Climate change and the adoption of renewable energy sources. The case of Italy

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Environmental Policy, grade: 2A, University of Stirling (School of Arts and Humanities - Division of Law and Philosophy), course: LLM International Energy Law and Policy, language: English, abstract: As almost unanimously acknowledged, human activities, such as industrial production, agriculture, household heating and cooling, transportation, and - last but not least - energy generation, are the main cause of climate change. The United Nations - just to cite an eminent international institution which is dealing with the issue, recently recognised that: "Global warming is unequivocal, human influence has been the dominant cause since the mid-20th century, and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases [...] will persist for many centuries." The Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report, states that "human activities are continuing to affect the Earth's energy budget by changing the emissions and resulting atmospheric concentrations of gases and aerosols and by changing land surface properties." All the human activities mentioned above produce a negative externality: they release Greenhouse Gases (GHG) Emissions to the atmosphere. At the international level, thirty-nine countries signed the Kyoto Protocol on 11 December 1997, which entered to force on 16 February 2005 and sets internationally binding emission reduction targets. In December 2012, the parties adopted an amendment to the Protocol, and seven other nations joined the previous signatories. The obligatoriness of the targets set by the Kyoto Protocol has not been completely fulfilled by the countries which agreed to them. The principal reason, as highlighted by the Harvard Magazine in 2002, is that the way the Protocol was drafted is "economically inefficient, unobjective, inequitable, and - worst of all - ineffective. [...] The original agreement outlined