Mitigating Failed Attempts at Mitigation: Using Unilateral Consumption-Based Measures to Remedy the UNFCCC/Kyoto System’s Failure to Stabilise Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Abstract

International climate change mitigation efforts have reached an impasse and global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. If the international community is to avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change, it must explore new, novel policy options aimed at climate change mitigation. This paper attempts to uncover a somewhat different but nonetheless effective means to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions through a genealogical method. An exploration of the origins of the present climate change mitigation impasse revealed several important structural defects in the UNFCCC/Kyoto regime that distinguish it from analogous international environmental law regimes and have rendered it largely ineffective for achieving mitigation in light of momentous recent changes to the structure of the global economy. The UNFCCC / Kyoto system, unlike the anterior Vienna Convention / Montreal Protocol system for the protection of the ozone layer, for example, requires volume-based reductions from only developed country parties and, most crucially, relies exclusively on production-based measures. Greenhouse gas consumption-based measures, which also address the greenhouse gases emitted elsewhere but effectively imported into a country as part of the product in which they are invisibly embedded, present an opportunity to overcome the limitations of the production-based developed country only UNFCCC/Kyoto regime and thereby to make a meaningful contribution to global climate change mitigation. Moreover, by leveraging off developed countries relatively larger shares of world consumption, consumption-based measures offer UNFCCC Annex I countries keen to act on global climate change a greater global climate change impact through unilateral regulation than their increasingly futile production-based internal measures. GHG consumption-based proposals may encounter some administrative, economic, political and legal obstacles, but broadly-speaking, it would seem that a State wishing to introduce such measures would be able to address most of the administrative and economic concerns by carefully designing a manageable, suitable and economically appropriate policy. While no panacea to the complex climate change mitigation problem, such policies may yet provide new and desperately-needed impetus in the global effort to stabilise and ultimately reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.