Temperature records compiled by the International Panel on Climate Change are biased by non-climatic factors that are largely socioeconomic in origin. The result is that as much as 50 percent of the land-surface warming that has been detected in recent decades may not be the product of global...

The recent wave of global warming legislation and litigation represents a triumph for climate change activists. But it is in no way a rational, economically sound response to the problems potentially raised by global warming. It ignores the likely costs and benefits of global warming on...

The effects of two environmental policy options for the reduction of pollution emissions, i.e. taxes and non-tradable quotas, are analyzed. In contrast to the prior literature this work endogenously takes into account the level of emissions before and after the adoption of the new environmental...

Subsidies to renewable energy are costly and contentious. We estimate the reduction in prices that follows from the subsidized entry of wind power in the Nordic electricity market. A relatively small-scale entry of renewables leads to a large-scale transfer of surplus from the incumbent...

Subsidies to renewable energy are costly and contentious. We estimate the reduction in prices that follows from the subsidized entry of wind power in the Nordic electricity market. A relatively small-scale entry of renewables leads to a large-scale transfer of surplus from the incumbent...

We investigate a central issue in the climate change debate associated with the Kyoto Protocol: the likely performance of international greenhouse gas trading mechanisms. Virtually all design studies and many projections of the costs of meeting the Kyoto targets have assumed that an...

This article evaluates an environmental protection instrument that the literature has hitherto largely overlooked, Dirty Input Limits (DILs), quantitative limits on the inputs that cause pollution. DILs provide an alternative to cumbersome output-based emissions trading and performance...

This paper suggests that a mixture of measures may be needed to encourage renewable energy under the Kyoto Protocol. It explains that the goal of maximizing short term cost effectiveness tends to conflict with the goal of encouraging the long-term technological development that the world will...

When Congress faces a controversial choice about pollution, it generally follows a two-step plan: announce some lofty goal but not explain how the goal is to be achieved, then outsource the rulemaking to the EPA or some other federal agency so that the legislators can claim credit for protecting...