31 services. But governments could be more active in developing educational campaigns, and funding third parties, to promote such ideational change.

Although the emphasis in climate policy will be on building consensual policy, it is inevitable that there will be differences in perspective and some groups will mobilize to resist climate policy. Every social reform sparks resistance. In particular _, predictions of economic doom and gloom have preceded every major political innovation in developed states including introduction of the 8 hour day, minimum wage rates, universal suffrage, and clear air legislation._ In the environmental sector research commissioned by the European Union suggests the costs of environmental compliance of impending measures are regularly overestimated by industry, often by several times. This is because of a systematic neglect of scale and learning effects. Clearly climate governance will sometimes imply government moving forward with regulation, pricing mechanisms, and other initiatives even in the face of vocal opposition from some concerned interests.

Another way of appreciating the difficulty of climate change governance is to introduce the concepts of path dependence and of dominant socio‐technical regimes. Previous rounds of development decision making have bequeathed to us a specific industrial structure; and each major sphere of socio‐technical activity (for example, the energy system) is dominated by established socio‐technical regimes. These regimes are composed of a complex set of technologies and practices, actors (primarily firms but also scientific and educational bodies), and institutions (capital markets, regulatory bodies). _The interdependence and co‐evolution of these elements encourages continuous incremental change within the regime, but makes more radical innovation difficult_ . Thus institutional barriers to the development and deployment of alternative technologies are substantial. For example in the renewable power sector they may involve issues related to: securing insurance and finance, customer expectations, training and maintenance, grid architectures and protocols, regulatory standards, and so on.

To illustrate the deep embededness of current patterns of energy use consider the fact that the higher energy intensity of the economies of countries such as Canada, the United States and Australia (as compared, for example, to that of some European countries and Japan) is rooted in long term economic trends. From the middle of the nineteenth century cheap and abundant resources constituted a comparative advantage for these large industrializing territories which they exploited consistently in competition with the other powers. But today their energy‐ intensive infrastructure is turning to a comparative disadvantage as the climate change externalities generated by fossil fuel usage have become clear. Moreover, when we consider the advance of energy efficiency and renewable energy options in countries such as Sweden and Denmark we should remember that the trajectory that generated present successes dates back not just forty years (to the oil shocks of the 1970s), but has roots in even earlier industrial development (for example, early experiments with district heating systems in Sweden and Denmark go back a century).

The deep institutional embededness of the carbon emitting industrial structure is one reason why carbon taxes and cap and trade systems (which seek to internalize externalities associated 31