Can carbon markets work? Book launch and discussion.
For decades the world’s governments have struggled to move from talk to action on climate. The most widely promoted strategy to address the climate crisis — the use of market-based programs to reduce climate pollution — hasn’t been working and isn’t ready to scale.

In a bold new book, Making Climate Policy Work, climate policy experts Danny Cullenward and David Victor show how the politics of creating and maintaining market-based policies render them ineffective nearly everywhere they have been applied. Reforms can help around the margins, but markets’ problems are structural and won’t disappear with increasingdemand for climate solutions. Facing that reality requires relying more heavily on smart regulation and industrial policy — government-led strategies — to catalyze the transformation that markets promise, but rarely deliver.

This online book launch will interrogate the track record of market-based climate policies to date and examine their role moving forward.

“I have spent my career trying to answer the question posed by Cullenward and Victor—how to make climate policy work. This book provides a compelling answer: the deep decarbonization the world needs will only beachieved when governments commit to a vision of transformation that all actors can work towards.”
Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation (ECF), Founder of IDDRI

Danny Cullenward is an energy economist and lawyer working on the design and implementation of scientifically grounded climate policy. He is the Policy Director at CarbonPlan and the California Senate’s appointee on the Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee, which is charged with reviewing California’s cap-and-trade program. Danny serves on the Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative (BERC) advisory board and previously taught climate policy at UC Berkeley. In addition to his public interest administrative law practice, he has represented environmental scientists as amici in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court. Danny holds a JD from Stanford Law School and a PhD in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) from Stanford University, where he earned his MS in Management Science & Engineering and a BS with Honors in Earth Systems.

David Victor is a professor of industrial organization and innovation at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. He is a director of the campus-wide Deep Decarbonization Initiative, which focuses on real world strategies for bringing the world to nearly zero emissions of warming gases. Victor is also an adjunct professor in Climate, Atmospheric Science & Physical Oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a professor (by courtesy) in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Prior to joining the faculty at UC San Diego, Victor was a professor at Stanford Law School where he taught energy and environmental law. He is also co-Chair of The Brookings Institution’s Initiative on Energy and Climate. His Ph.D. is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and A.B. from Harvard University.

Suganda Srivastav is a DPhil candidate in Environmental Economics at the University of Oxford supervised by Prof Cameron Hepburn.
Her research focuses on the drivers of the low-carbon energy transition, using applied econometrics, public finance and environmental economics to answer questions around steering innovation towards the social good.
Suganda previously worked as an environmental economist at Vivid Economics in London, and prior to that, as a trade economist at ICRIER in New Delhi. She has worked with governments, international organisations and private firms to advise on various aspects of climate policy.
Date: 27 October 2020, 17:00 (Tuesday, 3rd week, Michaelmas 2020)
Venue: Online
Speakers: Dr Thomas Hale (Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford), David Victor, Danny Cullenward, Sugandha Srivastav (Complexity/Sustainability Programmes, INET Oxford), Prof Cameron Hepburn (Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment)
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/can-carbon-markets-work
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editors: Chris White, Anna Baginska, Donna Palfreman