The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment

Is this the end of carbon trading, or just a hiccup? |

Cameron Hepburn, The Conversation, 16 May: "Just as scientists almost universally agree greenhouse gases contribute to the planet’s changing climate, economists almost universally agree the problem is made worse because polluters don’t pay for the mess they make."

Column-busting the carbon budget: Kemp|

17 May, Reuters:  "Unfortunately it seems the world is on course to break the carbon budget that scientists and policymakers agree is necessary to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius. If governments were really committed to limiting the rise in temperatures to 2 degrees, two-thirds of the currently known oil, coal and gas reserves would have to be left in the ground, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)."

Past lecture: 'Multilateralism in Crisis: environmental conflict and stalemate in the trade and climate regimes'|

On Monday 20 May, Robyn Eckersley, University of Melbourne, highlighted the commonalities and connections between the stalemates in the Doha trade round and the post-Kyoto climate negotiations from the standpoint of environmental multilateralism. The presentation also critically assessed the most commonly discussed explanation to account for the stalemate - namely, the shift towards a more multipolar world (the ‘power shift’ argument) - and explored the consequences of failure for each set of negotiations.

Past public lecture: 'Itinerant Farming to White House Arrests: a scientist’s view of the climate crisis'|

If our governments continue to fail to advance effective policy, thus causing continued extraction of every fossil fuel that can be found, today's children, future generations, and nature will bear the consequences, through no fault of their own. A variety of options for making governments do their job were discussed by Dr James Hansen, Adjunct Professor of Earth Sciences at Columbia University. *Photos available*|

Working paper: 'Sectors under scrutiny – Evaluation of indicators to assess the risk of carbon leakage in the UK and Germany'|

Misato Sato, Karsten Neuhoff, Verena Graichen, Katja Schumacher and Felix Matthes: "This study sets out a simple analytical framework and several indicators to measure the relative potential exposure of manufacturing sectors to emissions leakage."

Working paper: 'Discounting under disagreement'

Geoffrey Heal and Antony Millner: "A group of time consistent agents has access to a common productive resource stock whose output provides their consumption needs. The agents disagree about the appropriate pure rate of time preference to use when choosing a consumption policy, and thus delegate the management of the resource to a social planner who allocates consumption eciently across individuals and over time. We show that the planner's optimal policy is equivalent to that of a representative agent with a time varying rate of impatience."