Climate Change Mitigation: Ambition, Options, Transparency, and Accountability after Paris

Abstract

The Paris Agreement of the UNFCCC is the first international climate change agreement incorporating agreements to mitigate climate change from all participating parties. This was made possible by the bottom up process allowing countries to formulate their own Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. But the sum of the contributions pledged so far is insufficient to limit warming within the ambitious temperature targets affirmed in Paris. How can parties to the Paris agreement proceed to nonetheless work towards this aim? What policy instruments might be both effective and morally defensible? What moral concerns and unintended side-effects might arise from the proposals for carbon pricing and market mechanisms currently so popular? And what normative concerns arise from relying on carbon storage and other negative emissions technologies? What policy proposals could overcome these worries? Furthermore, what social burdens and economic risks associated with radical mitigation can we impose on what kinds of agents? And are there good reasons to assume that in least some case we ought to compensate agents for the costs associated with mitigation?