Search

The paper explains the findings of the MC3 Project (Meeting the Climate Change Challenge). This project brought together over 100 researchers, practitioners, civil-society leaders, and policy-makers, led by researchers from Royal Roads University, Simon Fraser University, and the University of British Columbia, with 12 major research partners from the public and private sectors, including the Union of British Columbia municipalities. Researchers conducted a detailed evaluation of 11 leading, yet different, municipalities across the province to identify the leading innovators and innovations on climate action. The case studies revealed the following key drivers of innovation, in order of prominence: the legislative and policy framework, supported by provincially led incentives and tools, access to partnership funding and intermediary support, and framing the issue as critically important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific evidence suggests that to have a 75 per cent chance of limiting warming in 2100 to 2°C above the pre-industrial level, the cumulative emissions of CO2 over the period 2010-50 should be capped at 657.1 Gt. The objective of this article is to examine the distribution of such an emission budget by applying different ethical perspectives. In particular, the article first analyses the paths for sharing the emission budget, that is, the major families of distributive patterns that vindicate a number of elementary principles and criteria of distribution. Subsequently, it presents and discusses the shares of the emission budget attributed to states, regions and groupings of states according to the paths investigated and it draws some reflections on the implications of such shares for the ethics of mitigation. Finally, it advances some lessons for international climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vast economics literature embraces taxation of the carbon content of fossil fuels as the superior policy approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, experience around the world suggests that carbon taxes face exceedingly difficult political hurdles. Federal experience in the United States and in Canada confirms this pattern. This article reviews sub-federal policy development among American states and Canadian provinces, a great many of which have pursued climate policy development. With one major exception, explicit carbon taxation appears to remain a political nonstarter. At the same time, states and provinces have been placing indirect carbon prices on fossil fuel use through a wide range of policies. These tend to strategically alter labeling, avoiding the terms of 'tax' and 'carbon' in imposing costs. The article offers a framework for considering such strategies and examines common design features, including direct linkage between cost imposition and fund usage to build political support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]