Environment & Climate Change

"Belfer Center Newsmakers" highlights members of the Belfer Center community who have been featured recently in the news.

While states have agreed to substantial reduction of emissions in the Paris Agreement, the success of the Agreement strongly depends on the cooperation of large Multinational Corporations. Short of legal obligations, the authors discuss the effectiveness and moral legitimacy of voluntary approaches based on naming and shaming. They argue that effectiveness and legitimacy are closely tied together; as voluntary approaches are the only alternative to legally imposed duties, they are most morally defensible particularly if they would be the most effective in reducing the harmful greenhouse gases

"With such radical and scientifically ignorant positions being advocated by the president-elect, many of us—myself included—saw November 8th as the day the sky began to fall. Fortunately, our domestic democratic institutions and the global response to climate change are bigger and more resilient than any one man. While a Trump presidency will certainly be detrimental to progress on climate change, it won’t be as catastrophic as many of us are thinking."

"...[E]ven if the impacts of a Trump slump in U.S. domestic climate action are manageable, the impact on global policy may not be. The concern here is not immediate support for new coal plants or the immediate risk of conflict; it is the way in which a weakening of international institutions might initiate a negative feedback loop played out over many years and decades."

The authors explore, in particular, the implications for CO2 removal and solar geoengineering of the Paris Agreement's long-term temperature goals, provision for "removals by sinks," and market-based mitigation mechanisms.