The Politics Of Carbon Markets

The carbon markets are in the middle of a fundamental crisis - a crisis marked by collapsing prices, fleeing actors, and ever increasing greenhouse gas levels. Yet carbon trading remains at the heart of global attempts to respond to climate change. Not only this, but markets continue to proliferate - particularly in the Global South. The Politics of Carbon Markets helps to make sense of this paradox and brings two urgently needed insights to the analysis of carbon markets. First, the markets must be understood in relation to the politics involved in their development, maintenance and opposition. Second, this politics is multiform and pervasive. Implementation of new techniques and measuring tools, policy development and contestation, and the structuring context of institutional settings and macro-social forces all involve a variety of political actors and create new forms of political agency. The contributions study the total extent of the carbon markets, from their prehistory to their contemporary expansion and wider impacts. This wide-ranging political perspective on the carbon markets is invaluable to those studying and interested in ecological markets, climate change governance and environmental politics.

Explores what went wrong with global carbon markets and what this means for future climate change policy and capitalism.

Upsetting the Offset engages critically with the political economy of carbon markets. It presents a range of case studies and critiques from around the world, showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities. But the book doesn't stop there. It also presents a number of alternatives to carbon markets which enable communities to live in real low-carbon futures.

In this timely book, Sven Rudolph and Elena Aydos take an interdisciplinary approach that combines sustainability economics, political economy, and legal concepts to answer two fundamental questions: How can carbon markets be designed to be effective, efficient and just at the same time? And how can the political barriers to sustainable carbon markets be overcome? The authors advance existing theoretical frameworks and examine empirical data from various real-life emissions trading schemes, identifying strategies and policy windows for implementing truly sustainable ETS.

Meckling explains how a transnational coalition of firms and a few market-oriented environmental groups actively promoted international emissions trading as a compromise policy solution in a situation of political stalemate. The coalition sidelined not only environmental groups that favored taxation and command-and-control regulation but also business interests that rejected any emissions controls. Considering the sources of business influence, Meckling emphasizes the importance of political opportunities (policy crises and norms), coalition resources (funding and legitimacy,) and political strategy (mobilizing state allies and multilevel advocacy).

By carrying out a groundbreaking analysis of their design and diffusion, this book covers all the major carbon market systems in operation: the EU, RGGI, California, Tokyo, New Zealand, Australia, China, South Korea and Kazakhstan.

For decades, the world’s governments have struggled to move from talk to action on climate. Many now hope that growing public concern will lead to greater policy ambition, but the most widely promoted strategy to address the climate crisis – the use of market-based programs – hasn’t been working and isn’t ready to scale. Danny Cullenward and David Victor show how the politics of creating and maintaining market-based policies render them ineffective nearly everywhere they have been applied. Reforms can help around the margins, but markets’ problems are structural and won’t disappear with increasing demand for climate solutions. Facing that reality requires relying more heavily on smart regulation and industrial policy – government-led strategies – to catalyze the transformation that markets promise, but rarely deliver.