Robyn Eckersley is a Professor and Head of Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely in the fields of environmental politics and policy, political theory and international relations. Her books include Environmentalism and Political Theory (1992); Markets, the State and the Environment: Towards Integration (1995) (as editor); The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (2004); The State and the Global Ecological Crisis (2005, as co-editor) and Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge (2006, as co-editor). She is on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Environmental Politics; Environmental Value; Ethics and International Affairs; Ethics, Place and Environment; Global Change, Peace and Security; Global Environmental Politics; International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development; International Theory: A Journal of International Politics, Law and Philosophy; Journal of International Political Theory; New Political Economy; and Organisation and Environment. From 1995-2005 she served as a Member of the Hazardous Waste Technical Working Group, a statutory committee advising the Commonwealth Minister on Australia's obligations under the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste. Her current research focuses on climate policy, with a special focus on the international climate change negotiations, the justice implications of carbon trading schemes, and the relationship between the World Trade Organisation and the climate change regime. She was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia in 2007.

Carbon trading schemes have emerged as the white knight of climate change policy at the international and national levels. Such schemes have been widely defended as more flexible than carbon taxes or prescriptive regulation because they promote least-cost solutions for any desired level of emissions reductions. However, their ethical credentials are more dubious. This lecture will assess carbon trading schemes from the standpoint of environmental justice and argue that they leave much to be desired because they enable the maintenance of carbon polluting practices, high consumption life-styles, and the postponement of deep structural changes in developed countries while increasing the costs of transition to a low carbon economy by developing countries.