Policy Pathways for Reducing CO2 Emissions: in Pursuit of Efficacy, Efficiency and Fairness

Global climate change is now widely regarded as an impending reality, with costs incident disproportionately upon the world’s poor. So what to do?  This “open class” provides an overview of the main approaches to curtailing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — from moral suasion to technological requirements to market-based instruments —  and explores their merits in terms of efficacy, cost-effectiveness (or “efficiency”), and their “fairness” in terms of who will bear the costs of GHG reductions.  Costs and fairness of potential regulations have implications for political buy-in to these policies, and for the rate at which we can hope to reduce emissions.