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Alice Mah's article, "Future-Proofing Capitalism: The Paradox of the Circular Economy for Plastics", is a second cautionary tale on how power dynamics along global value chains can thwart environmental policy agendas. Issue 21-2 of I Global Environmental Politics i is notable for exemplifying the wide variety of research topics addressed by the GEP community, including articles on climate politics, the sustainable development goals (SDGs), plastics and the circular economy, ecosystem services, global shipping, and global resource development. Schultz delves into the electoral politics of climate policy and how partisan electoral competition influences the timing and stringency of climate policy. [Extracted from the article]

This article considers carbon footprints as a form of climate governance. Drawing on science studies to consider the contingent nature of calculative devices and governmentality studies to examine the intrinsic relationship between how problems are framed and remedied, this article advances two arguments. First, it argues that efforts to define and deploy carbon footprints contributed to a conceptual shift in emissions accounting, from a narrower metric focused on emissions from fossil fuel and electricity use--Carbon Footprint 1.0--to a more expansive metric that includes emissions embodied in consumption and trade--Carbon Footprint 2.0. Second, this article argues that these approaches to carbon footprints at the individual level have intersected with broader discussions about allocating emissions responsibilities and examining mitigation strategies at the national and international levels, offering alternative grounds for assigning responsibility for climate-change mitigation and expanding the range of policy options available for addressing emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is the cornerstone of EU climate policy, a grand policy experiment, as the first and largest international emissions trading system in the world. In this article, we seek to provide a broad overview of the initiation, decision-making and implementation of the EU ETS so far. We explore why the EU changed from a laggard to a leader in emissions trading, how it managed to establish the system rapidly, and the consequences to date, leading up to the 2008 proposal for a revised ET Directive for the post- 2012 period. We apply three explanatory approaches, focusing on the roles of the EU member states, the EU institutions and the international climate regime, and conclude that all three approaches are needed to understand what happened, how and why. This also reveals that what happened in the early days of developing the system had significant consequences for the problems experienced in practice and the prospects ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]