This note highlights a major reason to limit climate change to the lowest possible levels. This reason follows from the large increase in uncertainty associated with high levels of warming. This uncertainty arises from three sources: the change in climate itself, the change’s impacts at the...

This paper covers three policy-relevant aspects of the carbon content of electricity that are well established among integrated assessment models but under-discussed in the policy debate. First, climate stabilization at any level from 2 to 3°C requires electricity to be almost carbon-free by...

This article investigates the use of expert-based Marginal Abatement Cost Curves (MACC) to design abatement strategies. It shows that introducing inertia, in the form of the"cost in time"of available options, changes significantly the message from MACCs. With an abatement objective in cumulative...

This paper studies the optimal transition from existing coal power plants to gas and renewable power under a carbon budget. It solves a model of polluting, exhaustible resources with capacity constraints and adjustment costs (to build coal, gas, and renewable power plants). It finds that optimal...

Climate change and climate policies will affect poverty reduction efforts through direct and immediate impacts on the poor and by affecting factors that condition poverty reduction, such as economic growth. This paper explores this relation between climate change and policies and poverty...

This paper investigates the optimal timing of greenhouse gas abatement efforts in a multi-sectoral model with economic inertia, each sector having a limited abatement potential. It defines economic inertia as the conjunction of technical inertia -- a social planner chooses investment on...

This paper uses a Ramsey model with two types of capital to analyze the optimal transition to clean capital when polluting investment is irreversible. The cost of climate mitigation decomposes as a technical cost of using clean instead of polluting capital and a transition cost from the...

The optimal timing, sectoral distribution, and cost of greenhouse gas emission reductions is different when abatement is obtained though abatement expenditures chosen along an abatement cost curve, or through investment in low-carbon capital. In the latter framework, optimal investment costs...

Green industrial policies can be defined as industrial policies with an environmental goal -- or more precisely, as sector-targeted policies that affect the economic production structure with the aim of generating environmental benefits. This paper provides a framework to assess their...

Decision makers facing abatement targets need to decide which abatement measures to implement, and in which order. This paper investigates the ability of marginal abatement cost (MAC) curves to inform this decision, reanalysing a MAC curve developed by the World Bank on Brazil. Misinterpreting...