WORKING PAPER SERIES (2023-6)

There is a high degree of uncertainty both about the level of carbon that will trigger higher temperatures as well as the nature of the commitments, so the bands of probability are wide for all the variables. [...] Secondly, we have quantitative and qualitative assessments of the styles and nature of the national governments in the 190 some independent states that are engaged in the UNCCC process and have made commitments related to carbon mitigation. [...] In the first instance, because governments are fundamentally at the heart of the process of defining and structuring the public agenda and organizing resources to achieve various public or common pool goods, one can assess whether the style of government influences policy design. [...] As with much of the literature about technology and the economy, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter is credited with the first economic definition of innovation, namely the introduction of a new good or a new quality of an existing good, a new method of production, the opening of a new market, the introduction of a new supply of inputs to a production system or a new organizational structure in. [...] Evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman, one of the complexity theorists from the Santé Fe Institute, stressed that the rate and scope of change in any system is a function of the number of adjacent potential opportunities.