Full Title: California’s Climate Policy – a Model?
Author(s): David Buchan
Publisher(s): The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies
Publication Date: December 1, 2010
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
California’s energy and climate policies deserve study for three new reasons. First, the impasse on climate legislation at the US federal level leaves climate action largely to individual states, of which California is the biggest. Second, California’s politicians have taken climate policy further than those of any other US state, and won popular backing in the world’s only direct referendum on greenhouse gas reduction in November 2010. Third, in the absence of any new legally- binding agreement in the United Nations climate negotiations, California, which on its own would be the world’s eighth largest economy, is increasingly vaunting itself as a model of how a sub-national entity can take climate action irrespective of its national government’s immobility on climate policy.