Climate change mitigation: passing through the eye of the needle?

Abstract

Anyone who follows climate change policy debates even casually knows that these debates are shot through with controversy about what ought to be done and who ought to be doing it. What sometimes get lost in these debates, however, are much deeper differences over the nature of the climate change problem itself. That is my focus in this chapter. I will take climate change as a prime example of broader debates over what constitutes “sustainable development” and draw upon different strands of the sustainability literature to show how these disagreements play out in the climate change context.

Citation

Toman, M.A. (2005), "Climate change mitigation: passing through the eye of the needle?", Sinnott-Armstrong, W. and Howarth, R.B. (Ed.) Perspectives on Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics (Advances in the Economics of Environmental Resources, Vol. 5), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 75-98. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1569-3740(05)05004-2