This report outlines a comprehensive agenda for decarbonizing the U.S. economy by 2050, with an emphasis on priority actions needed over the coming decade. This agenda was developed in close consultation with leading companies in key sectors through the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions’ (C2ES’s) Climate Innovation 2050 initiative. It builds on an earlier […]
The following was published in Nature magazine on June 14, 2017. (Download PDF) It was perhaps inevitable that Donald Trump would stand on the White House lawn to proclaim that the United States was quitting the Paris Agreement, our best hope ever for tackling climate change. It’s also plausible that the United States will not […]
The following appeared in the September 2016 edition of Climate 2020, A UNA-UK publication providing analysis and recommendations on fulfilling the Paris Agreement on climate change Even before the landmark Paris Agreement has formally become international law, it’s clear that the signals sounded in Paris are reverberating with many of the real-world decision-makers who […]
Fridtjof Nansen Institute Climate Policy Perspectives 13 October 2014 A primary goal of the Durban Platform negotiations should be to develop an agreement that will maximize reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over time. Achieving this objective will be a function of not only the ambition of the 2015 agreement, but also the levels of participation […]
This paper explores options for a hybrid approach in the 2015 agreement, focusing in particular on mitigation efforts, rather than the broader array of issues under consideration in the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform (ADP), such as finance, technology, and adaptation. It looks at the rationales for a hybrid approach, ways to […]
The international community is in the midst of shaping the next stage of the global climate effort—working both within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and through the broader “regime complex” that has grown alongside it. Within the UNFCCC, countries are working toward a new global climate agreement in 2015. This brief […]
In 2011, parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opened a new round of negotiations aimed at delivering a global climate agreement in late 2015 in Paris. The decision launching the Durban Platform talks spelled out some broad parameters: the new agreement is to have “legal force,” be “applicable to all Parties,” […]
Read Elliot Diringer’s article in Nature on the potential path forward for international climate talks. Below is a brief summary. With the failure in recent years of international attempts to deliver a binding treaty on emissions reductions, individual countries are finding their own ways to address the issue. This patchwork approach could work for climate-change […]
This commentary was originally published by Nature A preoccupation with binding commitments blocks progress in the global effort against climate change. It’s time to correct course, says Elliot Diringer. When governments gather for another round of United Nations (UN) climate change negotiations later this month in Durban, South Africa, they face a familiar thicket of […]
The 2009 Copenhagen climate summit may in retrospect prove a critical turning point in the evolution of the international climate change effort. For a decade and a half, the principal aim under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) had been to establish, and then to extend, a legally-binding regime regulating greenhouse gas (GHG) […]
