Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The essence of climate change dilemma is freeloading: CO2 inflicts great damage across the world, but the emitting countries shoulder only a marginal portion of the costs incurred. As a result, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission had increased to 149% in 2012 compared to the 1990’s levels, as opposed to Kyoto Protocol’s target to decreasing carbon emission by 5% within 2012. To battle the pollution, carbon pricing has emerged under carbon trading market as one of the elixirs to decreasing GHG emission and eventually avoiding environmental decay. While in theory, carbon pricing makes carbon more expensive to produce through taxation and Cap & Trade mechanism, how effective is it in practice in reducing CO2 emission to the targeted level? Alternatively, shifting from fossil fuel to clean energy requires significant fundamental and structural changes, i.e., political consensus, business reorientation and certainly more expense down the line. However, if we truly intend to avoid the apocalyptic turnout of climate change and repair the damaged earth, we will have to find a silver bullet regardless of theoretical approach and technological experimentation. This paper attempts to weigh in the sustainable trade-off of carbon pricing mechanism and its alternatives, and explores the avenues to complement the issues through required fundamental change, technical modulation and policy intervention.