China had been singled out by Western politicians and media for dragging its feet on international climate negotiations at Copenhagen, the accusations previously always targeted on the U.S. To put such a criticism into perspective, this paper provides some reflections on China's stance and...

China has realized that for its own sake and from the international community’s perspective, it cannot afford to continue along the conventional path of encouraging economic growth at the expense of the environment. Accordingly, the country has placed ecological goals at the same level of...

Canada has an ambitious plan to reduce the economy’s net emissions to zero by 2050. This will require a step change in mitigation action, with deep energy savings and near economy-wide replacement of fossil fuels with clean energy. Achieving this while minimising negative impacts on activity...

Energy affordability can be defined as a household’s ability to pay for necessary levels of energy use within normal spending patterns. This paper uses three indicators to measure energy affordability risk in 20 OECD countries. Energy affordability risk differs widely between countries. The...

Electricity consumption will comprise an increasing share of global energy demand during the next two decades. In recent years, the increasing prices of fossil fuels and concerns about the environmental consequences of greenhouse gas emissions have renewed the interest in the development of...

This paper studies the long-term distribution of energy-efficiency outcomes in the German residential sector. To uncover the underlying energy efficiency of buildings, we estimate the causal response of building-level heat energy demand to variability in heating degree days. We examine...

The aim of this paper is to enunciate a new way to estimate levelized cost of electric energy (LCOE), considering emission of greenhouse gases cost, by taking the theoretical cost of avoiding pollution as the emission cost. In this way, it would be comparable LCOE from different sources of...

Ottawa should establish a nationwide floor price for carbon, according to a new C.D. Howe Institute report. In “Carbon Copies: The Prospect for an Economy-Wide Carbon Price in Canada,” author Tracy Snoddon argues that a single economy-wide carbon price is required to achieve emissions...

We estimate the causal impact of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme on manufacturing firms using comprehensive panel data from the German production census. Semiparametric matching estimators yield robust evidence that the policy caused treated firms to abate one fifth of their CO2 emissions...

Two main approaches have been implemented in regional CO2 markets to address competitiveness and carbon leakage: output based allocation (Australia, California, New Zealand) and capacity based allocation (EU). This paper characterizes the best policy, given that auctioning with border adjustment...