P1 Guest Talk: Climate Change Cooperation: the Themis Mechanism

Abstract:

Climate change is widely regarded as an intractable problem. It’s not. It’s a collective action problem, and we know how to solve those. We just haven’t applied these insights to climate change.

Collective problems require cooperation. No national strategy - however bold - can solve a global problem on their own. The key requirements for cooperation are reciprocity and common commitments - notions which are completely absent from the Paris Agreement. Cooperation requires a framing avoiding zero-sum thinking, which renders participants adversarial.

The Themis Mechanism is a concrete coalition proposal which builds on these principles. It combines carbon pricing in a form attractive to both developing and industrialised nations, and an elicitation process to effectively determine governing quantities within an annual cycle which builds trust.

Bio:

Carl Rasmussen is professor of machine learning at Cambridge University, but has recently dedicated his efforts towards dealing with climate change. He did engineering at DTU, earned his PhD with Geoff Hinton in Toronto, and has worked at DTU, the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen and has been leader of the Computational and Biological Learning Lab in Cambridge. He is chairman and chief scientist at Secondmind. Carl is also an ELLIS Fellow.