Climate modelers have recognized the possibility of abrupt climate changes caused by a reorganization of the North Atlantic's current pattern (technically known as a thermohaline circulation collapse). This circulation system now warms north-western Europe and transports carbon dioxide to the...

Major carbon-pricing systems in Europe and North America involve multiple jurisdictions (countries or states). Individual jurisdictions often pursue additional initiatives—such as unilateral carbon price floors, legislation to phase out coal, aviation taxes or support programs for renewable...

This paper demonstrates how three important results in environmental economics, true under mild conditions in closed economies, are false or need serious amendment in a world with international trade in goods. Since the three results we highlight have framed much of the ongoing discussion and...

We discuss self-interested uses of equity arguments in international climate negotiations. Using unique data from a world-wide survey of agents involved in international climate policy, we show that the perceived support of different equity rules by countries or groups of countries may be...

Because of the global commons nature of climate change, international cooperation among nations will likely be necessary for meaningful action at the global level. At the same time, it will inevitably be up to the actions of sovereign nations to put in place policies that bring about meaningful...

We review the optimal pattern of carbon emission abatements across countries in a simple multi-country world. We model explicitly the fact that the atmosphere is a public good. Within this framework we establish conditions for it to be necessary for optimality that the marginal cost of abatement...

Thus far, most approaches to resolving the global warming externality have been quantity based. With n different national entities, a meaningful comprehensive treaty involves negotiating n different binding emissions quotas (whether tradeable or not). In post-Kyoto practice this n-dimensional...

Extreme temperatures lead to large fluctuations in electricity demand and wholesale prices of electricity, which in turn affects the optimal production process for firms to use. Using a large international sample of planned power plant projects, we measure the way that electric utilities'...

This paper studies a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model involving climate change. Our frame- work allows for feedback effects on the temperature dynamics. We are able to match estimates of future temperature distributions provided in the fifth assessment report of the IPCC (2014). We...

Climate change management is a global challenge that requires social science as much as it requires natural science. We provide a brief introduction to the physical science of climate change, written to provide essential background for economists and other social scientists. We also highlight...