Anyone who has paid attention to climate policy is either depressed or disgusted. Policies have been idiotic and ineffective. The US Waxman-Markey proposal is described by its supporters as a stinker. New direction might be useful.

Called How to Get Climate Policy back on Course, the report argues that the recent Japanese ‘Mamizu’ climate strategy is the world’s first to start down this ‘real world’ course in sharp contrast to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the UK Climate Change Act and the US Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation.

Professor Steve Rayner, Director of InSIS at the University of Oxford, said: ‘The world has centuries of experience in decarbonising its energy supply and Japan has led the world in policy-driven improvements in energy efficiency. These are the models to which we ought to be looking.’

Professor Gwyn Prins, from LSE, said: ‘Worthwhile policy builds upon what we know works and upon what is feasible rather than trying to deploy never-before implemented policies through complex institutions requiring a hitherto unprecedented and never achieved degree of global political alignment.’ . . .

The Obama Administration has argued that one should never waste a good crisis. How to Get Climate Policy back on Course shows how deep the crisis of climate policy really is and gives a real world alternative to the continued pursuit of policies that have so clearly failed.

The Obama Administration is a crisis, but I suspect that it will be wasted.

Still, it would be good to cut our losses and abandon the whole emissions targets nonsense and the wasteful bureaucratic machinery involved with such policies. We need good government rather than big government.