Regulating the Climate

This paper discusses the UN and EU regulations on the climate change in regard to CO2 emission in a perspective of the “Tragedy of the Commons”. The paper presents the objectives of the Rio Convention UNDCCC, the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement and the EU CO2 trading system. The main findings are that the regulation in these legal documents are too soft if defining the climate changes and the climate crisis as an example of the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons are analyzed in the paper in a climate perspective. Hence, this perspective results in a recommendation of binding legal measures as CO2 taxes or other types of regulations to regulate the climate market failure. It is argued that binding legal measures are needed to solve the tragedy of the commons and the climate crisis.