Energy security, local air pollution and GHG emissions are three key challenges facing China’s decision-makers. In this study, we first applied CIMS, a hybrid (bottom-up/top-down) energyeconomy model, to test how different policy packages could be designed to alleviate China’s energy and environment challenges. Secondly, we compared the marginal abatement cost curve of this study with those of ...

This paper presents an estimation of the cost of reducing CO2 emissions as agreed in Kyoto by Annex I countries. Unlike most of the existing literature, this paper focuses on European Union countries abatement costs and, using a simple model, estimates the role of each EU country within a EU market as well as an Annex 1 market. As a major result, marginal (and total) abatement costs for each EU...

Tradable permits are celebrated as a political instrument since they allow (i) firms to equalize marginal abatement costs through trade and (ii) the government to distribute the burden of the policy in a politically fair and feasible way. These two concerns, however, conflict in a dynamic setting. Anticipating that high-cost firms will receive more permits in the future, firms purchase excessiv...

When the US federal government first began regulating major sources of air pollution in the 1960s, the conventional approach to meeting air quality standards involved establishing maximum emissions rates or technology based standards for regulated stationary sources. However, economists have long maintained that an emissions permit market could more efficiently coordinate pollution abatement ac...

We show that for a broad class of technologies the relationship between policy stringency and the rate of technology adoption is inverted U-shaped. This happens when the marginal abatement cost (MAC) curves of conventional and new technologies intersect, which invariably occurs when emissions are proportional to output and technological progress reduces emissions per output. This outcome does n...

Carbon sequestration is believed to “buy time” for technical change in the energy sector. To assess rigorously this widespread argument, we build an intertemporal optimization model where both abatement of fossil fuel emissions and biomass sequestration can be used to mitigate climate change. We confirm that permanent sequestration, if feasible, can be a cost-effective part of an overall climat...

The UK Government recently reviewed its methodology to value greenhouse gas emissions in policy appraisal. The Review implemented a move away from the previous approach, which used estimates of marginal social damage costs (‘the social cost of carbon’) to value changes in emissions, to one in which valuation is based on the marginal abatement costs that will need to be incurred to meet specific...

This study analyses anaerobic digestion (AD) as a renewable energy technology by quantifying the emissions avoided and the cost incurred in the process. The quantitative model developed and demonstrated uses basic farm information to evaluate dairy farms from an environmental and economic perspective. Based on the cost of installing and operating an anaerobic digester and the emissions avoided ...