Some Legal Impacts of the Emerging International Climate Change Regime on Energy Prices

From the beginning of scientific assessment of climate change in the late 1970’s to the most recent conference of the parties (COP) to the Kyoto Protocol in Doha in 2012 , the international community has been attempting to establish a workable legal regime to deal with climate change. The purpose of this article is to explore some of the legal effects this emerging international climate change regime may have on energy prices in the foreseeable future. Specifically, this article in section II article accepts certain predicates relating to climate change and energy prices. In section III, it lays out briefly the thirty year, largely unsuccessful, history of the attempts to establish an international legal regime to deal with climate change. Section IV argues that despite the lack of success in establishing an international legal regime, certain legal principles have been established that will affect energy prices in the foreseeable future. Section V concludes that those legal principles should be taken into account by states, legislators, policy makers, energy companies, advocates, consumers and investors in making energy pricing decisions and energy pricing predictions in the coming decades