Joseph E. Stiglitz on the failure of Copenhagen

One month after the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Joseph E. Stiglitz reflects in the business paper Világgazdaság on alternative strategies for facing the climate crisis: "The real failure was that there was no agreement about how to achieve the lofty goal of saving the planet, no agreement about reductions in carbon emissions, no agreement on how to share the burden, and no agreement on help for developing countries. Even the commitment of the accord to provide amounts approaching 30 billion dollars for the period 2010-2012 for adaptation and mitigation appears paltry next to the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been doled out to the banks in the bailouts of 2008-2009. ... Perhaps it is time to try another approach: a commitment by each country to raise the price of emissions ... to an agreed level, say, 80 dollars per ton. Countries could use the revenues as an alternative to other taxes - it makes much more sense to tax bad things than good things."

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