Climate Change — Challenges for Trade, Innovation, and Governance

The problematique in focus for this paper is the following: what are the consequences of climate change – and climate change mitigation/adaption policies – for globalization? And to what extent is the globalized economy part of the problem or part of the solution?The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 recapitulates the emergence of the global economy and its relation to modernity followed by section 3 which provides a descriptive statistical analysis of the role of carbon in the globalized world that has emerged since around 1820. Section 4 is focused on the mechanisms of climate change and the planetary boundaries within which the world economy has to develop if there will be a fair chance to stay within the oftenly declared international 2°C target. In section 5 there is first an analysis of the cornerstones of trade theory and their relation to climate change, and secondly an analysis of the positions among "concerned" economists and trade theorists on that topic. Section 6 contains reflections on the policy challenges in a world that has to put more emphasis on climate change mitigation. Section 7, finally, concludes