316 research outputs found
The Cost of U.S. Forest-Based Carbon Sequestration
Examines the economic and climate impacts of storing carbon in forests over long periods of time. Investigates the potential for incorporating land-use changes into climate policy
What Drives Land-Use Change in the United States? A National Analysis of Landowner Decisions
Carbon-dioxide emissions trading and hierarchical structure in worldwide finance and commodities markets
In a highly interdependent economic world, the nature of relationships
between financial entities is becoming an increasingly important area of study.
Recently, many studies have shown the usefulness of minimal spanning trees
(MST) in extracting interactions between financial entities. Here, we propose a
modified MST network whose metric distance is defined in terms of
cross-correlation coefficient absolute values, enabling the connections between
anticorrelated entities to manifest properly. We investigate 69 daily time
series, comprising three types of financial assets: 28 stock market indicators,
21 currency futures, and 20 commodity futures. We show that though the
resulting MST network evolves over time, the financial assets of similar type
tend to have connections which are stable over time. In addition, we find a
characteristic time lag between the volatility time series of the stock market
indicators and those of the EU CO2 emission allowance (EUA) and crude oil
futures (WTI). This time lag is given by the peak of the cross-correlation
function of the volatility time series EUA (or WTI) with that of the stock
market indicators, and is markedly different (>20 days) from 0, showing that
the volatility of stock market indicators today can predict the volatility of
EU emissions allowances and of crude oil in the near future.Comment: 4 figure
Is There a Role for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulation?
Benefit-cost analysis has a potentially important role to play in helping inform regulatory decision-making, although it should not be the sole basis for such decision-making. This paper offers eight principles on the appropriate use of benefit-cost analysis.Environment, Health and Safety, Regulatory Reform
Benefit-Cost Analysis in Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulation: A Statement of Principles
Benefit-cost analysis can play a very important role in legislative and regulatory policy debates on improving the environment, health, and safety. It can help illustrate the tradeoffs that are inherent in public policymaking as well as make those tradeoffs more transparent. It can also help agencies set regulatory priorities. Benefit-cost analysis should be used to help decisionmakers reach a decision. Contrary to the views of some, benefit-cost analysis is neither necessary nor sufficient for designing sensible public policy. If properly done, it can be very helpful to agencies in the decisionmaking process. Decisionmakers should not be precluded from considering the economic benefits and costs of different policies in the development of regulations. Laws that prohibit costs or other factors from being considered in administrative decisionmaking are inimical to good public policy. Currently, several of the most important regulatory statutes have been interpreted to imply such prohibitions. Benefit-cost analysis should be required for all major regulatory decisions, but agency heads should not be bound by a strict benefit-cost test. Instead, they should be required to consider available benefit-cost analyses and to justify the reasons for their decision in the event that the expected costs of a regulation far exceed the expected benefits. Agencies should be encouraged to use economic analysis to help set regulatory priorities. Economic analyses prepared in support of particularly important decisions should be subjected to peer review both inside and outside government. Benefits and costs of proposed major regulations should be quantified wherever possible. Best estimates should be presented along with a description of the uncertainties. Not all benefits or costs can be easily quantified, much less translated into dollar terms. Nevertheless, even qualitative descriptions of the pros and cons associated with a contemplated action can be helpful. Care should be taken to ensure that quantitative factors do not dominate important qualitative factors in decisionmaking. The Office of Management and Budget, or some other coordinating agency, should establish guidelines that agencies should follow in conducting benefit-cost analyses. Those guidelines should specify default values for the discount rate and certain types of benefits and costs, such as the value of a small reduction in mortality risk. In addition, agencies should present their results using a standard format, which summarizes the key results and highlights major uncertainties.
Moral Concerns on Tradable Pollution Permits in International Environmental Agreements
Satellite quantification of methane emissions and oil–gas methane intensities from individual countries in the Middle East and North Africa: implications for climate action
We use 2019 TROPOMI satellite observations of atmospheric methane
in an analytical inversion to quantify methane emissions from the Middle
East and North Africa at up to ∼25 km × 25 km
resolution, using spatially allocated national United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reports as prior
estimates for the fuel sector. Our resulting best estimate of anthropogenic
emissions for the region is 35 % higher than the prior bottom-up
inventories (+103 % for gas, +53 % for waste, +49 % for
livestock, −14 % for oil) with large variability across countries. Oil and
gas account for 38 % of total anthropogenic emissions in the region.
TROPOMI observations can effectively optimize and separate national
emissions by sector for most of the 23 countries in the region, with 6
countries accounting for most of total anthropogenic emissions including
Iran (5.3 (5.0–5.5) Tg a−1; best estimate and uncertainty range),
Turkmenistan (4.4 (2.8–5.1) Tg a−1), Saudi Arabia (4.3 (2.4–6.0) Tg a−1), Algeria (3.5 (2.4–4.4) Tg a−1), Egypt (3.4 (2.5–4.0) Tg a−1), and Turkey (3.0 (2.0–4.1) Tg a−1). Most oil–gas emissions
are from the production (upstream) subsector, but Iran, Turkmenistan, and
Saudi Arabia have large gas emissions from transmission and distribution
subsectors. We identify a high number of annual oil–gas emission hotspots in
Turkmenistan, Algeria, and Oman and offshore in the Persian Gulf. We show that
oil–gas methane emissions for individual countries are not related to
production, invalidating a basic premise in the construction of
activity-based bottom-up inventories. Instead, local infrastructure and
management practices appear to be key drivers of oil–gas emissions,
emphasizing the need for including top-down information from atmospheric
observations in the construction of oil–gas emission inventories. We
examined the methane intensity, defined as the upstream oil–gas emission per
unit of methane gas produced, as a measure of the potential for decreasing
emissions from the oil–gas sector and using as reference the 0.2 % target
set by the industry. We find that the methane intensity in most countries is
considerably higher than this target, reflecting leaky infrastructure
combined with deliberate venting or incomplete flaring of gas. However, we
also find that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar meet the industry target and
thus show that the target is achievable through the capture of associated gas,
modern infrastructure, and the concentration of operations. Decreasing methane
intensities across the Middle East and North Africa to 0.2 % would achieve
a 90 % decrease in oil–gas upstream emissions and a 26 % decrease in
total anthropogenic methane emissions in the region, making a significant
contribution toward the Global Methane Pledge.</p
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