Modellers have examined a wide array of ideal-world scenarios for regulation of greenhouse gases. In this ideal world, all countries limit emissions from all economic sectors; regulations are implemented by intelligent, well-informed forward-looking agents; all abatement options, such as new...

International carbon offsets have been promoted since the Kyoto Protocol and an increasing number of countries have implemented or proposed cap-and-trade schemes with international trading, even though with quantitative or qualitative restrictions. Those limits reflect the trade-off between...

We describe three essential elements of an effective post-2012 international global climate policy architecture: a means to ensure that key industrialized and developing nations are involved in differentiated but meaningful ways; an emphasis on an extended time path of targets; and inclusion of...

The paper considers a situation where two countries - the North and the South - use a non-traded polluting input to produce the goods for final consumption. The North is more efficient in both, production and abatement processes. The study compares the effects of the transfer of abatement...

Three gaps in the Kyoto Protocol most badly need to be filled: the absence of emission targets extending far into the future, the absence of participation by the United States, China, and other developing countries, and the absence of reason to think that members will abide by commitments. To 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...

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...

Our purpose is to analyse the effectiveness and efficiency of a Partial Climate Agreement with open entry under a non-cooperative Nash-Equilibrium framework. We evaluate a partial agreement policy in which non-signatory countries can decide to join or to leave a coalition of the willing at any...

This paper examines how changes in an international climate regime would affect the European decarbonization strategy and costs through the mechanisms of trade, technology, and innovation. We present the results from the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) model comparison study on European climate...

After twenty years of global negotiations, the world is still far from a comprehensive climate agreement. The "top-down" approach embodied by the Kyoto Protocol has all but stalled, chiefly due to disagreements over levels of ambition and objections to financial transfers. To avoid those...