Moving the climate change regime further through a hydrogen protocol

This article first briefly presents why energy is relevant to climate change and why it is a priority issue in many countries. The next section shows how energy issues have been prioritized in the context of environment and development discussions in the last decade or two, and the criteria developed from an environmental perspective on sustainable energy sources. The following section analyses the legal activities that States have undertaken in relation to the promotion of hydrogen as an alternative fuel. It highlights, in some detail, the efforts of States within the International Energy Agency (IEA), where hydrogen has been dealt with since 1977. It discusses the new US-initiated bilateral agreements on climate change and hydrogen, and, finally, it presents the efforts of some States to advance a hydrogen economy via the International Partnership for a Hydrogen Economy. The next section then returns to a discussion of whether a Hydrogen Protocol could end the current deadlock within the climate change regime before drawing some final conclusions in the last section of this article.