Temperature records compiled by the International Panel on Climate Change are biased by non-climatic factors that are largely socioeconomic in origin. The result is that as much as 50 percent of the land-surface warming that has been detected in recent decades may not be the product of global...

The recent wave of global warming legislation and litigation represents a triumph for climate change activists. But it is in no way a rational, economically sound response to the problems potentially raised by global warming. It ignores the likely costs and benefits of global warming on...

Energy use is intertwined with environmental harms, climate, and economic development. However, the United States has failed to balance these interests together to make effective policy that can address each of these issues. The need for such integrative policy has become more and more obvious...

If the U.S. should limit carbon dioxide emissions, an allowance trading policy may offer one method of achieving that goal in a cost-effective manner. The distributional effects of such a program could be large, far in excess of the actual cost to the economy. This paper examines how two key...

We study an international climate agreement that assigns emission quotas to each participating country. Unlike the simplest models in the literature, we assume that abatement costs are affected by R&D activities undertaken in all firms in all countries, i.e. abatement technologies are...

Economic globalization affects the environment and sustainable development in several ways and through various channels. The purpose of this paper is to review the key links between globalization and the environment. The paper intends to consider the major issues in multilateral economic...

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...

Empirical evidence evaluating the efficiency of economic instruments is still rare, despite significant theoretical advances over the last decades. The objective of this paper is to evaluate one form of environmental taxation, the French tax on air pollution from 1990-99. While starting out in...

This article explains the numerous environmental protections contained in an unlikely statute, the Federal Power Act, first enacted in 1920. Federally licensed hydropower projects are often the largest influences on streamflows in watersheds, so making the projects environmentally compatible is...

Environmental policies typically combine the identification of a goal with some means to achieve that goal. This chapter focuses exclusively on the second component, the means – the “instruments” – of environmental policy, and considers, in particular, experience around the world with...