Many policymakers and academics argue that a comprehensive global treaty is the only effective method by which to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Some of them therefore see the failure to reach a post-Kyoto agreement at Copenhagen in 2009 as “catastrophic.” This Article argues instead...

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such...

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such...

Tradable voluntary emission reductions (VER’s), often called “offsets”, are a policy instrument designed to expand participation in emission cap regulations. In theory, voluntary reductions by unrestricted sources used as a substitute for increases in emissions, or unmet emission reduction...

This essay revisits the question of instrument choice for the regulation of externalities in the context of climate change. The central point is that the Pigouvian prescription to equate marginal control costs with the expected marginal benefits of damage reduction should guide the design of...

We propose a blueprint for an international emission permit market such as the EU trading scheme. Each country decides on the amount of permits it wants to offer. A fraction of these permits is freely allocated, the remainder is auctioned. Revenues from the auction are collected in a global fund...

A two-tier climate club exploits the comparative advantage of large countries to mete out punishments through trade, while taking their capacity to resist punishment as a constraint. Countries outside the coalition price carbon at a fixed fraction of the average carbon price adopted within the...