Faculty of Law University of Toronto

Climate Change Workshops 2007 – 2008

presents

Professor Jonathan B. Wiener

Duke University Law School

On Climate Change Policy, Think Globally,
Act Globally

Thursday, March 6, 2008

12:30 – 2:00 p.m.

Flavelle Dining Room

Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

78 Queen’s Park

Diagnosis is necessary but not sufficient to treat an illness; one must also find a remedy that will improve the patient's health.  Similarly, knowing that global climate change is serious is not sufficient to act; one must also design a policy that will yield desired results.  The recent flurry of local actions to regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as in California, several Northeastern US states, and some Canadian provinces, are understandable responses to relative inactivity by their national governments.  Such local actions may create a patchwork that motivates industry to lobby for broader national and international action, may induce technological change, and may enable learning from experimentation with alternative policy designs.  But acting locally is not well suited to regulating moveable global conduct that yields a global externality.  Local actions to regulate GHGs may be legally barred, may make only a minor difference in global emissions, may perversely spur emissions leakage to other jurisdictions, and may create conflicts with a larger harmonized regime. The best approach to a global externality is a well-designed global regime that engages participation by all major source countries, especially the US and China.  A system of comprehensive international emissions trading offers the best way to engage key countries in a global GHG regime.

Jonathan B. Wiener is Perkins Professor of Law, and professor at the >Nicholas School of the Environment & Earth Sciences and at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy, at Duke University.  In 2008 he is President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA).  Since 2002 he has been a University Fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF).  In 1989-93, he worked on U.S. and international environmental policy (including helping to negotiate the Framework Convention on Climate Change) at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and Office of Science and Technology Policy, and at the Justice Department, in both the first Bush and Clinton administrations.  He is a graduate of Harvard College and Law School, and he clerked for federal judges Jack B. Weinstein and Stephen G. Breyer.

A light lunch will be provided.

For workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko n.gulezko@utoronto.ca