Global climate change poses a threat to the well-being of humans and other living things through impacts on ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, capital productivity, and human health. This paper briefly surveys recent research on the economics of climate change, including theoretical insights...

Congress is likely to consider domestic climate change legislation during 2009, with a cap-and-trade system continuing to draw support from the Obama Administration and many leaders in Congress. Yet cap-and-trade regulations would take years for EPA to develop and implement, the desired price...

There is currently a consensus amongst the political establishment - and amongst the intellectual communities that feed into it - that detailed and wide-ranging government intervention is necessary to combat the effects of climate change. This monograph challenges that consensus. The authors...

Nitrogen management policies introduced in the past decades by some OECD countries have succeeded in reducing excess nitrogen use by farmers, but half of global mineral fertiliser use is still lost for crops. While about half of OECD countries have nutrient surpluses of between 25-50 kg N per...

A central issue in climate policy is the question whether long-term targets for green- house gas emissions should be adopted. This paper analyzes strategic effects related to the timing of such commitments. Using a two-country model, we identify a redistributive effect that undermines long-term...

A formula is derived for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that takes account of intragenerational income inequality and its evolution with economic growth. The social discount rate (SDR) should be adjusted to account for intragenerational and intergenerational inequality aversion and for risk...

Environmental policies are discussed when two countries differ in their ability to abate pollution. Northern eco-industries (the industry supplying abatement activities) are more efficient than Southern ones. Segmented environmental markets and a Northern monopoly yield identical second-best...

Economics has played an increasingly important role in shaping policy, in the United States and elsewhere. This chapter reviews some of the dimensions of the economic approach to analyzing, understanding, and developing solutions to the problem of climate change. We then turn to the issue of...

Intensity standards have gained substantial momentum as a regulatory instrument in US climate policy. Based on numerical simulations with a large-scale computable general equilibrium model we show that intensity standards may rather increase than decrease counterproductive carbon leakage....