Given the agreed urgency of decarbonizing electricity and the need to guide decentralized private decisions, an adequate and credible carbon price appears essential. The paper defines and quantifies the useful concept of the break-even carbon price for mature zero-carbon electricity investments. It appears an attractive alternative given the difficulty of measuring the social cost of carbon, bu...

The Clean Air Act provides the primary regulatory framework for climate policy in the United States. Tradable performance standards (averaging) emerge as the likely tool to achieve flexibility in the regulation of existing stationary sources. This paper examines the relationship between flexibility and stringency. The metric to compare the stringency of policies is ambiguous. The relevant secti...

Pollution emissions impose serious social negative externalities, especially in terms of public health. To reduce pollution emissions cost-effectively, the marginal abatement costs (MACs) of pollution emissions must be determined. Since the industrial sectors are the essential pillars of China's economic growth, as well as leading energy consumers and sulfur dioxide (SO₂) emitters, estimating M...

Title of Dissertation: Dissertation Directed By: ENERGY TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION Haewon C. McJeon, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Professor Matthias Ruth School of Public Policy This dissertation examines the role that technology plays in climate change mitigation. It contains three essays each focusing on different aspects of the process in which advancements in low-car...

Air pollution in industrial cities with emissions from firms is a growing problem in India. Durgapur, one of the growing industrial cities in eastern India, covering a host of industries, suffers from similar problems. The paper estimates the marginal abatement cost of air pollution of industries in Durgapur, West Bengal. We model the technology of a firm with output-distance function. Here the...

We consider a class of problems, which we call “SFQ” problems, in which both stocks and ows can be controlled to promote the quality of a valued resource, such as environmental quality or public infrastructure. Under the optimal policy, periodic restoration of the stock of quality complements positive but variable abatement of the ow of damages. When deterioration is more rapid or highly vari...

Energy conservation and greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement have been included in the national development strategy of China, however, the rigidity in command-and-control, absence of market-mechanism and arbitrariness in assignment of abatement burden across regions have caused unnecessary losses in both economic efficiency and social equity. In this paper, we established an Inter-Regional CGE model...

This paper studies countries’ incentives to develop advanced pollution abatement technology when technology may spillover across countries and pollution abatement is a global public good. We are motivated in part by the problem of global warming: a solution to this involves providing a global public good, and will surely require the development and implementation of new technologies. We show th...

A major concern with tradable emission permits is that stochastic permit prices may reduce a firm’s incentive to invest in abatement capital or technologies relative to other policies such as a fixed emissions charge. However, under efficient permit trading, the permit price uncertainty is caused by abatement cost uncertainties which affect investment under both permit and charge policies. We d...

Using a simple analytical model incorporating benefits of a stock, costs of adjusting the stock, and uncertainty in costs, we uncover several important principles governing the choice of price-based policies (e.g., taxes) relative to quantity-based policies (e.g., tradable permits) for controlling stock externalities. Applied to the problem of greenhouse gases and climate change, we find that a...