Energy products such as power, gas, and oil have long been the world's premier commodities. Consumers demand that power and fuel are available when they want it and they prefer to pay less for it. Few know or care where their fuel or power comes from. So for years energy companies believed that...

This paper examines the contribution of market expectations to commodity price dynamics. It proposes a dynamic competitive storage framework with an expectations shock explicitly along with concurrent shocks to study the commodity price movements. This allows for a more refined analysis of the...

Many new and ambitious energy efficiency and conservation laws are being enacted at all levels of government - and with greater financial incentives than provided previously. These innovations are intended to overcome or minimize market barriers such as principal-agent problems, information and...

This paper presents an estimate of the costs of reducing CO2 emissions as agreed in Kyoto by Annex 1 countries. Unlike most of the existing literature, this paper uses an Almost Ideal Demand System model for energy products to estimate the role of each country within the Annex 1 market. A major...

This paper provides a comprehensive global, regional, and country-level update of: (i) efficient fossil fuel prices to reflect their full private and social costs; and (ii) subsidies implied by mispricing fuels. The methodology improves over previous IMF analyses through more sophisticated...

This paper estimates fossil fuel subsidies and the economic and environmental benefits from reforming them, focusing mostly on a broad notion of subsidies arising when consumer prices are below supply costs plus environmental costs and general consumption taxes. Subsidies are $4.9 trillion...

WP 201 takes a historical perspective in analysing past systemic social-ecological transition processes. The research paper (MS 27) emerging from task 201.2 explores two major energy transitions of the past: the transition to the use of fossil fuels (e.g. starting with coal in the UK in the 17th...

For effective mitigation of the current severe economic crisis, developing countries can seize real opportunities for cleaner growth, including low-carbon growth. While complex and long, the process of greening economies can and should be gradually piloted towards selected “poles of clean...

The favored federal policy to address climate change is a domestic cap-and-trade system. However, a vocal minority of political leaders have begun arguing in favor of a carbon tax. Carbon taxes seem particularly attractive both for fiscal reasons and because they provide certainty over the price...

In this article, Professor Kaswan argues that hoped-for greenhouse gas reductions cannot be achieved without reducing consumption. Given their control over land use and buildings, cities can play a key role in reducing consumption. She argues that, while existing federal proposals for a...