"Eyes on a Climate Prize: Rewarding Energy Innovation to Achieve Climate Stabilization," explores the use of inducement prizes as a means to develop technology to stabilize
green house gas contributions to global climate change. The author, Jonathan H. Adler, presents the current state of the policy debate concerning greenhouse gases (GHG) and
global climate change. The premise of the paper is that the level of technological innovation necessary to make atmospheric stabilization affordable—and therefore a politically
viable proposition—is unlikely to happen without government intervention. Because GHG’s are emitted into the atmospheric commons, there is no direct economic incentive
to reduce such emissions and little market for GHG limiting innovations. This paper presents arguments as to deficiencies, merits, and drawbacks of the approaches. The author concludes that prizes are the superior approach to address GHG and presents a proposal for significant federal funding of innovation prizes to address the global climate change problem.