Monday, 30 June 2014
As the world confronts the ever-destructive impact of climate change, which has generated a higher frequency of extreme weather conditions in recent years, the world has increasingly shifted its attention to varying mechanisms to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gasses -- predominantly from the consumption of hydrocarbon energy resources -- in the atmosphere.
Ongoing efforts over establishing robust climate mitigation and adaptation regimes, however, have been undermined by the reluctance of the world’s largest economies, both in the Industrialized West as well as among the biggest emerging markets in Asia, to subject their existing development paradigm to any form of external scrutiny and legally-binding constraints. Nonetheless, the European Union (EU) has vociferously pushed for a new global climate consensus to expedite the transition of the world economy towards a renewable future -- precipitating the retrenchment of hydrocarbon-intensive models of growth, which have become increasingly unsustainable and climate-disruptive.