This session explores the intricate and dynamic relationship between technological innovation, climate change, and legal regulation. It examines the role of law in promoting and incentivizing climate change innovation, the effectiveness of regulatory measures in encouraging the adoption of new mitigation measures, and the challenges associated with implementing such measures on a global scale.
CHAIR: Nathalie Des Rosiers
Benjamin Alarie, “Environmental Regulation, Technological Progress, and the Choice of Governing Instrument”
In their masterful work of 1982, The Choice of Governing Instrument, Trebilcock et al contend that, “There is considerable evidence that command-and-control types of intervention are inefficient and costly; and they delay technological progress. Yet, in North America, environmental protection is almost universally pursued through command-and-control types of intervention, with little or no use of market incentives. While economists have been critical of the inefficiency of this policy choice, the choice becomes easy to understand, if not inevitable, when one examines [its] political rationality.” This essay observes that, contrary to the strongest version of this claim, market mechanisms have in fact been recruited by lawmakers to combat climate change (e.g., carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, etc.) Taking the failure of the strongest version as a point of departure for the analysis, this essay assesses how well a softer version of the claim has fared in contemporary legal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. The essay concludes with lessons for prospective greenhouse gas regulation.
Anthony Niblett, “How Law Can be Best Used to Incentivize New Technology to Combat Climate Change Problems”
What role does law play in finding technological solutions to climate change? How can governments incentivize new technologies to either mitigate climate change (such as carbon sequestration) or develop efficient, clean alternatives to harmful activities? The market will not solve the problem. It fails to incentivize investment in innovation because knowledge is a public good. But the archetypal legal solution - assigning property rights to innovations - also fails here. Mitigating climate change, like knowledge, is a public good. The free rider problem is pervasive.
This paper explores alternatives, focusing on government "prizes". Should governments offer prizes for general innovation in climate change, or would it be optimal to offer prizes for solutions to specific problems such as carbon sequestration? Should prizes be offered for potential solutions (grants) or the realization of successful solutions? Perhaps most importantly, how do we ensure international cooperation between governments to mitigate the free rider effect across jurisdictions?
Gillian Hadfield, “Why We Need Legal and Regulatory Innovation to Meet the Climate Challenge”
Today’s “regulatory technology” consists primarily of jurisdictionally-located text-based rules, systems (like public investigation or private rights of action) to identify violations, and penalties intended to channel behavior towards the requirements set out in text. But this technology is increasingly unable to respond to increasingly complex, global, data-intensive and rapidly-evolving challenges (like AI and the climate crisis). The regulatory technology of the (very near) future needs to include actual technologies. In the context of the climate crisis, for example, effective regulation is likely to require (likely AI-based) technologies that can track, audit and even intervene on complex and dynamic systems intended to balance and reduce emissions. But how will such technologies be invented and built? Entities producing emissions will have some market incentives to invest in innovation of these regulatory technologies, but these incentives are likely to lead to under-investment and will not clearly be responsive to public, as opposed to private, cost-benefit analysis. In this talk I’ll describe the model of what I call regulatory markets-the creation of a sector of government-licensed/approved/regulated private regulators who provide regulatory services to regulatory targets-as a model that can generate the incentive for innovators to develop independent regulatory technologies while ensuring these technologies remain aligned with democratically-determined values.
Негізгі бет Panel 5 - Law, Technology and Climate Change
Пікірлер