Australia’s transport greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are high and continue to grow, with current levels approximately one-third higher than in 1990 and increasing by around 1% annually. Efforts to curtail and reverse this growth have not been successful to date. In recent times, national policy development and debate has centred on market-based mechanisms to reduce GHG emissions, namely an emis...

Current policies in the road transport sector fail to deliver consistent and efficient incentives for greenhouse gas abatement (see companion article by Creutzig et al., in press). Market-based instruments such as cap-and-trade systems close this policy gap and complement traditional policies that are required where specific market failures arise. Even in presence of strong existing non-market ...

Faced with the latest predictions of the effects of climate change, the European Union has agreed to a fresh cut in carbon dioxide emissions of 20 per cent and to press for a global reduction of 30 per cent. Environment ministers dismissed calls to water down EU objectives and approved a binding set of new targets to be fulfilled by 2020, covering the period after the expiry of the Kyoto protoc...

This paper constitutes – to our best knowledge – the first econometric analysis on stock market effects of the EU Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). Our results suggest that EU Emission Allowance (EUA) price developments matter to the stock performance of electricity firms: EUA price changes and stock returns of the most important European electricity corporations are shown to be positively rela...

Linking the EU and Chinese Emission Trading Systems (ETS) increases cost-efficiency of reaching greenhouse gas mitigation targets, but both partners will benefit – if at all to different degrees. Using global computable-general equilibrium (CGE) model DART Kiel, we evaluate effects linking ETS in combination with 1) restricted allowances trading, 2) adjusted allowance endowments compensate Chin...

Much has been written about the economic and environmental performance of U.S. emissions trading programs for “acid rain” (sulfur dioxide) and nitrogen oxides. Less explored have been the unique roles and interactions of environmental regulators and the companies they regulate. I first examine how these roles change the way that regulators and companies operate within their own organizations an...

In this paper, we analyze the rationale for an energy policy mix when the European Emissions Trading scheme (ETS) is considered from a public choice perspective. That is, we argue that the economic textbook model of the ETS implausibly assumes 1) efficient policy design and 2) climate protection as the single objective of policy intervention. Contrary to these assumptions, we pro...

This study will review the environmental implications of dynamic policy objectives and instruments outlined in the European Union 7th Framework Programme (EU-FP7) Project DYNAmic policy MIXes for absolute decoupling of EU resource use from economic growth (DYNAMIX) to address reductions in food consumption, food waste and a change in waste handling systems. The environmental implications of red...

Early emissions trading programs obtained a very high rate of compliance, in part through a system of continuous emissions monitoring systems (CEMS). As they expand into a wider range of pollutants and sources, however, emissions trading programs will no longer be able to rely entirely, or even primarily, on CEMS. Instead, policy designers will have to rely on different forms of self-reporting,...