The “Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change” reached conclusions and policy recommendations dramatically different from most of the earlier economic analyses of climate change. It found that the costs of climate change, as well as the potential net benefits of greenhouse gas...

Global governance institutions for climate change, such as those established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, have so far failed to make a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Following the lead of Elinor Ostrom, this paper offers an...

Chapter 1 of my book SELLING HOT AIR: EMISSIONS TRADING AND OFFSETS (forthcoming CUP 2011) describes the theory and practice of emissions trading and offsets. Chapter 2 then examines and exposes the flaws in the Kyoto Protocol's comprehensive trading and offset systems. The present chapter...

Climate change presents the greatest collective action problem the international community has yet confronted. The unequal distribution of expected costs and benefits from climate change (based on mean damage estimates from probability distribution functions) creates different incentives for...

States have treaty-based and customary international law-based responsibilities to ensure that greenhouse gas emissions emanating from their territory do not cause transboundary harm. However, those international legal responsibilities conflict with the observed behavior of states, which...

This essay examines the relationship between property rights and environmental protection. According to the 'tragedy of the commons' model, environmental pollution and resource depletion result from the inadequate specification of property rights on environmental goods. Two solutions are...

This chapter surveys the origins of emissions trading in theory and early practice, from John Dales' initial explication of the instrument through its first large scale experiment in the 1990 US Clean Air Act Amendments

Elinor Ostrom's IAD and SES frameworks are both widely used among social scientists. Each framework suffers from significant problems not shared by the other. For instance, the IAD framework pays insufficient attention to important social and, especially, ecological variables that can affect or...

Economists and legal scholars have known for decades that "economic instruments," including cap-and-trade regimes and effluent taxes, can reduce emissions at lower cost than command-and-control regulations. Yet, the US system of environmental law remains heavily dominated by command-and-control....

This is a substantially revised, refocused, and updated version of an earlier draft paper, exploring the significant role Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) plays in facilitating or impeding legislative and regulatory policy decisions. The paper centers around three case studies of CBAs EPA prepared...