Annual global CO2 emission forecasts at 2100 span 10 to 40 billion tonnes. Modeling work over the past decade has not narrowed this range nor provided much guidance about probabilities. We examine the time-series properties of historical per capita CO2 emissions and conclude that per capita...

Policy discussions on global warming are focused on mitigation and adaptation. Here the role of ex post compensation as a substitute for ex ante mitigation is considered. In a simple 2-period model the salient features of the global warming problem suggest mitigation is difficult to motivate. A...

Inducing farmers to adopt alternative, more environmentally friendly production practices has been attempted in a variety of ways ranging from moral suasion to direct regulation to economic instruments. Among the most common instruments are voluntary cost-share programs that involve taxpayers...

The contribution of this paper is to show that a simple nonlinear tax can achieve a long-run socially optimal level of pollution without the regulator knowing marginal abatement costs. Firms are charged their differential contribution to total damages, evaluated at the upper margin of current...

Confusion surrounding the appropriateness of long-run considerations in effluent regulation has arisen in the literature and recently carried over into textbooks. We use a factor input model under oligopsony to show that, when firms can influence the level of marginal damages, a linear pollution...

The Stern Review, described as the most comprehensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change, was published on 30 October 2006. The twin papers from a combined team of scientists and economists present a critique in two parts of the Stern Review. Part I focuses on scientific...

"Scientific assessment panels are playing increasingly influential roles in national and international policy formation. Although they typically appeal to the standard of journal peer review as their quality control criterion, there seems to be confusion about what peer review actually does. It...