We conduct a sensitivity analysis to describe conditions under which liquid fuel producers would fund the development of a climate backstop. We estimate (1) the cost to develop competitively priced direct CO₂ air capture technology, a possible climate backstop and (2) the effect of this...

A frequently made claim in the innovation literature is that important inventions involve the transfer of new knowledge from one technological domain to another. This study uses U.S. patents granted from 1976-2006 to identify the role of knowledge acquired from outside each patent’s...

We present an analysis of the barriers and opportunities for incorporating air quality co-benefits into climate policy assessments. It is well known that many strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions also decrease emissions of health-damaging air pollutants and precursor species, including...

This report looks at the most important uncertain details of climate change mitigation policy, depicts the dispersion of implementation details in existing policy proposals, assesses which ones will have greater cost impacts, and then describes the type of scenarios that could have major direct...

Widespread public funding of nascent energy technologies, combined with recent increases in the costs of those that have been most heavily supported, has raised the stakes of a policy dilemma: should policy makers sustain these programs anticipating that recent cost increases are temporary...

We combined an expert elicitation and a bottom-up manufacturing cost model to compare the effects of R&D and demand subsidies. We modeled their effects on the future costs of a low-carbon energy technology that is not currently commercially available, purely organic photovoltaics (PV). We found...

Moving non-incremental innovations from the pilot scale to full commercial scale raises questions about the need and implementation of public support. Heuristics from the literature put policy makers in a dilemma between addressing a market failure and acknowledging a government failure:...

The incorporation of experience curves has enhanced the treatment of technological change in models used to evaluate the cost of climate and energy policies. However, the set of activities that experience curves are assumed to capture is much broader than the set that can be characterized by...