Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Pricing, Decarbonization, And Green New Deals, David M. Driesen, Michael A. Mehling

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

This Article evaluates an emerging literature claiming that carbon pricing (emissions trading or carbon taxes) has not performed very well and therefore cannot be the basis for the sort of transformative change now required to address the climate crisis. This is an important claim, as carbon pricing has been viewed as being at the heart of global efforts to address one of our most important contemporary problems.

We provide theoretical and empirical support for these critics’ claim that carbon pricing by itself cannot catalyze the technological transformation now required, and that other approaches have done and will likely do better. …

Incentive Compatible Climate Change Mitigation: Moving Beyond The Pledge And Review Model, Gabriel Weil

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Climate change represents a global commons problem, where individuals, businesses, and nation-states all lack sufficient incentives to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to levels consistent with meeting their collectively agreed upon mitigation goals. The current “pledge and review” paradigm for global climate change mitigation, which many see as a major breakthrough, relies primarily on moral pressure, reputational incentives, and global public opinion to foster cooperation on mitigation efforts over and above those driven by maximization of narrow conceptions of national interests. Given the scale of the emissions reductions required to meet stated mitigation goals, the substantial economic costs of deep …