Stabilization and global climate policy

Targets for global climate policy: An overview

A survey of the economic impact of climate change and the marginal damage costs shows that carbon dioxide emissions are a negative externality. The estimated Pigou tax and its growth rate are too low to justify the climate policy targets set by political leaders. A lower discount rate or greater concern for the global distribution of income would justify more stringent climate policy, but would...

Agriculture and global climate stabilization: a public good analysis

Cumulative carbon as a policy framework for achieving climate stabilization

The primary objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that will avoid dangerous climate impacts. However, greenhouse gas concentration stabilization is an awkward framework within which to assess dangerous climate change on account of the significant lag between a given concentration level and the eventual equ...

Adaptive Management of the Global Climate Problem: Bridging the Gap between Climate Research and Climate Policy

To date the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concerned itself with gathering a state of the art review of the science of climate change. While significant progress has been made in enhancing our integrated understanding of the climate system and the dynamics of the social systems that produce an array of potential greenhouse gases, it is also clear from the panel’s reports h...

U.S. ClImATE mITIGATION IN THE CONTExT OF GlOBAl STABIlIzATION

SUMMARy This issue brief examines recent studies of long-term scenarios for stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to understand whether and how near-term U.S. climate policy can translate into environmentally significant climate outcomes. Specifically, the focus is on modeling analyses that have attempted to quantify the emissions reductions necessary to achieve a de...