With the Swedish student Greta Thunberg, the protest for the environment has taken on a personal face. Her central statement is: "Politicians are doing far too little for climate protection. This is irresponsible towards the youth." Something new has happened: Suddenly young people have become...

This study investigates the dynamic efficiency of an emissionregulation regime where companies competitively pay for emissionlicences. We embed the emission licence market in a Cournotmodel where the price of emission licences is subject to strategictradeoff between licences and abatement...

In this paper we study the short term price behavior of December 2008 future prices for EU emissionallowances. We model returns and volatility dynamics of this price showing that a standard ARMA-GARCHframework is not adequate and that the gaussianity assumption is rejected due to the occurrence...

Although gasoline taxes are widely used (nearly) efficient CO2 emission controls, additional fuel-efficiency regulation is applied e.g. in the USA and in Europe. In a simple analytical model, we specify the welfare implications of (i) gasoline taxes, (ii) of 'gas-guzzler taxes' (iii) of...

Methane is a major anthropogenic greenhouse gas, second only to carbon dioxide (CO2) in its impact on climate change. Methane (CH4) has a high global warming potential that is 25 times as large as the one of CO2 on a 100 year time horizon according to the latest IPCC report. Thus, CH4...

Ground level ozone remains a serious problem in the United States. Because ozone non-attainment is a summer problem, episodic rather than continuous controls of ozone precursors are possible. We evaluate the costs and effectiveness of an episodic scheme that requires people to buy permits in...

As an important step towards building a "harmonious society" through "scientific development", China has incorporated for the first time in its five-year economic plan an energy input indicator as a constraint. While it achieved a quadrupling of its GDP while cutting its energy intensity by...

Just prior to the Copenhagen climate summit, China pledged to cut its carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 relative to its 2005 levels to help to reach an international climate change agreement at Copenhagen or beyond. This raises the issue of whether such a pledge is ambitious or just represents...

France has 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 encompass policy...

Environmental information disclosure strategies, which involve corporate attempts to increase the availability of information on pollution and emissions, can become a basis for a new wave of environmental protection policy that follows and has the potential to complement traditional command and...