UC Berkeley

Climate change mitigation requires immediate and enduring cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, achievable only through the transformation of today's fossil fuel energy systems. Those systems today provide high-quality, inexpensive, and dependable energy to industrial societies. The low-emissions renewable energy systems that would replace them are, as of 2013, still more expensive, more complex, and unproven.

This combination of factors makes the political economy of climate change mitigation immensely difficult. Achieving real emissions reduction will impose very large material costs powerful interests, in pursuit of distant--if potentially massive--environmental benefits. These conditions are not auspicious for adopting, much less sustaining, effective climate policy.

Yet an increasingly large number of countries have taken explicit or implicit action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These actions include emissions pricing schemes, renewable energy research and development, energy efficiency mandates, technological research and development, and a host of other policies. The list of states pursuing such policy is as diverse as the policies themselves: the European Union, South Korea, India, and even China have adopted some or all of the provisions outlined above.

This dissertation addresses how states have overcome the apparently sizable barriers to climate change mitigation. It argues that successful states have made progress by choosing policies that target environmental ends with economic gains. Those gains comes through benefits derived from the transformation of national energy systems--transformations that improve energy security, increase economic competitiveness, improve technological leadership, or target other opportunities and challenges in the legacy energy infrastructure. By targeting such areas explicitly, these policies create new constituents with a material stake in long-term policy stability. Those constituents act as valuable political allies in the political fight over the scale and distribution of costs for emissions reduction.

But while such policy strategies have proven successful to date, they do not resolve the underlying problem of cost that has plagued climate change mitigation to date. Massive emissions reduction still poses net economic costs, even if it yields huge positive environmental benefits. The benefits created by a low-emissions energy systems transformation can offset those costs, and if targeted can create supportive economic constituents. But the low-emissions energy systems of the future still do not, as of this writing, offer any novel economic or technological improvements over the reliably and ubiquitous energy we enjoy today. Hence these policies remain at risk of disruption from outside forces. The recent policy stagnation in the United States and Europe point to the risks posed by this inherent policy vulnerability.