Book Talk: Making Climate Policy Work by Danny Cullenward and David Victor

The Center on Global Energy Policy hosted Dr. Danny Cullenward, Policy Director at CarbonPlan and lecturer at Stanford Law School, and Dr. David G. Victor, Professor of International Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego and co-lead of the initiative on energy and climate at the Brookings Institution, for a discussion of their new book, Making Climate Policy Work. Following their presentation, they were joined by Dr. Jessica Green, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and Dr. Noah Kaufman, CGEP Research Scholar, for a conversation moderated by Jason Bordoff, CGEP Founding Director.

From the publisher:

“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.”

[williamconnacher]

I'm trying to learn more about policy and how it can help / is failing at solving the climate crisis. This video is a great 'jumping in the deep end' sort of introduction. Thanks all for holding this event and publishing the video on youtube. However, as a physical scientist (fluids and acoustics), I wish there was more hard data in talks like this. The ideas expressed are reasonable and maybe even insightful, but I'd like more analysis to compare theory with data. I realize some of this is in the academic publications rather than these seminars. But at similarly seminars in my field I see more plots and figures with my detail.