What should be the West's top priority for climate-change policy? This article is a revised and updated version of my talk to the Potsdam Global Sustainability Symposium (which drafted the Potsdam Declaration presented to the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference in Bali)

The development of unconventional gas extraction has led to significant declines in gas prices, recently followed by a large drop of oil prices. This is also the year which is supposed to deliver the long awaited post 2020 climate agreement. This article brings different pieces of research...

In this paper, we review the literature on carbon reduction policies detailing the main ways that carbon emissions are controlled. Three main categories of carbon reduction policies are surveyed: carbon sequestration, alternative energy sources, and carbon pricing. We survey academic literature...

Dieser Beitrag macht auf drei umweltpolitische Herausforderungen aufmerksam, die im gegenwärtigen Diskurs zum Themenkomplex Klima- und Umweltschutz zumeist nur am Rande und lediglich ansatzweise behandelt werden. Abschnitt 2 erörtert, inwiefern "Fake News" ein Problem für Umweltpolitik...

Focusing on tail effects, I incorporate distributions for temperature change and its economic impact in an analysis of climate change policy. I estimate the fraction of consumption w*(τ) that society would be willing to sacrifice to ensure that any increase in temperature at a future point is...

"Any economic analysis of climate change policy requires some model that describes the impact of warming on future GDP and consumption. Most integrated assessment models (IAMs) relate temperature to the level of real GDP and consumption, but there are theoretical and empirical reasons to expect...

After twenty years of global negotiations, the world is still far from a comprehensive climate agreement. The "top-down" approach embodied by the Kyoto Protocol has all but stalled, chiefly due to disagreements over levels of ambition and objections to financial transfers. To avoid those...

This paper studies a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model involving climate change. Our model allows for damages on economic growth resulting from global warming. In the calibration, we capture effects from climate change and feedback effects on the temperature dynamics. We solve for the...

The Australian Government asked the Productivity Commission to undertake a study on the ‘effective' carbon prices that result from emissions and energy reduction policies in Australia and other key economies (the UK, USA, Germany, New Zealand, China, India, Japan and South Korea). The...

We analyze and critique how optimizing Integrated Assessment Models, and specifically the widely-used DICE model, represent abatement costs. Many such models assume temporal independence – abatement costs in one period are not affected by prior abatement. We contrast this with three dimensions...