2,765 research outputs found
Near-Term Greenhouse Gas Emissions Targets
At the present time no widely accepted temporal emissions path for greenhouse gases has been developed and adopted at either a country or a global level. What does exist is a set of nearterm, country-level emissions targets associated with the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol and a process for the determination of targets for subsequent commitment periods. However, the first commitment period targets specified by the protocol have been heavily criticized on the grounds that they are arbitrary and ad hoc. The purpose of this paper is to examine the conceptual foundations upon which one might base a domestic climate policy for the United States and to attempt to determine whether a near-term emissions target can indeed be derived from structured decisionmaking resting upon these conceptual foundations.U.S. climate policy, greenhouse gas target, cost-effectiveness analysis, costbenefit analysis
Calculating the Cost of Environmental Regulation
Decisions concerning environmental protection hinge on estimates of economic burden. Over the past 30 years, economists have developed and applied various tools to measure this burden. In this paper, developed as a chapter for the Handbook of Environmental Economics, we present a taxonomy of costs along with methods for measuring those costs. At the broadest level, we distinguish between partial and general equilibrium costs. Partial equilibrium costs represent the burden directly borne by the regulated entity (firms, households, government), including both pecuniary and nonpecuniary expenses, when prices are held constant. General equilibrium costs reflect the net burden once all good and factor markets have equilibrated. In addition to partial equilibrium costs, these general equilibrium costs include welfare losses or gains in markets with preexisting distortions, welfare losses or gains from rebalancing the government's budget constraint, and welfare gains from the added flexibility of meeting pollution constraints through reductions in the use of higher-priced, pollution-intensive products. In addition to both partial and general equilibrium costs, we also consider the distribution of costs across households, countries, sectors, subnational regions, and generations. Despite improvements in our understanding of cost measurement, we find considerable opportunity for further work and, especially, better application of existing methods.social cost, cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, environmental regulation
Exact results in a slave boson saddle point approach for a strongly correlated electron model
We revisit the Kotliar-Ruckenstein (KR) slave boson saddle point evaluation
for a two-site correlated electron model. As the model can be solved
analytically, it is possible to compare the KR saddle point results to the
exact many particle levels. The considered two site cluster mimics an
infinite- single-impurity Anderson model with a nearest neighbor Coulomb
interaction: one site is strongly correlated with an infinite local Coulomb
repulsion which hybridizes with the second site, on which the local Coulomb
repulsion vanishes. Making use of the flexibility of the representation we
introduce appropriate weight factors in the KR saddle point scheme. Ground
state and all excitation levels agree with the exact diagonalization results.
Thermodynamics and correlation functions may be recovered in a suitably
renormalized saddle point evaluation.Comment: 4 page
Capacitance and compressibility of heterostructures with strong electronic correlations
Strong electronic correlations related to a repulsive local interaction
suppress the electronic compressibility in a single-band model, and the
capacitance of a corresponding metallic film is directly related to its
electronic compressibility. Both statements may be altered significantly when
two extensions to the system are implemented which we investigate here: (i) we
introduce an attractive nearest-neighbor interaction as antagonist to the
repulsive on-site repulsion , and (ii) we consider nano-structured
multilayers (heterostructures) assembled from two-dimensional layers of these
systems. We determine the respective total compressibility and
capacitance of the heterostructures within a strong coupling evaluation,
which builds on a Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave-boson technique. Whereas the
capacitance for electronic densities close to half-filling is
suppressed---illustrated by a correlation induced dip in ---it may be
appreciably enhanced close to a van Hove singularity. Moreover, we show that
the capacitance may be a non-monotonic function of close to half-filling
for both attractive and repulsive . The compressibility can differ
from substantially, as is very sensitive to internal electrostatic
energies which in turn depend on the specific set-up of the heterostructure. In
particular, we show that a capacitor with a polar dielectric has a smaller
electronic compressibility and is more stable against phase separation than a
standard non-polar capacitor with the same capacitance
Cost-Benefit Analysis and Regulatory Reform: An Assessment of the Science and Art
The continuing efforts in the 104th Congress to legislate requirements for cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and the revised Office of Management and Budget guidelines for the conduct of such assessments during a regulatory rulemaking process highlight the need for a comprehensive examination of the role that CBA can play in agency decision-making. This paper summarizes the state of knowledge regarding CBA and offers suggestions for improvement in its use, especially in the context of environmental regulations.
Economic incentives and point source emissions : choice of modeling platform
The purpose of this study is to identify the best modeling platform for the analysis of alternative environmental policy instruments designed to reduce the emission of pollutants from point sources, most notably, central power generating stations and manufacturing facilities. The primary analysis of concern is a cost-effectiveness investigation of the policy; where for the most part, the cost of compliance is a multidimensional variable that includes the private costs incurred by the owners of the facility, measures of the change in the cost of providing the facility's product, and estimates of the change in facility capacity factors. The range of pollutants under consideration include the usual menu of air- and waterborne emissions as well as solid and liquid wastes finding their way to landfills and other such disposal options. The range of policies considered include: (a) tariffs on the emission of pollutants; (b) tariffs and subsidies applied to the inputs or the outputs of the point source activities under consideration; (c) limits on the pollutant emissions themselves; and (d) directives regarding the installation of particular equipment and/or the alteration of process activities. The paper also discusses a nonexhaustive set of issues associated with the modeling of point source emissions and policies for their control.Economic Theory&Research,Access to Markets,Markets and Market Access,Consumption,Environmental Economics&Policies
Technology Adoption and Aggregate Energy Efficiency
Improved technology is often cited as a means to alter the otherwise difficult trade-off between the economic burden of regulation and environmental damage. Focusing on energy-saving technologies that mitigate the threat of climate change, we find that both energy prices and financial health influence technology adoption among a sample of industrial plants in four heavily polluting sectors. Based on a model linking technology adoption to growth in aggregate efficiency, we estimate that a doubling of energy prices, after raising the growth rate to 2.1%, would require slightly more than 50 years to generate a 50% improvement in aggregate efficiency relative to the baseline forecast.energy efficiency, endogenous technological change, technology adoption
Barnes slave boson approach to the two-site single impurity Anderson model with non-local interaction
The Barnes slave boson approach to the single impurity Anderson
model extended by a non-local Coulomb interaction is revisited. We demonstrate
first that the radial gauge representation facilitates the treatment of such a
non-local interaction by performing the \emph{exact} evaluation of the path
integrals representing the partition function, the impurity hole density and
the impurity hole density autocorrelation function for a two-site cluster. The
free energy is also obtained on the same footing. Next, the exact results are
compared to their approximations at saddle-point level, and it is shown that
the saddle point evaluation recovers the exact answer in the limit of strong
non-local Coulomb interaction, while the agreement between both schemes remains
satisfactory in a large parameter range.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, published versio
Bad metal and negative compressibility transitions in a two-band Hubbard model
We analyze the paramagnetic state of a two-band Hubbard model with finite
Hund's coupling close to integer filling at n=2 in two spacial dimensions.
Previously, a Mott metal-insulator transition was established at with a
coexistence region of a metallic and a bad metal state in the vicinity of that
integer filling. The coexistence region ends at a critical point beyond which a
charge instability persists. Here we investigate the transition into negative
electronic compressibility states for an extended filling range close to n=2
within a slave boson setup. We analyze the separate contributions from the
(fermionic) quasiparticles and the (bosonic) multiparticle incoherent
background and find that the total compressibility depends on a subtle
interplay between the quasiparticle excitations and collective fields.
Implementing a Blume-Emery-Griffiths model approach for the slave bosons, which
mimics the bosonic fields by Ising-like pseudospins, we suggest a feedback
mechanism between these fields and the fermionic degrees of freedom. We argue
that the negative compressibility can be sustained for heterostructures of such
strongly correlated planes and results in a large capacitance of these
structures. The strong density dependence of these capacitances allows to tune
them through small electronic density variations. Moreover, by resistive
switching from a Mott insulating state to a metallic state through short
electric pulses, transitions between fairly different capacitances are within
reach.Comment: 22 pages, 18 figure
Special Topic: Chesapeake Bay Management -- Welfare Implications of Restricted Triazine Herbicide Use in the Chesapeake Bay Region
The United States Environmental Protection Agency has responsibility under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIERA) to formulate pesticide policies on the basis of risk-benefit analyses. To measure the benefits of pesticide use, one must look at the losses in consumer and producer surpluses that would accompany the banning of a particular pesticide. A typical scenario is one in which the banned pesticide is replaced by another that is more costly and/or less effective. The resulting decrease in supply raises the price of the crop on which the banned pesticide is used, and may alter the prices of substitute and complementary crops as well. This article presents a simulation model of com and soybean production in the Chesapeake Bay drainage area to investigate the economic implications of a local ban on triazine herbicides. It reports estimates of lost producer and consumer surplus and the effect that the ban would have on the profitability of agricultural production in the region.Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,
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