The Great Tôhoku-Earthquake and the following nuclear meltdown in Fukushima called the world’s attention to Japans’ energy and climate policy. Japan is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouses gases in the world and still far away from reaching its Kyoto target. Emissions trading systems...

An economy with clean and dirty intermediate inputs may fall into a trap characterized by low environmental quality and low life expectancy, while the others converge to opposite steady states. We propose new strategies towards sustainable growth. They include: (i) taxes (subsidies) imposed on...

Following the Brent Spar controversy, the OSPAR countries reached a unanimous agreement in 1998 for the future rules for disposal of petroleum installations. The vast majority of existing offshore installations will be re-used or returned to shore for recycling or disposal. For installations...

Intergenerational altruism and contemporaneous cooperation are both important to the provision of long-lived public goods. Equilibrium climate protection may depend more sensitively on either of these considerations, depending on the type of policy rule one examines. This conclusion is based on...

This paper analyses the formation of international environmental agreements (IEAs) under uncertainty, focusing on the role of learning and risk aversion. It bridges two strands of literature: one focused on the role learning for the success of IEA formation when countries are risk neutral and...

A well-known result about market power in emission permit markets is that efficiency can be achieved by full free allocation to the dominant firm. I show that this result breaks down when taking the interaction between input and output markets into account, even if the firm perceives market...

I estimate the level of emissions cost pass-through to hourly wholesale electricity prices in Germany, based on spot market data. I control for contemporaneous shocks to demand and supply by constructing a detailed supply curve for fossil generation, and intersecting it with residual demand for...

This paper calculates, for the top twenty emitting countries, how much pricing of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is in their own national interests due to domestic co-benefits. On average, nationally efficient prices are substantial, $57.5 per ton of CO2 (for year 2010), reflecting primarily...

One country that tries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may fear that other countries get a competitive advantage and increase emissions (“leakage”). Estimates from computable general equilibrium (CGE) models such as Elliott et al (2010a,b) indicate that 15% to 25% of abatement might be...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a project-based carbon trade mechanism that subsidizes the users of climate-friendly technologies and encourages technology transfer. The CDM has provided financial support for a large share of Chinese wind projects since 2002. Using pooled...