Danny Cullenward

Making Climate Policy Work
Polity Press, 2020 (with David G. Victor)

For decades, the world’s governments have struggled to move from talk to action on climate. Many now hope that growing public concern will lead to greater policy ambition, but the most widely promoted strategy to address the climate crisis — the use of market-based programs — hasn’t been working and isn’t ready to scale.

Danny Cullenward and David Victor show how the politics of creating and maintaining market-based policies render them ineffective nearly everywhere they have been applied. Reforms can help around the margins, but markets’ problems are structural and won’t disappear with increasing demand for climate solutions. Facing that reality requires relying more heavily on smart regulation and industrial policy — government-led strategies — to catalyze the transformation that markets promise, but rarely deliver.

Adam Tooze, Columbia University:

“To my mind, the contribution which most comprehensively sums up the critique of carbon pricing that is prevalent in the US today is Danny Cullenward and David G. Victor’s timely book, Making Climate Policy Work. Their sophisticated argument, based in political science and political economy, deserves a hearing on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Laurance Tubiana, Sciences Po:

“I have spent my career trying to answer the question posed by Cullenward and Victor — how to make climate policy work. This book provides a compelling answer.”

David Roberts, Volts:

“I found the book incredibly illuminating. It helped give structure and coherence to reservations about carbon pricing I’ve been trying to express for years.”