The Next Step for Climate Change Policy

The third Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be held in Kyoto in early December. These upcoming negotiations, aimed at reducing future emissions of greenhouse gases, are almost certain to accomplish nothing. Failure is likely because the...

In earlier papers we have argued that the Kyoto Protocol is not sustainable as a global climate change policy and have proposed an alternative policy regime based on a coordinated but decentralised system of national permit trading systems with a fixed internationally negotiated price for...

Beyond the Kyoto Protocol

Uncertainty is an obstacle for commitments under cap and trade schemes for emission permits. We assess how well intensity targets, where each country's permit allocation is indexed to its future realised GDP, can cope with uncertainties in international greenhouse emissions trading. We present...

Global Emissions Trading: Prospects and Pitfalls

We give theoretical, partial equilibrium comparisons of a tax with thresholds, tradable targets ('emissions trading' or ET), and non-tradable targets, as mechanisms to abate well-mixed ('global') emissions from many parties, under independent uncertainties in both future business-as-usual...

The next major round of international negotiations on controlling global climate change is to be held later this year in Kyoto. The focus of talks to date has been on policies to reduce worldwide carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels and hold them there. A proposal by the United States would...

In a number of papers, McKibbin and Wilcoxen (1997a,1997b,1999) have proposed to tackle rising greenhouse emissions by using an internationally coordinated system of domestic permit trading schemes with a fixed price rather than a fixed cap on greenhouse emissions. This paper argues that early...