ABSTRACT
Carbon emissions will not be reduced by international agreement, government declarations or even commitments unless there are clear economic incentives for abatement, or alternatively credible legal penalties for failure to comply with appropriate regulation. As we saw in Chapter 7, all these have been conspicuous by their absence in the Kyoto Protocol. Rising prices for fossil fuels for the decade up to mid 2008 provided an incentive in the right direction, but, together with related food price inflation from 2006, also caused hardship for poor people everywhere, and a massive transfer of income to the oilproducing states. Their growing wealth increased the power of authoritarian rulers in countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. This has changed dramatically with the global recession of 2008 and collapsing commodity prices, though economic recovery will doubtless renew the upward trend. However, market prices of fossil fuels have not been persistently high enough (yet) to generate the really large-scale investment in alternative energy that is needed to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change.
