ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the international political projects – or “regimes,” as they are often called – constructed to encourage national reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In an address delivered on September 30, 1847 to the Agricultural Society of Rutland County, then US Congressman George Perkins Marsh warned that “though man at his pleasure command the rain and the sunshine, the wind and frost and snow, yet it is certain that climate itself has in many instances been gradually changed and ameliorated or the deteriorated by human action”. Markets may be a subsidiary element of such a political strategy, but the institutional concomitants come first. In the face of the failure to develop an effective international climate regime, and in-line with neo-liberal governance in a global political economy, carbon markets have become “the core of the global response to climate change”.
