James Malone

Anyone can criticize condemn and complain.... The book dedicates 6 of the 8 main chapters to draw out the historical failures of carbon pricing mechanisms (of which there are admittedly many) and makes the case that carbon markets should be scaled down and abandoned on political grounds. However it fails to propose a compelling alternative (in contrast to the title of the book) on how to make climate policy work! The authors dedicated just a single chapter to articulate an alternative solution which they coin "experimentalist governance" . Under this model, instead of companies paying for their emissions and creating a source of revenue to fund the low carbon transition, governments should focus on playing a much bigger role in creating and supporting industrial policies to accelerate the creation of low-carbon solutions. The benefits of this approach is that it takes less political capital to implement. Unsurprisingly however, individual taxpayers end up footing the bill under this model through loan guarantees and direct government support. In short, taxpayers end up bearing the risk and costs in supporting these new innovations and the rewards for any successes are captured mainly by private businesses. Furthermore, there are a number of problematic assumptions underpinning the books arguments mainly ; (1) only Europeans will ever be capable of supporting efforts that price carbon at sufficiently high levels to incentivize meaningful decarbonisation (no supporting evidence is provided for this view ) (2) that voters will somehow be more supportive of government intervention to help pick winners and losers than market based solutions (no evidence is provided). (3) that policy makers cannot learn from past experiences with carbon market and pricing.