I investigate the cost and feasibility of reducing US GHG emissions by 80% from 2005 levels by 2050. The US has stated in its Paris COP 21 submission that this is its aspiration. I suggest that this goal can be reached at a cost in the range of $37 to $135 bn/year. I assume that the goal is to...

Many countries have phased out nuclear electricity production in response to concerns about nuclear waste and the risk of nuclear accidents. This paper examines the impact of the shutdown of roughly half of the nuclear production capacity in Germany after the Fukushima accident in 2011. We use...

For the first four decades of its existence the U.S. nuclear power industry was run by regulated utilities, with most companies owning only one or two reactors. Beginning in the late 1990s electricity markets in many states were deregulated and almost half of the nation's 103 reactors were sold...

The prospects for a revival of nuclear power were dim even before the partial reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Nuclear power has long been controversial because of concerns about nuclear accidents, proliferation risk, and the storage of spent fuel. These concerns are real and...

Integrated assessment models have become the primary tools for comparing climate policies that seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Policy comparisons have often been performed by considering a planner who seeks to make optimal trade-offs between the costs of carbon abatement and the...

To reliably achieve deep decarbonization of the US power sector, a candidate policy must perform robustly across a range of possible future trajectories of demand, fossil fuel prices, and prices of new wind and solar capacity. Using a modified version of the NREL ReEDS model with scenarios that...

The U.S. Congress is considering a set of bills designed to limit the nation's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper complements the analysis by Paltsev et al. (2007) of cap-and-trade bills and applies the MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model to carry out an analysis of...

Efforts to reduce carbon emissions significantly will require considerable improvements in energy intensity, the ratio of energy consumption to economic activity. Improvements in energy intensity over the past thirty years suggest great possibilities for energy conservation: current annual...

In the absence of first-best climate policy, we demonstrate that existing government institutions and policy established for reasons unrelated to climate change may induce climate adaptation. We examine the impact of temperature on ambient ozone concentration in the United States from 1980-2013,...

The Green Paradox posits that fossil fuel markets respond to changing expectations about climate legislation, which limits future consumption, by shifting consumption to the present through lower present-day prices. We demonstrate that oil futures responded negatively to daily changes in the...