What do you think?
Rate this book
Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World
Solving the global climate crisis through local partnerships and experimentation
Global climate diplomacy―from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement―is not working. Despite decades of sustained negotiations by world leaders, the climate crisis continues to worsen. The solution is within our grasp―but we will not achieve it through top-down global treaties or grand bargains among nations.
Charles Sabel and David Victor explain why the profound transformations needed for deep cuts in emissions must arise locally, with government and business working together to experiment with new technologies, quickly learn the best solutions, and spread that information globally. Sabel and Victor show how some of the most iconic successes in environmental policy were products of this experimentalist approach to problem solving, such as the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer, the rise of electric vehicles, and Europe’s success in controlling water pollution. They argue that the Paris Agreement is at best an umbrella under which local experimentation can push the technological frontier and help societies around the world learn how to deploy the technologies and policies needed to tackle this daunting global problem.
A visionary book that fundamentally reorients our thinking about the climate crisis, Fixing the Climate is a road map to institutional design that can finally lead to self-sustaining reductions in emissions that years of global diplomacy have failed to deliver.
Global climate diplomacy―from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement―is not working. Despite decades of sustained negotiations by world leaders, the climate crisis continues to worsen. The solution is within our grasp―but we will not achieve it through top-down global treaties or grand bargains among nations.
Charles Sabel and David Victor explain why the profound transformations needed for deep cuts in emissions must arise locally, with government and business working together to experiment with new technologies, quickly learn the best solutions, and spread that information globally. Sabel and Victor show how some of the most iconic successes in environmental policy were products of this experimentalist approach to problem solving, such as the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer, the rise of electric vehicles, and Europe’s success in controlling water pollution. They argue that the Paris Agreement is at best an umbrella under which local experimentation can push the technological frontier and help societies around the world learn how to deploy the technologies and policies needed to tackle this daunting global problem.
A visionary book that fundamentally reorients our thinking about the climate crisis, Fixing the Climate is a road map to institutional design that can finally lead to self-sustaining reductions in emissions that years of global diplomacy have failed to deliver.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published August 2, 2022
4 people are currently reading
150 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 30, 2024
Well researched, slightly less well argued. Builds on important work by Victor critiquing naive Econ 101 arguments for carbon pricing and identifies a lot of interesting failed policy attempts that the authors successfully tie together conceptually: they were all built with a lack of flexibility and insufficient acknowledgement of uncertainties, complexity, and interconnectedness of different tech areas.
Experimentalism, a new governance paradigm the authors lay out here, calls for climate governance by sector rather than global or economy-wide measures, better incorporation of uncertainty and regular joint reviews, updates, and gradual tightening or loosening of hard targets depending on whether evidence suggests solutions are either ready or not yet available for a given sector. Slow moving firms, households, or countries must be given technical assistance before applying penalties.
All fine until here. For hardliner resistance, compliance is incentivized by “penalty defaults” such as limited access to markets, closer scrutiny by regulators, or financial penalties. But how different are these from financial incentives like a price? And how willing are political leaders/constituencies to impose these penalties in the absence of political consensus in favor of action? What are the pathways to building these experimentalist governance structures in the US with a weak/hamstrung regulatory state (and where supporters of stronger regs are generally against flexibility/reform as envisioned here)?
In the more positive case studies the authors are also way too optimistic about the outcomes and their ability to scale. Giving every farmer in the world an extension agent might work if you could do it but would be prohibitively expensive and labor intensive. CA’s electricity grid might be good at deploying batteries but is not an overall success story with slow permitting times, blackouts every summer, and high costs.
Overall a very informative and well put together book, and if I agreed with it more I probably would have gotten less out of reading it.
Experimentalism, a new governance paradigm the authors lay out here, calls for climate governance by sector rather than global or economy-wide measures, better incorporation of uncertainty and regular joint reviews, updates, and gradual tightening or loosening of hard targets depending on whether evidence suggests solutions are either ready or not yet available for a given sector. Slow moving firms, households, or countries must be given technical assistance before applying penalties.
All fine until here. For hardliner resistance, compliance is incentivized by “penalty defaults” such as limited access to markets, closer scrutiny by regulators, or financial penalties. But how different are these from financial incentives like a price? And how willing are political leaders/constituencies to impose these penalties in the absence of political consensus in favor of action? What are the pathways to building these experimentalist governance structures in the US with a weak/hamstrung regulatory state (and where supporters of stronger regs are generally against flexibility/reform as envisioned here)?
In the more positive case studies the authors are also way too optimistic about the outcomes and their ability to scale. Giving every farmer in the world an extension agent might work if you could do it but would be prohibitively expensive and labor intensive. CA’s electricity grid might be good at deploying batteries but is not an overall success story with slow permitting times, blackouts every summer, and high costs.
Overall a very informative and well put together book, and if I agreed with it more I probably would have gotten less out of reading it.
October 6, 2023
The authors provide an interesting framework for working through complex coordination problems and emphasize the role of experimentation and some kind of orderly chaos to address them across a range of contexts. They also give a number of examples. However, that is all the book is. It's essentially qualitative and theoretical, which has the limitation of focus. For example, the case of the Montreal Protocol is given as a case where funds were provided to China so it would be able to comply with environmental demands. This is taken to be a success of the authors' adaptive and collaborative problem solving strategy. But one could also say it required a capable and committed set of partners to pull off, which may not be the case with climate related issues. By focusing on their chosen framework, and not justifying it beyond case studies, they have no way to diminish or clearly rule out these other, potentially more important, things.
October 4, 2023
The premise is interesting: why did the Montreal Protocol effectively managed to ban ozone-depleting chemicals in about 10 years? And why don’t COPs replicate that success? The boon though is really for policy specialists. It is not as much about solutions themselves as it is about theoretical frameworks to develop and deploy them.
Interesting but very niche. If you studied political frameworks and international cooperations systems, you might like it. Otherwise, I’m afraid you’ll find it quite tedious and not really addressing climate change as anything else than an intellectual puzzle for policy enthusiasts.
Interesting but very niche. If you studied political frameworks and international cooperations systems, you might like it. Otherwise, I’m afraid you’ll find it quite tedious and not really addressing climate change as anything else than an intellectual puzzle for policy enthusiasts.
April 23, 2024
Tiring and dumb. Makes the climate issue into a game of 3D chess ignoring obvious obstacles thrown in by the fossil fuel interests. Celebrates without questioning counterproductive policies and tech choices. Treats California as an interesting case study and Norway as an example of credible climate policy. How dumb can you get?
February 26, 2023
A solid, if purely qualitative, application of Deweyan experimentalism to the climate crisis.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews