Myriad policy measures aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector, promote generation from renewable sources, and encourage energy conservation. To what extent do innovation and energy efficiency (EE) market failures justify additional interventions when a carbon price is...

In this paper, we introduce a new top-down approach to modeling the effects of publicly financed energy-efficiency programs on electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. The approach draws on a partial-adjustment econometric model of electricity demand and represents the results of a...

Commercial and residential buildings are responsible for 42 percent of all U.S. energy consumption and 41 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions. Engineering studies identify several investments in new enegy-efficiency equipment or building retrofits that would more than pay for themselves in terms of...

The adoption of domestic emissions trading schemes (ETS) can impose a heavy burden on energy-intensive industries. In particular, energy-intensive industries competing with foreign competitors could lose their international edge. Although the abatement of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in...

This paper discusses fuel economy regulations in the United States and other countries. We first describe how these programs affect fuel use and other dimensions of the vehicle fleet. We then review different methodologies for assessing the costs of fuel economy regulations and discuss the...

The risk of losing income and productive means due to adverse weather can differ significantly among farmers sharing a productive landscape and is, of course, hard to estimate or even “guesstimate” empirically. Moreover, the costs associated with investments in adaptation to climate are...

Deep and shallow uncertainty are defined and contrasted with regard to messaging the uncertainty about climate change. Deep uncertainty is often traced back to the writings of Frank Knight, where in fact it simply meant subjective probability. Although Knight envisioned a scientifically grounded...

Recent reduced-form econometric models of climate change impacts on agriculture assume climate is additive. This is reflected in climate regressors that are aggregated over several months that include the growing season. In this paper I develop a simple model to show how this assumption imposes...

The introduction of a price on carbon dioxide is expected to be more efficient than prescriptive regulation. It also instantiates substantial economic value. Initially programs allocated this value to incumbent firms (grandfathering), but the growing movement toward auctioning or emissions fees...

A concern of many environmentalists is that the use of biomass energy will decimate the forests. Searchinger et al. (2008, 2009) examined this issue related to corn ethanol and suggested that substituting corn ethanol for petroleum would increase carbon emissions associated with the land...