At the recent UN Climate Change Conferences in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban, the developed nations promised hundreds of billions of dollars in financial aid to help developing countries overcome global climate change dangers. The developed nations will need to spend many more billions to limit their own greenhouse gas pollution, the main cause of global warming and climate change. Will all this money and effort be wasted? This book argues that nearly all of the world's climate policy makers and expert advisors have been making tragic mistakes that ensure the failures of climate change mitigation attempts.The great majority of climate change programs, from American congressional bills to cap-and-trade economic incentive schemes to the Kyoto Protocol and other international treaties, rely on greenhouse gas emissions-reduction targets that will prove "too little, too late" by deferring strict pollution controls too far into the future. The inadequate emissions-reduction measures also will not be able to bridge the gap between the highest priorities of developed and developing nations. Vast discharges of greenhouse gases authorized by weak emissions-reduction programs in the next several decades virtually guarantee that the cumulative concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will keep increasing while climate change continues to grow worse.Rather than adopting ineffectual emissions-reduction programs that cannot limit the cumulative concentration of greenhouse gases in the air, this book proposes a shift to a "clean" technology-replacement strategy that could support current lifestyles and expanding economic development without further damaging our climate. The only way to reduce the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere enough to decrease climate change hazards is to replace large pollution sources as rapidly as feasible in as many industrial sectors and geographic regions as possible with "clean" alternative technologies, processes, and methods.

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter I Introduction: Challenging the Consensus 1

Chapter II “Reducing the Increases” in the Atmospheric GHG Concentration 19

Persistent GHG Discharges 29

Natural and Human-Made “Sinks” 37

Reducing the Growth Rate of GHGs in the Atmosphere 40

The Two Degrees Celsius Non-Solution 46

Chapter III Economic Incentive Programs 55

Cap-and-Trade Systems 56

Carbon Offset Programs 75

Voluntary Offset Programs 77

Offsets as Part of National Emissions-Reduction Programs 80

International Offsets and the Clean Development Mechanism 85

Carbon Taxes, Fees, or Charges 91

Chapter IV The Stalemate in International Negotiations 109

Arguments Supporting the South’s Positions 117

Arguments Supporting the North’s Positions 122

The Durban Platform for Enhanced Action 130

Identifying a Potential Solution 138

Chapter V Overlapping Institutional Responsibilities 151

Adopting Initial or Interim Mitigation Measures 153

The Clean Technology Commission and Development Fund 162

A Progressively Increasing Carbon Tax 170

“Technology-Based” Regulations in High-Pollution Sectors 177

Mandatory GHG-Pollution Disclosure Programs 186

Chapter VI Conclusion 191

Endnotes 201

Index 255

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