Climate Change Governance after Bali

It is a long and winding road from Bali to a meaningful climate change regime. The “Bali Roadmap” is singularly indistinct in its details. Because the stakes are extremely high, we are unlikely to see any diplomatic breakthroughs in the negotiations until the very last minute. Consequently, I argue in this piece that the next year or so can be fruitfully used to help build the political support for achieving a genuine breakthrough at that fateful point. Relying on multilateral diplomacy, based on the general model which has been successfully pursued to create international regimes in other substantive domains of global environmental politics, is not likely to be effective for climate change in the short to medium term. I offer some suggestions to improve the prospects for multilateralism through an effort to fortify the foundations for meaningful multilateral diplomacy while we still have time. The issue of climate change now seems armly planted on the international agenda. Yet the political will for meaningful action is not yet apparent. The facts of the matter are now fairly clear. Scientiac consensus is expressed in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group (WG) I report, which calls anthropogenic climate change “unequivocal.”1 Between the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the Stern Review, and now the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC, it is widely agreed that severe consequences will occur if global concentrations of carbon are allowed to exceed 450–550 ppm by 2050. Keeping emissions below this level will entail 50–85 percent reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 from current levels.2 A standard list of policy responses was also endorsed by the IPCC WG III, many of which hearken back to 1970s efaciency framing of the energy policy