The Hartwell Paper is a “white paper” on climate policy:
Here is a quote:
Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernible real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in 15 years.
The underlying reason for this is that the UNFCCC/Kyoto model was structurally flawed and doomed to fail because it systematically misunderstood the nature of climate change as a policy issue between 1985 and 2009.
The result of three months’ intensive work by a group of 14 authors from Asia, Europe and North America, ‘The Hartwell Paper’ argues that a radical change of approach is required, given that the 1992 United Nations international climate policy framework has failed to produce any discernible real world reductions in greenhouse gases. The crash of 2009 is a crisis that must not be wasted.
Here is another:
Politics is not about maximising rationality. It is about finding compromises that enough people can tolerate to allow society to take steps in the right direction. So, contrary to all our modern instincts, political progress on climate change simply cannot be solved by injecting more scientific information into politics.
The concept of ‘tame’ and ‘wicked’ problems is worth noting. Tame problems are “complicated, but with defined and achievable end states, whereas climate change is ‘wicked’ (comprising open, complex and imperfectly understood systems). Originally described … in the context of urban planning, ‘wicked’ problems are issues that are often formulated as if they are susceptible to solutions when in fact they are not.”