The Carbon Charter

As mayors and city councilors seek solutions to climate change, existing policies and legislation can stand in the way of effective change. The Carbon Charter is the first book to describe the municipal bylaws required to abate climate change and create sustainable communities. It provides city councilors with a cut-and-paste set of green bylaws and policies of best practices culled from environmentally advanced communities around the world. They can be taken straight out of the book, placed into a council agenda with minimum modification, and voted on. The Carbon Charter provides city councilors with the ammunition they need to implement and accelerate sustainability initiatives quickly. The book describes bylaws that are applicable throughout the world, with the emphasis on examples that are beneficial to temperate climates such as the U.S. and Canada. It also proposes innovative new bylaws that are found nowhere else. This highly accessible, comprehensive handbook includes: Sample bylaws, case studies and background material and references Numbered QuickLinks that allow readers access to full bylaw texts and links Special icons that pinpoint target audiences, with bylaws relevant to each audience. This book will appeal to city councilors and mayors, municipal planners, architects, and engineers world-wide.

Climate change and declining fossil fuel reserves make the current energy economy unsustainable. Developing nations aspire to the modern energy economy, yet over half the world's population still lacks access to energy. This volume explores how the law can impede or advance the shift to a significantly different world energy picture.

The present energy economy, with its heavy dependence on fossil fuels, is not sustainable over the medium to long term for many interconnected reasons. Climate change is now recognized as posing a serious threat. Energy and resource decisions involving the carbon fuels therefore play a large role in this threat. Fossil fuel reserves may also be running short and many of the major reserves are in politically unstable parts of the world. Yet citizens in nations with rapidly developing economies aspire to the benefits of the modern energy economy. China and India alone have 2.4 billion potential customers for cars, industries, and electrical services. Even so, more than half of the world's citizens still lack access to energy. Decisions involving fossil fuels are therefore a significant part of the development equation. This volume explains how the law can impede or advance the shift to a world energy picture significantly different from that which exists today. It first examines the factors that create the problems of the present carbon economy, including environmental concerns and development goals. It then provides international and regional legal perspectives, examining public international law, regional legal structures, the responses of international legal bodies, and the role of major international nongovernmental actors. The book then moves on to explore sectoral perspectives including the variety of renewable energy sources, new carbon fuels, nuclear power, demand controls, and energy efficiency. Finally, the authors examine how particular States are, could, or should, be adapting legally to the challenges of moving beyond the carbon economy.

Carbon is chemically versatile and is thus the body and soul of biological, geological, ecological and economic systems. Its appropriation by humans through diversion of its biogeochemical cycle has been a mainstay of development. This domestication is characterized by a number of thresholds: control of fire, development of agriculture, expansion of Europe, fossil-fuel use and biotechnology. All have exacted an environmental toll, not least being climatic change and biodiversity loss. Carbon management now and in the future is a ‘hot’ political issue. There is no existing book which focuses on the pivotal role of carbon in the environment and society and the ways in which carbon has been domesticated in time and space to generate wealth and political advantage. Students of environmental science, geography, biology and general science will find this work invaluable as a cross-disciplinary text.