88th Annual Meeting (20-24 January 2008)

Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Advances in the effectiveness and feasibility of climate policy
Exhibit Hall B (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
Paul A. T. Higgins, AMS, Washington, DC
Heated disagreements among stakeholders hinder society's progress in devising and implementing solutions to climate change. Recently, the AMS Policy Program initiated a series of stakeholder summits designed to identify conflicting needs among interest groups, diffuse counterproductive political disagreements, and promote the development and adoption of new policy breakthroughs. The first of these stakeholder summits, scheduled for the fall of 2007 (after the deadline for this abstract), will focus on emission fees, a powerful but contentious tool for reducing greenhouse gas pollution. The summit will bring together researchers, policy makers, and leaders from the NGO and business communities in order to: 1) identify the pros and cons of emission fees, 2) explore the potential policy tweaks that could help make these fees environmentally effective and politically feasible, and 3) negotiate a broadly agreeable policy approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions using emission fees. In this presentation, I will discuss the obstacles facing policies that seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the opportunities for overcoming these obstacles, and the broadly agreeable policy approaches for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

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