The outcome of the December 2011 United Nations climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, provides an important new opportunity to move toward an international climate policy architecture that is capable of delivering broad international participation and significant global CO2 emissions...

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies. First, by creating this system to reduce SO2 emissions to curb acid...

This paper provides a simple analytic approach for measuring the burden of carbon pricing that does not require sophisticated and numerically intensive economic models but which is not limited to restrictive assumptions of forward shifting of carbon prices. We also show how to adjust for the...

This paper develops an analytical model to quantify the costs and distributional effects of various fiscal options for allocating the (large) rents created under prospective cap-and-trade programs to reduce domestic, energy-related CO2 emissions. The trade-off between cost effectiveness and...

Revised July 2011James K. Boyce and Matthew Riddle have updated earlier anlysis that examines the household-level impacts of a cap-and-dividend plan, and how they differ between states. In this paper, the authors not only consider the specific parameters of the 2010 CLEAR Act, but also add an...

In pursuit of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, policymakers in some Canadian provinces are contemplating a low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS), a regulation that would require transportation fuel providers to distribute a mix of fuel that, on average, emitted a declining amount of GHG per...

California will enact an economy wide cap-and-trade program on CO2. Estimates of the value of tradable emissions allowances in the first year range from roughly $2.6 to $7.8 billion, when electricity and industry are covered under the program. Those sectors receive most of their allowances for...

California will implement a cap-and-trade program to limit emissions of carbon dioxide covering industry and electricity sector emissions in 2013, expanding to cover transportation and natural gas in 2015. Although cap-and-trade would increase annual electricity costs for the average customer by...

Cap-and-trade programs, such as the EU carbon Emission Trading Scheme, are currently the most prominent market-based method used to reduce carbon emissions. Cap-and-trade programs are, on theoretical grounds, considered to be a cost-efficient method. Experimental evidence, however, shows that...

In this paper, we discuss the design of carbon dioxide (CO2) taxes at the domestic and international level and the choice of taxes versus a cap-and-trade system. A strong case can be made for taxes on uncertainty, fiscal, and distributional grounds, though this critically hinges on policy...