Jean-Paul Maréchal, Associate Professor of economics at Université Rennes 2.

Venue: Room Segalen, 25/F, Admiralty Centre, Tower 2, 18 Harcourt Road, Hong Kong

The Copenhagen Climate summit that took place last December can be seen as a key moment of reconfiguration and polarisation of the post cold-war world system. A polarisation around two centres China and the US. This situation has many effects on both climate change and on the kind of solutions that can be expected to be adopted. I shall examine the historical and present responsibilities of the G2 members in global warming; the decision-making framework generated by American and Chinese GHG emissions; some debates concerning burden sharing rules between the US and China in global warming mitigation and, finally, the prospects that can be conceived concerning a Sino-American cooperation.

Jean-Paul Maréchal is Associate Professor of economics at Université Rennes 2. He also teaches at the École normale supérieure and at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers. He is a researcher at Cress-Lessor (Centre régional de recherches en sciences sociales - Laboratoire d'économie et de sciences sociales de Rennes). His research fields are economic ethics, environmental economics, sustainable development and epistemology. He has published more than one hundred articles in scholarly journals and specialised publications and five books (one of them was awarded the prize of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 2001).