'Global Warming Gridlock' Receives Positive Reviews
A Way to Win the Climate Fight?
05/10/2011
David Roberts,
The American Prospect
According to David Victor's new book, Global Warming Gridlock, the problem runs much deeper. In fact, climate negotiators are operating under the influence of a series of myths and misunderstandings that doom their strategy to perpetual failure.
Victor, a political scientist who directs the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego, is a bit of a climate Zelig. For two decades, he's been popping up everywhere, leading study groups, working as a consultant to governments and businesses, and serving on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has seen firsthand the failure to make substantial progress on climate policy, and he's been taking notes.
There's ample reason for alarm about climate change. The odds of catastrophic impacts rise with each day of delay, yet the status quo has inertia and powerful interests on its side. A problem so terrible, so intractable, seems to call for a response of commensurate size and force. As Victor tells it, however, that sense of desperate urgency felt by climate scientists and campaigners is precisely what's led to their undoing.
Click here to read the full review.
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David Victor is Director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation (ILAR). Looking across a wide array of issues from environment and energy to human rights, trade and security, the Laboratory explores when (and why) international laws actually work.
