G. Victor and Charles F. Kennel.

POLITICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON INTERNATIONAL LAW: THE STATE OF THE FIELD By Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, David G. Victor, and Yonatan Lupu* The discipline of political science has developed an active research program on the devel- opment, operation, spread, and impact of international legal norms, agreements, and institu- tions. Meanwhile, a growing number of public international lawyers have developed an interest in political science research and methods. 1 For more than two decades, scholars have been call- ing for international lawyers and political scientists to collaborate, and have suggested possible * Emilie M. Hafner-Burton and David G. Victor are Co-directors of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation and Professors at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego. Yonatan Lupu is a lawyer and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at UCSD. We thank participants in the “mapping the field” project at the laboratory for detailed research on what political science has learned in various issue areas—including Karl Kruse, Mihaela Papa, Michael Plouffe, and Hallie Stohler. For com- ments on earlier drafts, we thank participants at the UCLA Law School faculty seminar and participants at a review meeting on December 10, 2010, at UCSD—including Kenneth Abbott, Tim Bu¨the, Peter Cowhey, Peter Goure- vitch, Stephan Haggard, Miles Kahler, Robert Keohane, Daniel Klerman, Barbara Koremenos, David Lake, Kat- erina Linos, Edward Mansfield, Lisa Martin, Helen Milner, Jon Pevehouse, Eric Posner, Tonya Putnam, Duncan Snidal, Alan Sykes, and Michael Tomz. Thanks also to Nicole Deitelhoff, Martha Finnemore, and Ann Towns for comments on our second draft, to Linda Wong for editorial assistance, and to Greg Shaffer and Tom Ginsburg for sharing an early draft of their related article, which appears in this same issue of the Journal. Some of these legal works that draw, in part, on political science methods and concepts look across many sub- stantive areas of law and focus on topics such as the role of law in managing economic relations, the effectiveness of law, legitimacy, and game-theoretic perspectives. See, e.g., Jeffrey L. Dunoff & Joel P. Trachtman, Economic Anal- ysis of International Law, 24 Y ALE J. I NT ’ L L. 1, 3 (1999); J ACK L. G OLDSMITH & E RIC A. P OSNER , T HE L IMITS OF I NTERNATIONAL L AW (2005); Jack Goldsmith, Sovereignty, International Relations Theory, and International Law, 52 S TAN . L. R EV . 959 (2000) (book review); Claire R. Kelly, Realist Theory and Real Constraints, 44 V A . J. I NT ’ L L. 545 (2004); Richard A. Falk, The Relevance of Political Context to the Nature and Functioning of Inter- national Law: An Intermediate View, in T HE R ELEVANCE OF I NTERNATIONAL L AW : E SSAYS IN H ONOR OF L EO G ROSS 133 (Karl W. Deutsch & Stanley Hoffmann eds., 1968); J UTTA B RUNN E ´ E & S TEPHEN J. T OOPE , L EGIT - IMACY AND L EGALITY IN I NTERNATIONAL L AW : A N I NTERACTIONAL A CCOUNT (2010); John K. Setear, An Iterative Perspective on Treaties: A Synthesis of International Relations Theory and International Law, 37 H ARV . I NT ’ L L.J. 139 (1996); Jens David Ohlin, Nash Equilibrium and International Law, 96 C ORNELL L. R EV . 869 (2011). Some legal studies, drawing on political science methods and concepts, examine the functioning of legal machinery. See, e.g., John K. Setear, Responses to Breach of a Treaty and Rationalist International Relations Theory: The Rules of Release and Remediation in the Law of Treaties and the Law of State Responsibility, 83 V A . L. R EV . 1 (1997). A large and growing body of legal literature, drawing from political science, focuses on particular issue areas, most notably human rights. See, e.g., Oona A. Hathaway, Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?, 111 Y ALE L.J. 1935 (2002); Laurence R. Helfer, Overlegalizing Human Rights: International Relations Theory and the Commonwealth Caribbean Backlash Against Human Rights Regimes, 102 C OLUM . L. R EV . 1832 (2002). In addition, a large literature addresses the environment. See, e.g., Jutta Brunne´e & Stephen J. Toope, The Chang- ing Nile Basin Regime: Does Law Matter?, 43 H ARV . I NT ’ L L.J. 105 (2002); Eyal Benvenisti, Collective Action in the Utilization of Shared Freshwater: The Challenges of International Water Resources Law, 90 AJIL 384 (1996); Jonathan Baert Wiener, Global Environmental Regulation: Instrument Choice in Legal Context, 108 Y ALE L.J. 677 (1999). Trade law is one among various other areas drawing on political science scholarship. See, e.g., G. Richard Shell, Trade Legalism and International Relations Theory: An Analysis of the World Trade Organization, 44 D UKE L.J. This article is reproduced with permission from the January 2012 issue of the American Journal of International Law © 2012 American Society of International Law. All rights reserved

Why do some decision makers prefer big multilateral agreements while others prefer cooperation in small clubs? Does enforcement encourage or deter institutional cooperation? We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—along with a substantive survey focused on international trade—to illustrate how two behavioral traits (patience and strategic reasoning) of individuals who play key roles in negotiating and ratifying an international treaty shape their preferences for how treaties are designed and whether they are ratified. Patient subjects were more likely to prefer treaties with larger numbers of countries (and larger long-term benefits), as were subjects with the skill to anticipate how others will respond over multiple iterations of strategic games. The presence of an enforcement mechanism increased subjects' willingness to ratify treaties; however, strategic reasoning had double the effect of adding enforcement to a trade agreement: more strategic subjects were particularly likely to favor ratifying the agreement. We report these results for a sample of 509 university students and also show how similar patterns are revealed in a unique sample of ninety-two actual US policy elites. Under some conditions certain types of university student convenience samples can be useful for revealing elite-dominated policy preferences—different types of people in the same situation may prefer to approach decision-making tasks and reason through trade-offs in materially different ways.

The emission targets adopted in the Kyoto Protocol1 far exceed thelikely level of emissions from Russia and Ukraine. These countries could selltheir surplus if the Protocol is followedand industrialized countries establish an international emission tradingsystem. Critics have condemned the potentialsale and dubbed the surplus ‘hot air’ because it does not represent anyreduction in emissions below the level thatwould have occurred anyway. Using the most recent, comprehensive regionalscenarios2 for the emissions of carbon dioxide from the energysystem, we estimate that during the Protocol's2008–2012 ‘budget period’ the surplus will range from 9 MtC (milliontons of carbon) to 900 MtC for Russia andfrom 3 MtC to 200 MtC for Ukraine. Even scenarios with high economic growthand carbon-intensive technologies donot exhaust the surplus before the budget period. In the central (‘middlecourse’) scenario, the total carbon surplusexceeds 1000 MtC and is worth 22 to 170 billion U.S. dollars (4 to 34 billionU.S. dollars per year). This flow ofrevenues, which could exceed Russian earnings from natural gas exports($10 billion in 19973), is comparable with the projectedtotal investmentsof the Russian energy system for 2008–2012. If directed towardslow-carbon infrastructure investments (e.g., gaspipelines), surplus transfers could reinforce and partially lock-indecarbonization of the world energy system.

On average a person spends 1.1 h per day traveling and devotes a predictable fraction of income to travel. We show that these time and money budgets are stable over space and time and can be used for projecting future levels of mobility and transport mode. The fixed travel money budget requires that mobility rises nearly in proportion with income. Covering greater distances within the same fixed travel time budget requires that travelers shift to faster modes of transport. The choice of future transport modes is also constrained by path dependence because transport infrastructures change only slowly. In addition, demand for low-speed public transport is partially determined by urban population densities and land-use characteristics. We present a model that incorporates these constraints, which we use for projecting traffic volume and the share of the major motorized modes of transport—automobiles, buses, trains and high speed transport (mainly aircraft)—for 11 regions and the world through 2050. We project that by 2050 the average world citizen will travel as many kilometers as the average West European in 1990. The average American's mobility will rise by a factor of 2.6 by 2050, to 58,000 km/year. The average Indian travels 6000 km/year by 2050, comparable with West European levels in the early 1970s. Today, world citizens move 23 billion km in total; by 2050 that figure grows to 105 billion.

▪ Abstract Technology largely determines economic development and its impact on the environment; yet technological change is one of the least developed parts of existing global change models. This paper reviews two approaches developed at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, both of which use the concept of technological learning and aid modeling of technological change. The first approach is a micromodel (“bottom-up”) of three electricity generation technologies that rigorously endogenizes technological change by incorporating both uncertainty (stochasticity) and learning into the model's decision rules. This model, with its endogenous technological change, allows radical innovations to penetrate the energy market and generates S-shaped patterns of technological diffusion that are observed in the real world. The second approach is a macro (“top-down”) model that consists of coupled economic- and technological-system models. Although more stylistic in its representation of endogenous technological change, the macro model can be applied on a worldwide scale and can generate long-term scenarios that are critical for policy analysis. Both the micro- and macro models generate radical departures from currently dominant technological systems (“surprises”), including long-term scenarios with low carbon and sulfur emissions. Our focus is modeling, but for policy, the work underscores the need for huge investments before environmentally superior technologies can compete in the market.

Humans spend, on average, a constant fraction of their time and expenditure on travel. These and a few other constraints allow a new model for projecting regional and world travel, which we use to develop a scenario for carbon emissions from passenger transport. Globally, carbon emissions rise from 0.8 GtC in 1990 to 2.7 GtC in 2050. In every industrialized region aircraft and high-speed trains become the dominant mode; unable to satisfy the rising demand for mobility within a fixed travel time budget, automobile travel declines by 2050. Passenger transport carbon emissions stabilize by 2020 without any further policy intervention. But in developing countries automobile travel is still rising and becomes the dominant source of carbon dioxide from passenger transport. Fear of global warming may require stabilization of these emissions by mid-century. We show that without some action to accelerate an improvement in energy efficiency starting in the next decade, the goal of stabilization is a technically impossible task, unless zero-carbon technologies become available.

Introduction and overview, David G. Victor et al. Part 1 Systems for implementation review: long-term trends in systems for implementation review in international agreements on fauna and flora, John Lanchbery the system for implementation review in the ozone regime, Owen Greene the operation and effectiveness of the Montreal protocol's non-compliance procedure, David G. Victor implementation review in the Baltic Sea regime, Owen Greene "learning by doing" in the nonbinding international regime to manage trends in hazardous chemicals and pesticides, David G. Victor data quality and compliance control in the European air pollution regime, Juan Carlos di Primio. Part 2 National implementation: the making and implementation of North Sea commitments -the politics of environmental participation, Jon Birger Skjaerseth participation in NOx policy-making and implementation in the Netherlands, UK and Norway - different aproaches but similar results?, Jorgen Wettestad the making and implementation of whaling policies -does participation make a difference?, Steinar Andresen nuclear dumping in Arctic seas - Russian implementation of the London Convention, Olav Schram Stokke implementation and effectiveness of the acid rain regime in Russia, Vladimir Kotov and Elena Nikitina regime and enterprise -Norilsk Nickel and transboundary air pollution, Vladimir Kotov and Elena Nikitina domestic implementation of Baltic Sea pollution commitments in Russia and the Baltic states, Alexei Roginko implementation of Baltic Sea pollution commitments in Poland - a review of the literature, Ronnie Hjorth conclusions, Kal Raustiala and David G. Victor.

Technological choices largely determine the long-term characteristics of industrial society, including impacts on the natural environment. However, the treatment of technology in existing models that are used to project economic and environmental futures remains highly stylized. Based on work over two decades at IIASA, we present a useful typology for technology analysis and discuss methods that can be used to analyze the impact of technological changes on the global environment, especially global warming. Our focus is energy technologies, the main source of many atmospheric environmental problems. We show that much improved treatment of technology is possible with a combination of historical analysis and new modeling techniques. In the historical record, we identify characteristic &l such network e!ects yield high barriers to entry even for superior competitors. These simple observations allow three improvements to modeling of technological change and its consequences for global environmental change. One is that the replacement of long-lived infrastructures over time has also replaced the fuels that power the economy to yield progressively more energy per unit of carbon pollution } from coal to oil to gas. Such replacement has &d they also include endogenous generation of &s we show that doing so can yield projections with lessened environmental impacts without necessarily incurring negative e!ect on the economy. Arriving on that path by the year 2100 depends on intervening actions, such as incentives to promote greater diversity in technology and lower barriers to entry for new infrastructures that could accelerate historical trends of decarbonization. ( 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), perfluoromethane (CF4) and perfluoroethane (C2F6) are strong greenhouse gases with long (>1000 year) atmospheric residence times. We derive emission factors for the major anthropogenic sources and project future emissions for 5 regions and the world. Although firms in many industrialized countries are already limiting emissions, without further policy intervention global emissions will rise 150% (CF4 and C2F6) and 210% (SF6) between 1990 and 2050; radiative forcing will increase 0.026 W m-2. Full application of available low-cost and costless policies in industrialized nations would cut that radiative forcing by one-quarter. Increased forcing due to these gases is small (

Victor talks about how crunch climate talks can be a success even without a deal to keep warming below 2°C. The Paris pledges already put the world on track for a lot less warming than some feared a few years ago. And governments in richer countries are on track to honor a commitment to free up, by 2020, about $100 billion per year to help the poorest countries. Much of this success comes from the system of individual national pledges. It has given countries flexibility to focus their obligations on areas where they are willing and able to act.

After Paris, policymakers will need new goals for protecting the climate. Science can help with a basket of measures because 'climate change' isn't just about temperature.

How much will people travel in the future? Which modes of transport will they use? Where will traffic be most intense? The answers are critical for planning infrastructures and for assessing the consequences of mobility. They will help societies anticipate environmental problems such as regional acid rain and global warming, which are partially caused by transport emissions. These questions also lie at the center of efforts to estimate the future size of markets for transportation hardware -- aircraft, automobiles, buses and trains. In this research, the authors have tried to answer these questions for 11 geographic regions specifically and more generally for the world. Historical statistics for trains, buses, automobiles and high-speed transport were used to compose a scenario for the future volume of passenger travel, as well as the relative prevalence of different forms of transportation through the year 2050.

Ever since the 1970s, a small number of national oil companies (NOCs) have dominated the world supply of oil and other hydrocarbons. Despite the huge influence that NOCs have on political economy, systematic scholarship remains surprisingly thin. I examine the factors that explain the wide variation in the strategy and performance of NOCs and survey the literature that has suggested the many ways in which NOCs play pivotal political and economic roles in resource-rich countries. As we look to the future, the fate of NOCs hinges on the price of oil, which may be eroded as new supplies (largely outside the control of most NOCs), such as deep water and shale oil, affect global markets.

The case for protecting biodiversity has many dimensions. The direct economic returns - mainly in pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and biotechnology - are numerous, though prone to overstatement.(14) The number and value of drags such as aspirin and taxol (first identified in the wild but now synthesized) are likely to be small.(15) Examples abound of crop-threatening diseases such as wheat rust for which resistant strains were found in the wild, protected in gene banks, and crossbred into domesticated species. More productive and disease-resistant crop species have allowed agricultural production to grow faster than the human population even though the amount of land devoted to agriculture has remained roughly constant.(16) While many biodiversity-rich forests have been harvested for timber, a recent study of the Peruvian rain forest calculated that the net present value of sustainable rubber, fruit, and timber harvests is $6,820 per hectare - more than six times the mill value of clear-cut timber.(17) Sustainable uses that protect biodiversity can clearly be cost-effective, although the value of forests (which is based on location, markets, and products) may vary by a factor of 400.(18)

Central to international cooperation in many issue-areas is enforcement: the act or process of compelling obedience to international agreements by force or persuasion. Whether focused on transaction costs, domestic politics or forces such as structure and culture, most explanations for states’ preferences for institutionalized enforcement mechanisms are anchored in the useful simplifying assumption that decision-makers (and thus bureaucracies and states) have advanced strategic reasoning skills that allow them to anticipate the incentives and actions of other players down long decision trees. That scholarship also usually assumes that decision makers are fairly homogenous in the employment of these skills that affect how they analyze and respond to complex chains of reasoning. Yet there is evidence from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology that people are neither hyper-rational nor homogenous in their strategic reasoning. If policymakers are not in fact all highly (and equally) strategic reasoners, then perhaps the variance in their skills could help explain deviations from international cooperation models and provide new insight into debates over enforcement. We explore how variations in strategic reasoning might affect preferences for cooperation under different enforcement conditions with a series of experiments and surveys on 85 current and former U.S. government officials and U.S. based business strategists working in companies exposed to international policy decisions. Our central finding is that the strategic qualities of the people tasked with actually making international trade cooperation decisions help to explain their preferences for the enforcement design of the agreement. Specifically, as decision makers become more skilled in their ability to reason strategically, they become more indifferent to enforcement when deciding whether or not to join an international trade agreement.

International relations theories have largely ignored the role of individual people who play key roles in treaty design and participation; instead, that scholarship assumes that other factors, such as treaty enforcement, matter most. We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology — along with a substantive survey focused on international trade treaties — to illustrate how two traits (patience and strategic skills) could influence treaty outcomes. More patient and strategic players favor treaties with larger numbers of countries (and thus larger long-term benefits). These behavioral traits had much larger impacts on simulated treaty outcomes than treaty enforcement mechanisms. This study is based on a sample of 509 university students yet provides a baseline for future experimental and survey research on actual policy elites who design and implement treaties; a preliminary sample of 73 policy elites displays the same main patterns described in this paper.

List of figures List of tables Part I. Introduction: 1. Introduction David Hults, Mark Thurber and David Victor Part II. Thematic Studies of National Oil Companies: 2. The political economy of expropriation and privatization in the oil sector Christofer Warshaw 3. Hybrid governance: state management of national oil companies David Hults 4. On the choice of oil company: risk, management, and the frontier of the petroleum industry Pete Nolan and Mark Thurber Part III. National Oil Company Case Studies: 5. Saudi Arabia - Saudi Aramco: a giant amongst giants Paul Stevens 6. Iran - oil, monarchy, revolution, and theocracy: a study on the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) Paasha Mahdavi 7. Mexico - handcuffed: an assessment of Pemex's performance and strategy Ognen Stojanovski 8. Kuwait - Kuwait Petroleum Corporation: an enterprise in grid Paul Stevens 9. China - China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC): a balancing act between enterprise and government Binbin Jiang 10. Venezuela - Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A.: from independence to subservience David Hults 11. United Arab Emirates - awakening giant: strategy and performance of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company David Victor and Varun Rai 12. Brazil - Petrobras: strategy and performance Adilson de Oliveira 13. Algeria - Sonatrach: the political economy of an Algerian state institution John Entelis 14. Norway - Norway's evolving champion: Statoil and the politics of state enterprise Mark Thurber and Benedicte Tangen Istad 15. Russia - Gazprom: the struggle for power Nadejda Victor and Inna Sayfer 16. Nigeria - the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Nigeria's network for oil patronage Mark Thurber, Ify Emelife and Patrick R. P. Heller 17. India - fading star: explaining the evolution of India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC) Varun Rai 18. Malaysia - Petronas: reconciling tensions between company and state Leslie Lopez 19. Angola - Sonangol: dexterous right hand of the state Patrick R. P. Heller Part IV. Conclusions and Implications: 20. Major conclusions and implications for the future of the oil industry David Victor, Mark Thurber and David Hults Part V. Appendices: I. Performance ranking II. Depletion Index.

Introduction Abu Dhabi sits on the world’s fifth-largest oil reserves (after Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait) and is the eighth-largest producer of liquid fuels (after Saudi Arabia, Russia, the US, Iran, China, Mexico, and Canada). Its output, which had been roughly flat at about 2.5 million barrels per day (mbpd) during the 1990s, is now rising. It stood at 2.9 mbpd in 2008 and is poised to grow, perhaps to 4.5 mbpd over the next decade, as the company invests in managing its aging fields better and also in bringing new fields into production. Although its financial indicators are difficult to assess because the company is famously secretive, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) appears to be well managed and efficient. Compared with KPC, the Persian Gulf state oil enterprise with reserves comparable in size, ADNOC is a completely different organization. KPC, despite huge reserves, struggles to maintain production and is strikingly inefficient (see Chapter 8). ADNOC, by contrast, sits alongside Aramco among the star performers in the Persian Gulf. But where Aramco’s performance stems from having internalized all facets of oil discovery and production, ADNOC’s success comes from a blend of internal expertise and heavy reliance on foreign partners. This chapter explores the history of ADNOC and examines the factors that explain its strategic choices and performance. We make four arguments. First, the company’s high performance seems to be the result mainly of two factors. One is the relatively late arrival of Abu Dhabi to the league of large world oil producers. When the waves of nationalization overtook the petrostates in the 1970s, Abu Dhabi had little to nationalize because it was just beginning to organize a large oil industry. The emirate was part of a fragile country (United Arab Emirates) that was just three years old on the eve of the first oil shock in October 1973; Abu Dhabi had little internal capacity and many distractions just assuring its national integrity. Those accidents of history yielded the defining feature of Abu Dhabi’s oil sector: concessions for exploration and production of oil that are operated through a consortium in which the controlling share (usually 60 percent) rests with the state (ADNOC) but minority shares are allocated among several Western oil companies. Unlike its peers in North Africa and the Persian Gulf, Abu Dhabi didn’t fully nationalize its industry because its industry was at a much earlier stage of development; risks were much higher; and the country had little choice but to offer a large role for foreign ownership and operators. The other factor that helps explain ADNOC’s high performance relative to its peer NOCs is that the company has used this unique position to build internal management talent through a clever system of corporate governance. ADNOC puts senior managers from the Western oil companies working alongside local employees and continually elicits information and technology from the Western companies. Whereas other studies in this book describe NOCs that have encouraged information and technology on best world practices by opening the oil sector to competition (e.g., Brazil and India), Abu Dhabi has done this within its oil company. In effect, ADNOC serves the dual roles of regulating the oil sector and also governing one of the world’s largest oil companies. Not surprisingly, it is the emirate’s leading institution for building indigenous talent.

The problem of global warming requires policy efforts in three distinct areas. One is regulating emissions that are building up in the atmosphere and causing changes in the climate. A second is boosting investment in new knowledge – so that future efforts to control emissions are better informed and so that cheaper technologies for controlling emissions are closer at hand and easier to deploy. A third is bracing for the large (possibly catastrophic) changes in climate that may occur. Each of these problems is related, but each requires its own distinct policy strategy. In this part of the book – Chapters 3 to 6 – I look at each of these three policy challenges. This chapter and the next are about the first and most central area for policy: regulating emissions. Experts also call this “mitigation.” The best place to start building a theory to predict how individual countries will mitigate is to look at two main groups of countries. This chapter is about the “enthusiastic countries,” and Chapter 4 is about “reluctant countries.” If a reliable world government existed then it might not be so important to look at these two groups of countries separately. The world government would set policy and then firms and people across the planet would comply. But in the real world, international policy is trickier to craft because it hinges on what every nation, individually, is willing and able to implement.

After two grueling weeks of negotiations, late in 2009 the Copenhagen conference on global warming ended with a whimper. On nearly every major agenda item, including the need for a new treaty to replace the aging Kyoto Protocol, the meeting failed to produce a useful agreement. Diplomats did the easy things, such as making bold proclamations that global warming should be stopped at 2 degrees and promising huge new sums of money to help developing countries control their emissions and adapt to the changing climate. They also invited countries to make pledges for how they would contribute to these planetary goals. In the months since Copenhagen, analysts have shown that those national pledges won't come close to stopping global warming at 2 degrees. Many of the pledges are missing serious plans for how they will be fulfilled. And the new financial promises for developing countries are also slipping away. Even worse, while everyone agrees that more formal global talks are needed, there is little consensus on the best strategy. As global talks have become stuck in gridlock, the picture inside the countries whose policies will matter most in determining the future of global warming isn't any more encouraging. Of the industrialized countries, for many years the members of European Union (EU) and Japan have made the biggest policy efforts.

The reluctant countries are different from the rich, enthusiastic nations examined in Chapter 3 for two reasons. One is to do with interests. Reluctant countries have other priorities than spending their own resources to slow global warming. The other reason is low and variable administrative capacity. These countries are “developing” in part because their administrative systems are weak, fragmented, and often erratic in their functioning. In some sectors of the economy, the government has mercurial control – for example, most energy systems in the largest developing countries are directly owned by governments and staffed with government employees. Yet in other parts of the economy, the government is barely able to monitor behavior and implement policy. In such settings, even with strong inducements it is hard for governments to make credible commitments about policies they will reliably implement at home. Such problems are hardly new in international affairs. Diplomats fix them in two ways. One is by creating incentives that lead reluctant nations to rethink their interests. Those incentives include sticks (e.g., trade sanctions) and carrots (e.g., subsidies for projects that reduce emissions and for administrative capacity-building). I start this chapter by looking at the sticks and carrots that have been deployed so far and showing how they can be made more effective. Sticks are difficult to use because they create many risks. Trade sanctions against countries that don't mitigate emissions can easily touch off broader trade wars that leave people much worse off. Politically, carrots are easier to offer.

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.

In this article the author discusses aspects of climate change and the end of diplomatic communication between developed nations. He notes that developing nations are not to blame for stalled diplomacy as leaders of developed nations suggest, discusses the refusal of developing countries, such as China, to sign an international agreement to control emissions, and outlines what several developing nations are doing to curb greenhouse gas emissions, such as reducing deforestation.