Anu Bradford: Just Say "No" to (Bad) Climate Deal

Instead, doing nothing in Cancún may be a better strategy for advocates. A failure to enact a post-Kyoto agreement does not mean that there will be no price on greenhouse gas emissions. What most treaty advocates fail to understand is that businesses today are already changing their behavior based on expectations of the future and that carbon emissions already have a de-facto price in their minds.

This de-facto price comes from a mounting swarm of national and sub-national efforts to curb carbon, including renewable portfolio standards, fuels standards, regional trading schemes, and indirect measures including the US EPA's recent authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.