What is Climate Change Policy Now Trying to Achieve?
Almost all advocates of international climate change policy hope and expect that the Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris in November–December 2015 will reach an agreement to reduce global anthropomorphic greenhouse gas emissions. Yet more than 25 years of international climate change policy has failed to reach such an agreement; emissions, far from having been reduced, have greatly increased. In the author's view, no such agreement will be reached in Paris. Anticipating this, Lord Stern, a highly influential figure in international climate change policy, has restated the case for continuing with this policy while relinquishing the objective of reaching such an agreement, though it had previously been claimed that this was essential to ‘save the world’. Advocating the continuation of climate change policy while disavowing a formerly acknowledged condition of its success seems to represent a further stage in the abandonment of rationality in climate change policy formulation.
After Doha: What Has Climate Change Policy Accomplished?
At the end of the Doha Climate Change Conference and of the first commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, it is incontrovertible that 20 years of international climate change policy has failed to secure a reduction in global emissions. Bringing up to date an argument first made in 2007, this note explains this failure as a result of the legal position established by those negotiations. Contrary to general belief, it is not the case that no legally binding agreement over emissions has been established. One has been established, but it has been to grant to the major industrialising countries a permission to emit as much as they wish. The emissions of these countries have never been capped, and the operation of the Clean Development Mechanism, which, by the nature of its design, logically cannot prevent a growth of emissions, has been a failure. The increase of major industrialising countries’ emissions has made the policy of mitigating growth of global emissions impossible from the start and makes it impossible now.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1