Climate Change and Carbon Markets: Late or Too Late?

The book is designed to appeal to a range of readers, from academics, teachers and students concerned with climate change studies, to professionals as an overview of, and reference to, carbon markets, to policy-makers as a comprehensive introduction to climate and carbon reduction policy issues, to general readers who wish to understand the fundamentals of the science and the markets, and to journalists and the media who are looking for a reliable source of references and understanding. Each chapter has extensive endnotes. It is deliberately designed therefore to be a bridge between the specialists and the public, written in an accessible style despite the demanding nature of the issues which are today of the utmost importance and urgency. A book that makes demands on its readers, through extensive referencing and through argument, but offers rewards. A book that ‘looks under the hood’. Ultimately, it is an appeal to rational thinking, and to the inevitability of trade-offs if the Paris Agreements are to be fulfilled. If there is an underlying thesis it is: to have any chance of meeting the Paris Agreement timescale, carbon reduction (net negative) is absolutely essential in Scopes 1,2,3, supported by direct carbon capture where the technologies can be developed., and by carbon taxes and subsidies to fossil fuels redirected towards renewables and their end uses, such as solar panels, are likely the way to accelerate/motivate that process. As most Green Houses Gases (GHGs) emanate from the Global South as EMDEs (Emerging Market and Developing Economies) aim to industrialize, the focus of carbon abatement should lie there. An International Green Bank is proposed with exclusive focus upon EMDEs. Carbon trading is an ameliorative, helpful more in terms of raising enterprise awareness than in making more than a marginal impact and indeed the logic of its advocates is that credits are merely a stop-gap. That’s a commercial reality. Nature-based projects to support biodiversity and carbon sinks, can likely only play a marginal role as far as the Paris Agreement timescale is concerned, but longer term (post-2100) there are central to life on Earth.