This paper offers a framework for regulating internalities. Using a simple economic model, we provide four principles for designing and evaluating behaviorally-motivated policy. We then outline rules for determining which contexts reliably reflect true preferences and discuss empirical...

It is almost certain that the US Congress is going to pass some kind of comprehensive climate change legislation that in some fashion will have mandatory limits or costs for the production of Carbon Dioxide. How this legislation is constructed will have enormous impacts on the economy and the...

Concerns about climate change have led many to advocate for future reliance on nuclear power, a constant low‐​carbon energy source. But nuclear’s high capital costs have historically precluded its ability to be cost‐​competitive with fossil fuel generators. Would nuclear power be...

The capture and permanent storage of CO2 emissions from coal combustion is now widely viewed as imperative for stabilization of the global climate. Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel. This trend presents a forceful case for the development and wide dissemination of technologies...

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a promising technology that might allow for significant reductions in CO2 emissions. But at present CCS is very expensive and its performance is highly uncertain at the scale of commercial power plants. Such challenges to deployment, though, are not new to...

Emission trading has become recently more and more import in environmental regulation. In the context of controlling greenhouse gas emissions, the directive on a Europewide trading scheme for large immobile sources may be perceived as one of the most important milestones in recent years. Prior...

Promoting energy efficiency (EE) has become a leading policy response to greenhouse gas emissions, energy dependence, and the cost of new generators and transmission lines. Such policies present numerous puzzles. Electricity prices below marginal production costs could warrant EE policies if EE...

Artificial photosynthesis (AP) is an area of well-advanced research involving large international groups at the cutting edge of synthetic biology and nanotechnology. In simple terms it offers to produce a cheap source of hydrogen for fuel through using sunlight to split water, as well as making...

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...