A Copenhagen Collar: Achieving Comparable Effort Through Carbon Price Agreements

The global financial crisis proves how unforeseen macroeconomic conditions can affect policies aimed at reducing and stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. It has made voters uneasy about potential climate policy that could raise energy costs and unemployment. To improve the political stability of any policy agreement emerging from this December’s annual meeting on the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen, and to ensure the comparability of commitments and ease the inclusion of developing countries, the authors propose that the UNFCCC supplement emissions targets with a price collar. This paper outlines an example that shows that a price collar can have a negligible expected impact on the outcome that matters most for the climate—increasing emissions.