Carbon lock-in, rebound effects and China at the limits of statism

From the beginning, the statist frame of the Kyoto Protocol has invited a focus on national carbon budgets and piecemeal mitigation within rich countries. Despite the Clean Development Mechanism and other efforts to diffuse low carbon technologies to developing countries, China has over the last decades continued to construct hundreds of new thermal coal power plants leading not only to skyrocketing emissions in the present but also to long-term carbon lock-in. In light of this, China is likely to continue to put strong upward pressure on global emissions for many decades to come. Ignoring the seriousness of this situation, many rich countries have persisted to seek marginal improvements to intermittent low-energy sources such as wind power rather than taking the lead in developing breakthrough baseload technologies such as nuclear fusion. This paper argues that only such high-energy technologies, if made significantly cheaper than any fossil alternatives, will be capable of breaking the current carbon lock-in process in China and other developing countries. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.