Fear for oil exhaustion and its consequences on economic growth has been a driver of a rich literature on exhaustible resources from the 1970s onwards. But our view on oil has remarkably changed and we now worry how we should constrain climate change damages associated with oil and other fossil...

When the United States puts a cap on carbon emissions as part of the effort to address the problem of global climate change, this will increase the prices of fossil fuels, significantly impacting not only consumers but also local, state, and federal governments. Consumers can be “made...

This essay examines the distributional effects of a “cap-and-dividend" policy for reducing carbon emission in the United States: a policy that auctions carbon permits and distributes the revenue to the public on an equal per capita basis. The aim of the policy is to reduce U.S. emissions of...

We study a dynamic carbon pollution model where carbon accumulates both inside a nonrenewable and a renewable reservoir with a constant regeneration rate. Two primary energy sources are available: a cheap exhaustible fossil fuel (coal) and an expensive clean energy alternative (solar). To avoid...

Traditionally, wood fuels, like other bioenergy sources, have been considered carbon neutral because the amount of CO2 released can be offset by CO2 sequestration due to the regrowth of the biomass. Thus, until recently, most studies assigned a global warming potential (GWP) of zero to CO2...

Reducing CO2 emissions is imperative to stay within the 2oC global warming ‘safe limit’ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However to ensure social and political stability, these reductions must be aligned with fuel security and economic growth. Here an advanced multifactorial...

This paper discusses the merits and limits of the recent European energy policy aimed at reducing carbon emissions, devoting particular attention to the European Trading System of carbon permits and to the measures that the European Union has adopted to promote renewable energy sources. From the...

This paper studies innovation dynamics in efficiency improving electricity generation technologies as an important means of mitigating climate change impacts. Relevant patents are identified and used as an indicator of innovation. We find that patenting in efficiency improving technologies has...