With countries from around the world set to meet in Copenhagen to try to hammer out a post-2012 climate change agreement, no one would disagree that a U.S. commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions is essential to such a global pact. However, despite U.S. president Obama's recent announcement...

Federal action addressing climate change is likely to emerge either through new legislation or via the U.S. EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act. The prospect of federal action raises important questions regarding the interconnections between federal efforts and state-level climate policy...

There is growing impetus for a domestic U.S. climate policy that can provide meaningful reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. In this article, I propose and analyze a scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically feasible approach for the United States to...

In this paper we argue that when a subgroup of countries cooperate on emission reduction, the optimal response of non-signatory countries reflects the interaction between three potentially opposing factors, the incentive to free-ride on the benefits of cooperation, the incentive to expand the...

Emissions of greenhouse gases linked with global climate change are affected by diverse aspects of economic activity, including individual consumption, business investment, and government spending. An effective climate policy will have to modify the decision calculus for these activities in the...

This paper examines the determinants of climate related disasters and attempts to estimate the presence of adaptive capacity in terms of per capita income and population density elasticities. We find evidence of adaptive capacity in a “weak” form both in terms of income and population...

A simplified energy balance climate model is considered with the global mean temperature as the state variable, and an endogenous ice line. The movements of the ice line towards the Poles are associated with damage reservoirs where initial damages are high and then eventually vanish as the ice...

Urban areas have particular sensitivities to climate change, and therefore adaptation to a warming planet represents a challenging new issue for urban policy makers in both the developed and developing world. Further to climate mitigation strategies implemented in various cities over the past 20...

This paper examines biofuels from an economic perspective and evaluates the merits of promoting biofuel production in the context of the policies' multiple objectives, life-cycle implications, pecuniary externalities, and other unintended consequences. The policy goals most often cited are to...

The ongoing process of climate change goes along with an increase in the frequency and severity of various sorts of natural disasters. While the existing literature has almost exclusively focused on studying the direct effects resulting from different types of disasters, the effect of changing...