1,721,238 research outputs found
Technology-Led Climate Policy, Alternative perspectives
No full text"The failure of the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009 revealed major flaws in the way the world's policy makers have attempted to prevent dangerous levels of increases in global temperatures. The expert authors in this specially commissioned collection focus on the likely costs and benefits of a very wide range of policy options, including geoengineering; mitigation of CO2, CH4, and "black carbon"; expanding forest Carbon Sequestration; R&D of low-carbon energy; and encouraging green technology transfer. For each policy, the authors outline all of the costs, benefits and likely outcomes, in fully referenced, clearly presented chapters accompanied by shorter, critical alternative perspective papers."-
Integrated Assessment Models for Climate Change
Full text linkTo guide climate change policymaking, we need to understand how technologies and behaviors should be transformed to avoid dangerous levels of global warming and what the implications of failing to bring forward such transformation might be. Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are computational tools developed by engineers, earth and natural scientists, and economists to provide projections of interconnected human and natural systems under various conditions
Comment
No full textThe paper by Haewon McJeon and coauthors seeks to estimate the benefits (measured as avoided climate policy costs) of different carbon-free and low-carbon technologies in the context of climate stabilization. The paper does not include a full cost-benefit analysis of these technologies nor does it evaluate what would be needed to bring these technologies about (e.g., in an optimal R\&D investment portfolio). Nonetheless, in its main conclusions, the paper provides a sensible analysis and adds to the expanding literature on this extremely relevant topic by exploring a new dimension, that of the interactions among technologies and their combined impact
Setting environmental policy when experts disagree
Full text linkHow can a decision-maker assess the potential of environmental policies when a group of experts provides divergent estimates on their effectiveness? To address this question, we propose and analyze a variant of the well-studied -maxmin model in decision theory. In our framework, and consistent to the paper's empirical focus on renewable-energy R\&D investment, experts' subjective probability distributions are allowed to be action-dependent. In addition, the decision maker constrains the sets of priors to be considered via a parsimonious measure of their distance to a benchmark ``average'' distribution that grants equal weight to all experts. While our model is formally rooted in the decision-theoretic framework of Olszewski~\cite{o07}, it may also be viewed as a structured form of sensitivity analysis. We apply our framework to original data from a recent expert elicitation survey on solar energy. The analysis suggests that more aggressive investment in solar energy R\&D is likely to yield significant dividends even, or rather especially, after taking expert ambiguity into account.JRC.DDG.01 - Econometrics and applied statistic
Taxing Carbon under Market Incompleteness
No full textThis paper is the first attempt, to the best of our knowledge, to study the impact of a carbon tax by means of a heterogeneous agents model. The objectives of the paper are two: i) To assess how the results of a representative agent model compare to those coming from a model accounting for heterogeneity across agents when evaluating aggregate economic and environmental impacts of a carbon tax; ii) To assess the distributional implications of a carbon tax (and equivalent cap) and how they can be mitigated through different recycling schemes or allocations
Integrating stochastic programming and decision tree techniques in land conversion problems
No full textThis paper is concerned with gradual land conversion problems, placing the main
focus on the interaction between time and uncertainty
Occasionally binding emission caps and real business cycles
No full textRecent applications to the modeling of emission permit markets by means of stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models look into the relative merits of different policy mechanisms under uncertainty. The approach taken in these studies is to assume the existence of an emission constraints that is always binding (i.e. the emission cap is always smaller than what actual emissions would be in the absence of climate policy). Although this might seem a reasonable assumption in the longer term, as policies will be increasingly stringent, in the short run there might be instances where this assumption is in sharp contrast with reality. A notable example would be the current status of the European Emission Trading Scheme. This paper explores the implications of adopting a technique that allows occasionally, rather than strictly, binding constraints. With this new setup the paper sets out to investigate the relative merits of different climate policy instruments under different macro-economic shocks
Data Envelopment Analysis of different climate policy scenarios
No full textThis paper discusses a quantitative methodology to assess the relative performance of different climate policy scenarios when accounting for their long-term economic, social and environmental impacts
Uncertainty and Option Value in Land Allocation Problems
No full textIn this paper we are concerned with modelling techniques for evaluating development and conservation
opportunities when dealing with investment decisions involving environmental resources management
Innovation under uncertainty: the future of carbon-free energy technologies
No full textThis volume collects the results of a four-year European Research Council funded project which focused on innovation and uncertainty in carbon-free energy technologies (ICARUS project, www.icarus-project.org)
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