ABSTRACT
Late industrial societies have set themselves various environmental targets for achieving ‘sustainable development’. In this chapter I will not discuss whether this exercise is a genuine one or not. Nor will I examine the targets themselves. The Second Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group Three, 1995) suggests that obligations under current international agreements are extremely modest, if the objective is to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations within the next half century. Finally, I am not proposing to undertake a review of the meaning of ‘sustainable development’, for which there is a voluminous literature that seems to grow in inverse proportion to its achievement.
