A climate diplomacy proposal: carbon pricing consultations

The Doha climate talks in December 2012, wrapped up lines of negotiation that were begun years before in Bali. Negotiators resolved contentious questions about the future of the Kyoto Protocol and finally put the constraints of the Bali agenda behind them. Now they need turn to developing by 2015 a new agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to cover the post-2020 period. In order to make concrete progress on climate policy there is a need to establish a Carbon Pricing Consultation (CPC) process, which would be a detailed, pragmatic, and ongoing discussion of the implementation details of domestic cap-and-trade and GHG taxes.Though carbon pricing generally been considered to be a national-level policy to be adopted at the discretion of individual governments the paper argues that a CPC process would provide an opportunity for negotiators, as well as the administrators of national pricing policies, to discuss how to induce, practically and efficiently, the broad economic shifts required to de-couple emissions and economic activity. This paper makes the argument for focusing on carbon pricing in the international negotiations and offers a way forward in that process

Climate Policy and Uncertainty: The Roles of Adaptation versus Mitigation

Climate Policy and Uncertainty: The Roles of Adaptation versus Mitigationclimate change,uncertainty, policy

Global Emissions Trading: Prospects and Pitfalls

Global Emissions Trading: Prospects and Pitfallspermit trading, climate change, Kyoto, Blueprint, Dutch Disease

Estimates of the Costs of Kyoto-Marrakesh versus the McKibbin-Wilcoxen Blueprint

In this paper we update our earlier estimates of the cost of the Kyoto Protocol using the G-Cubed model, taking into account the new sink allowances from recent negotiations as well as allowing for multiple gases and new land clearing estimates. Rather than comparing this to the original Kyoto Protocol as other studies have done, we compare the estimates from the current Kyoto Protocol to a realistic alternative to the Kyoto Protocol outlined by McKibbin and Wilcoxen ( 1197a, 1997b, 2002). A key part of the comparison between the two alternatives is not to predict exactly what the outcome for emissions reduction might be at a future date under each approach. What we want to focus on is the importance of the inherent uncertainty about the future that should be at the heart of the design of a suatainable climate policy. To show how important uncertainty is to the design of the climate policies, we take two alternative plausible assumptions about a single aspect of the future predictions and compare the two regimes under these alternative assumptions. Since climate change is all about policy making under uncertainty it is important in comparing regimes to explore how the regimes handle aspects of uncertainty as well as the average performance of the regimes. This comparison illustrates a fundamental difference between the Kyoto Protocol and the Blueprint.climate change, Kyoto, blueprint, uncertainty, policy

A Copenhagen Collar: Achieving Comparable Effort Through Carbon Price Agreements

The global financial crisis proves how unforeseen macroeconomic conditions can affect policies aimed at reducing and stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. It has made voters uneasy about potential climate policy that could raise energy costs and unemployment. To improve the political stability of any policy agreement emerging from this December’s annual meeting on the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen, and to ensure the comparability of commitments and ease the inclusion of developing countries, the authors propose that the UNFCCC supplement emissions targets with a price collar. This paper outlines an example that shows that a price collar can have a negligible expected impact on the outcome that matters most for the climate—increasing emissions.

Beyond the Kyoto Protocol

Conclusion: The system we advocate is flexible enough to adapt to changing political, economic and climate circumstances. Most importantly, we believe that the system we have designed although simple in concept, solves many of the insurmountable problems of the Kyoto Protocol and delivers an outcome in which global emissions will be lower than otherwise would be the case

A Proposal to Integrate Price Mechanisms into International Climate Negotiations

The Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change continue their efforts to forge a new binding international agreement by 2015. This article proposes to adapt international negotiations to allow for hybrid price and quantity-based commitments. The economic risks surrounding target-only commitments—the current approach—are enormous. Combining a clear cumulative emissions target with price-based limits on the cost associated with achieving that target would reduce those risks, ensure that commitments by Parties remain feasible and reduce the chance that the agreement would collapse. Moreover, we argue that adding prices into the agreement offers transparent and verifiable assurance of the comparability of effort across countries. Finally, we also show that it is possible to calculate ‘carbon price equivalents’of quantity-based climate commitments in a conceptually similar way to the tariff equivalents used in international trade negotiations

A Climate Diplomacy Proposal : Carbon Pricing Consultations

Climate talks in December 2012 in Doha, Qatar, wrapped up lines of negotiation that were begun years before in Bali. Negotiators resolved contentious questions about the future of the Kyoto Protocol and finally put the constraints of the Bali agenda behind them. Now they will turn to developing by 2015 a new agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to cover the post-2020 period. At the same time, the Major Economics Forum (MEF) needs a new thrust of engagement, having developed the Clean Energy Ministerial into an enduring venue for technology discussions.1 This momentary opening for new agenda items offers an excellent opportunity to expand the dialogue to include technical aspects of the one policy approach that would actually address the climate problem cost effectively: pricing carbon and other greenhouse gases (GHGs)

U. S. labor supply and demand in the long run

In this paper we model U.S. labor supply and demand in considerable detail in order to capture the enormous heterogeneity of the labor force and its evolution over the next 25 years. We represent labor supplies for a large number of demographic groups as responses to prices of leisure and consumption goods and services. The price of leisure is an after-tax wage rate, while the final prices of goods and services reflect the supply prices of the industries that produce them. By including demographic characteristics among the determinants of household preferences, we incorporate the expected demographic transition into our long-run projections of the U.S. labor market.Labor supply ; Labor market

What to expect from an International System of Tradeable Permits for Carbon Emissions

We use an econometrically-estimated multi-region, multi-sector general equilibrium model of the world economy to examine the effects of using a system of internationally-tradable emissions permits to control world carbon dioxide emissions. We focus, in particular, on the effects of the system on flows of trade and international capital. Our results show that international trade and capital flows significantly alter projections of the domestic effects of emissions mitigation policy, compared with analyses that ignore international capital flows, and that under some systems of international permit trading the United States is likely to become a significant permit seller, the opposite of the conventional wisdom