Gwyn Prins, of the London School of Economics, has written a follow-on piece to his collaboration with Steve Rayner that appeared in Nature just over a year ago. (Time to Ditch Kyoto, a shorter version of The Wrong Trousers, PDF).  Prins’ follow on is published in the Delegate’s Book to the Poznan Climate Conference, and I am happy to provide a copy here in PDF.

Here is an excerpt:

‘Time to ditch Kyoto’ elicited considerable public and professional reaction, as did the underpinning study in which we documented its central claims (The Wrong Trousers: radically rethinking climate policy, James Martin Institute, University of Oxford/Mackinder Centre, London School of Economics, November 2007 – available at the relevant websites). Last year, our position was seen by some to be heretical. Today, outside the circle of those officials, carbon traders, think-tankers, journalists and academics professionally involved in the promotion of the Kyoto approach, that is no longer so. Last year, we suggested that the objective of the Bali Conference in December 2007 should be to switch tracks to a radically different type of climate policy which might have a hope of producing real changes in the real world of emissions reductions. Has that in fact happened?

It has not. We enter the Poznan conference with the European Union’s climate policy holed and sinking, but with the emergence elsewhere than in Europe of the principles of what a viable climate policy might actually look like. The challenge of Poznan is therefore the same as the challenge of Bali: namely to find a path from the ‘Kyoto Road’ to a new road based on a deal which has a chance of working. Such a deal will not involve the leading instruments of the current conventional wisdom among the expert community of climate policymakers. So what has happened between Bali and Poznan?

For the answer, read the whole thing (PDF).