The Politics of Climate Policy

Although the science of climate change is well-established and there are well-known policy instruments that could significantly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without prohibitive economic costs, political obstacles to more determined action remain despite heightened concern among mainstream politicians and the public. This book analyses the nature of climate policy politics in affluent democracies from a number of different theoretical angles in order to improve our understanding of which political strategies would be likely to enable national governments to make deep cuts in emissions while avoiding significant political damage. Different conceptual and logical schemas highlight different features of political situations, so describing the politics of climate policy in terms of different theories will result in different conceptual and logical pictures of this phenomenon. This in turn implies that at least to some extent the inferences drawn from these different pictures about the nature of the political obstacles to more vigorous action on climate change, and the best ways of overcoming them, will also be different. These analyses should reveal a more detailed and nuanced view of the political options open to activist governments.This book was previously published as a special issue of Environmental PoliticsCompston, Hugh is the author of 'The Politics of Climate Policy' with ISBN 9780415458702 and ISBN 0415458706.