This paper analyzes the impact of environmental policy instruments on the choice of pollution control techniques. I ̄rst recast the existing theoretical model of pollution abatement technology choice. Previous studies have found that the cost savings to a ̄rm that adopts a technical innovation in pollution control are greater under a market-based instrument, such as an emissions tax or tradeabl...

Assessments of the benefits of climate change mitigation—and thus of the appropriate stringency of greenhouse gas emissions abatement—depend upon ethical, legal, and political economic considerations. Global climate change mitigation is often represented as a repeated prisoners’ dilemma in which the net benefits of sustained global cooperation exceed the net benefits of uncooperative unilateral...

BACKGROUND This paper describes a conceptual framework for solutions-focused management of chemical contaminants built on novel and systematic approaches for identifying, quantifying and reducing risks of these substances. METHODS The conceptual framework was developed in interaction with stakeholders representing relevant authorities and organisations responsible for managing environmental q...

Geosequestration is currently promoted by some in industry and government as the only realistic option to achieve major reductions in the Australian electricity sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. However its technical feasibility, cost effectiveness, theoretical abatement potential and possible environmental risks are not yet known. While there is clearly value in supporting development of this...

BACKGROUND The current literature reports increased infectious disease occurrence in various construction occupations, as an important contributor to morbidity and mortality arising from employment.These observations should be expanded to asbestos abatement workers, as the abatement can create an environment favorable for bacterial, viral and fungal infections. DISCUSSION Asbestos abatement w...

Macro economic studies of the costs of reducing CO2 emissions generally estimate the global cost of stabilising the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in the range 350–550 ppm in trillions of USD. This creates the impression that the cost of CO2 reductions is so large that it threatens economic development. But, presented in another way, a completely different picture emerges. There is widesprea...

Will economic growth inevitably degrade the environment, throughout development? This paper presents a simple household-choice framework that emphasizes the tradeoff between pollution-causing consumption and pollution-reducing abatement expenditures. The framework yields a simple explanation for Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKCs, i.e. non-monotonic, upward-turning paths of environment while de...

Many production activities generate undesirable byproducts in conjunction with the desirable outputs they produce. The present study uses an output distance function approach and its duality with the revenue function to estimate the marginal abatement cost of CO2 emissions from a sample of thermal plants in India. Two sets of exercises have been undertaken. The marginal abatement cost is first ...

We compare several emissions reduction instruments, including quantity policies with banking and borrowing, price policies, and hybrid policies (safety valve and price collar), using a dynamic model with stochastic baseline emissions. The instruments are compared under the design goal of obtaining the same expected cumulative emissions across all options. Based on simulation analysis with the m...

This thesis describes efforts made on the development of an existing catalytic incinerator. The development work, called process characterization, consists of four general parts. These are the development of measurement methodology, the studying of construction materials, the selection of suitable catalysts and the testing of the effects of process operation conditions. The two application area...