This paper deals with two different types of irreversibility: Pollution irreversibility occurs if the stock of pollution cannot be reduced (any more) by nature's assimilative capacity; characteristics irreversibility occurs when some characteristic of the environmental resource is irreversibly...

The first part of the paper focusses on the implications of optimal intertemporal pollution control under alternative hypotheses about the assimilative capacity of environmental resources. Then it is shown how the optimal intertemporal allocation could be achieved by an emission tax policy. As...