We analyse games of greenhouse gas emission reduction in which the emissions and the emission reduction costs of one country depend on other countries’ emission abatement. In an analytically tractable model, we show that international trade effects on costs and emissions can either increase or decrease incentives to reduce emissions and to cooperate on emission abatement; in some specifications...

Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) involve the collaboration on reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in developing countries with suitable countermeasures relevant to the state of technological and economic conditions prevalent in the country. This study proposes appropriate GHG countermeasures in Thai transport NAMAs, which are based on the implementation of transport dem...

This paper examines how enforcement affects the structure and performance of emissions trading programs with price controls under uncertainty about firms’ abatement costs. The analysis highlights how an enforcement strategy can cause abatement-cost risk to be transmitted to enforcement costs via the price of permits. When this occurs, accommodating the effect of abatement-cost risk with an opti...

Banking has been an important component of sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions trading in the U.S. Acid Rain Program and it is commonly included as a desirable feature of cap-and-trade programs for limiting emissions. This paper evaluates the performance of this temporal dimension of SO2 allowance trading based on the five years in which the SO2 bank was built up and the first year of draw-down that...

Unilateral carbon policies are inefficient due to the fact that they generally involve emission reductions in countries with high marginal abatement costs and because they are subject to carbon leakage. In this paper, we ask whether the use of carbon tariffs — tariffs on the carbon embodied in imported goods — might lower the cost of achieving a given reduction in world emissions. Specifically,...

While theory suggests that information programs may correct market failures and improve welfare, the empirical impacts of these policies remain undetermined. We show that mandatory disclosure programs in the electricity industry achieve stated policy goals. We find that the proportion of fossil fuels decreases, and the proportion of clean fuels increases in response to disclosure programs. Howe...

This paper presents a survey of methods of regulations with focus on pollution abatement and of various approaches to the issue of measuring quantities such as the marginal benefit of improved health that are crucial in view of implementing the regulation. Since pollution is a public bad, in general the efficient level of pollution can only be reached by way of some sort of public intervention....

We investigate how ideas from the International Environmental Agreement (IEA) literature can be applied to the problem of space debris mitigation. Space debris pollution is similar to other international environmental problems in that there is a potential for a ‘‘tragedy of the commons’’ effect: individual nations bear all the cost of their mitigation measures but share only a fraction of the b...