Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
At the international scale, 172 countries have ratifi ed the Kyoto Protocol that
commits industrialised nations to reducing their GHG emissions by an average of
7 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012. Few nations, however, are on target
to meet this goal. Emissions also continue growing in the USA, which along with
Australia has rejected the protocol, and in developing countries, which are not yet
required to reduce emissions. While having little impact on emissions levels, the
Kyoto process is a grand experiment in new institutional arrangements for pursuing
international environmental and economic sustainability. The Protocol relies heavily
on market-based 'new environmental policy instruments' (Bailey and Rupp, 2005),
most notably emissions 'cap and trade' provisions that allocate tradable GHG emis-
sion permits so that those who are able to reduce emissions at relatively low costs
might sell permits to high-cost emitters, thus reducing the total cost of compliance
but introducing complex institutional and ethical considerations (Solomon and Lee
2000). The European Union Emission Trading Scheme and the UN Clean Develop-
ment Mechanism are presently the two largest institutions facilitating the trading
of emissions and emissions credits, and serious questions have been raised as to the
effectiveness and transparency of each. Supporters argue problems to date are
growing pains to be expected in the complex process of creating a functional GHG
market, while others argue the concept of 'pollution trading' is fl awed and inher-
ently subject to political manipulation by industry (Davies, 2007). Despite the Kyoto
Protocol's strong geographic and social justice implications, it has not been a direct
subject of much geographic research.
In the USA, federal intransigence drove environmental activists to focus increas-
ingly on states and localities as potential sites of policy innovation, particularly in
the electricity sector that accounts for 40 percent of all US GHG emissions. This
effort got caught up in the wave of neoliberal electrical sector privatisation and
deregulation that reached America's shores in California following a decade of
decidedly mixed results elsewhere (Bacon, 1995). Restructuring overthrew the model
of state-regulated territorial utility monopolies that had guided electrical power
infrastructure development for a century and replaced it with one based on competi-
tion and 'consumer choice' in buying electricity from newly deregulated independent
power producers. The California model was a short-lived failure that cost the state
and consumers billions of dollars due to a confl uence of poor market design, fraud,
transmission bottlenecks, constrained hydropower supplies, elevated natural gas
price and rising electricity demand (see Solomon and Heiman, 2001). Nevertheless
the political horse-trading that accompanied power sector restructuring in some two
dozen states also ushered in new, more progressive climate-related energy policies,
many based paradoxically on new institutions of state intervention. California, for
example, recently embraced Kyoto-like mandatory emissions reduction targets, and
a number of states support renewable energy and conservation through regulation
and fi nancial incentives. While there has been a strong process of policy diffusion
and regionalisation embedded in state policy strategies in the USA (Peterson and
Rose 2006) and elsewhere (Kent and Mercer, 2006), translating state 'leadership'
into serious national progress remains enormously challenging (Heiman and
Solomon, 2004; Heiman, 2006). With sustainable energy progress increasingly
defi ned in terms of carbon and GHG trends, geographers have analysed the relation-
ship of state emissions trends to demographic, economic and policy concerns
(Rose et al., 2005). Although typically seen as a straightforward empirical exercise,
Demeritt (2001) has deconstructed 'greenhouse gas' as a metric of climate change
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