Editors' introduction: The economics of technologies to combat global warming

摘要

As we write this at the beginning of 2011, global warming continues on its upward trend, while policies to slow warming have largely failed. The meetings at Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancun in 2010 proved unable to produce a binding international agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol in the period beyond 2012, when the original commitment period ends. Although countries have agreed to the aspirational target of limiting warming to 2 °C above preindustrial levels (United Nations, 2009), the facts on the ground indicate that CO_2 emissions continue to grow rapidly. At the current pace, the world is likely to hit the 2 °C target by 2050 (Clarke et al., 2009a,b; Nordhaus, 2010).