Climate Change and European Leadership: A Sustainable Role for Europe?

Front Cover
Joyeeta Gupta, M.J. Grubb
Springer Science & Business Media, 2000 M07 31 - 346 pages
The issue of climate change is now widely recognised as one of the major challenges for mankind in the 21st century, not only because it may ultimately affect many areas of our environment, nature and human activity but also because its mitigation may have far reaching consequences for almost all sectors of the economy where energy conversion takes place. Although climate change is firmly positioned on the political agenda and some initial targets have been agreed within a global framework, we are still far away from a mature political and practical policy which may deliver timely and appropriate results .to tum the tide. This is partly due to the complex nature of a possible global climate change regime, the still early stage of the development of effective and efficient instruments and the wide variety of possible ramifications for individual countries and economic sectors. But it is also due to the complexity of the negotiation process, and the lack of effective international or even global governance and leadership to tackle a multi-dimensional problem of this size and nature. This book is the first broad attempt to address the issue of leadership by one of the major parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in the ongoing international debate and negotiations towards such a policy which inevitably has to be constructed on a global scale.

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Contents

Leadership
15
The role of the EU in climate negotiations
47
Perceptions of the EUs role
67
The EU in international environmental regimes and the Energy
83
Socioeconomics of policy formation and choices
109
The economics of coalition formation
135
Issue linkages to the sustainability agenda
157
Economic dimensions of the Kyoto Protocol
173
Emission reductions in EU countries
221
Implementing EU Commitments under Kyoto
239
Strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats of the EU
263
Leadership scenarios
275
Implementing European leadership
287
References
313
Target differentiation and the European Bubble
333
Index
341

Competence and subsidiarity
203

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