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Free Markets, Carbon Tax Best Way to Fight Climate Change: View

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The Durban climate-change talks ended in what agreed to call a success. Governments, including China and India for the first time, said they would devise a new global system for curbing emissions of greenhouse gases and make it operational by 2020. This promise, however, has uncertain legal force, the form of any new regime is unclear, and the meeting failed to set any new binding targets.

Don’t be too disappointed. The ambition to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a similar but truly global set of quantitative limits in two weeks of talks in South Africa was mistaken all along. In this vital effort, the world needs a new and more realistic measure of progress.