Getting The Carbon Price Right

Introduction

The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will expire in 2012. Governments around the world are gearing up to meet in Copenhagen this December and negotiate a political agreement about what to do after 2012. Originally, the conference was envisioned as the birth place of a new successor treaty to stem global greenhouse gas emissions. However, this has now been ruled out and Copenhagen has acquired the more modest aim of providing a stepping stone to such a successor treaty. Progress has been slow, not least because the US administration, a key participant in any negotiations leading to a post-Kyoto regime (and the only developed country not to have ratified Kyoto), is hobbled by domestic divisions on the issue of how to tackle climate change.