Climate change involves fundamental international asymmetries in terms of its sources and impacts. The World Development Report 2010 presents an optimistic picture of the possibilities for tackling global warming, its optimism rather at odds with the gloomy prospects that may well be in store...

The authorities have a very ambitious environmental-policy agenda, aimed chiefly at cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also at dealing with local air and water pollution, waste management and the conservation of biodiversity. The laws that followed the Grenelle de l?environnement...

Large nuclear waste management, laboratory and electric power generating complexes are a daunting challenge for state, regional and local planners. A survey of 2101 residents who lived near 11 nuclear power plants and US Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear waste management sites and laboratories...

The Kyoto Protocol has not only created carbon emission reduction obligations for industrialized countries, but also opportunities for the private sector to participate in its "flexible mechanisms". One of these mechanisms is Joint Implementation, which allows private legal entities to engage in...

The Green Paradox states that, in the absence of a tax on CO2 emissions, subsidizing a renewable backstop such as solar or wind energy brings forward the date at which fossil fuels become exhausted and consequently global warming is aggravated. We shed light on this issue by solving a model of...

This paper analyzes greenhouse gas emissions that build up an atmospheric stock which depreciates over time. Weakly renegotiation-proof and subgame perfect equilibria in a game of international emission reduction exist if countries put a sufficiently high weight on future payoffs, even though...

The world financial and economic crisis is the worse since the Great Depression. But it should not be forgotten that climate change is dangerously and continuously destroying planet earth. This editorial does not deny the importance of the economic mess that bankers and hedge-fund managers have...

Funding a response to climate change after Kyoto will require another look at both burden sharing and funding mechanisms. After reviewing the risks of cap-and-trade with carbon offsets and the advantages of a harmonized carbon tax, a method is proposed to utilize a harmonized carbon tax to...

This paper discusses to what extent the recent trends in energy consumption and production are compatible with the requirements of sustainable development. For this purpose, starting from a simple identity applied to the energy sector, we use the decomposition analysis to derive a few analytical...