Climate change policy

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Christian de Perthuis

"Since the publication of the Stern Review, economists have started to ask more normative questions about climate change. Should we act now or tomorrow? What is the best theoretical carbon price to reach long-term abatement targets? How do we discount the long-term costs and benefits of climate change? This provocative book argues that these are the wrong sorts of questions to ask because they don't take into account the policies that have already been implemented. Instead, it urges us to concentrate on existing policies and tools by showing how the development of carbon markets could dramatically reduce world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, triggering policies to build a new low-carbon energy system while restructuring the way agriculture interacts with forests. This provides an innovative new perspective on how a post-Kyoto international climate regime could emerge from agreements between the main GHG emitters capping their emissions and building an international carbon market"--

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John Weyant

The primary objective of Energy and Environmental Policy Modeling is to introduce a variety of recent energy-environmental modeling concepts, and to provide an overview of these modeling concepts. Another major objective of the book is the application of management science techniques to energy and environment policy issues which have expanded dramatically over the last twenty-five years: the results from these applications have become increasingly relied upon by those making energy and environmental decisions. Thus, an overview of some of the most interesting work in this field on some of the biggest contemporary policy issues is a worthy objective. In this respect, policy issues are discussed in the following conceptual modeling frameworks: end-use modeling, integrating supply and demand, aggregate energy-economy interactions, and multi-sector energy-economy interactions. Hence the book begins with policy studies. First there is a chapter on oil resource depletion and technological change by John Rowse. Two articles on electric sector restructuring follow, by William Hogan and Hung-po Chao/Stephen Peck. The first section is followed by four chapters motivated by the debate over appropriate climate change policies: one by Richard Richels, Jae Edmonds, Howard Gruenspecht, and Tom Wigley on the implications of different carbon emission trajectories; one by Stephen Peck and Thomas Telsberg on appropriate emissions trajectories under uncertainty; one by Susan Swinehart on the potential of tree planting as a climate policy response; and one by Gunter Stephan on inter-generational discounting. Finally, the book ends with a chapter by Tom Rutherford on the sequence of linear complimentarity problem technique for solving general equilibrium problems, and one on the International Energy Network by Leo Schrattenholzer, an institution managed jointly by Schrattenholzer and Alan Manne. The work of Professor Alan Manne is heavily referenced in every chapter of this book.

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Philip Cooke

"This book traces the theoretical explanation for clusters back to the work of classical economists and their more modern disciples who saw economic development as a process involving serious imbalances in the exploitation of resources. First, natural resource endowments explained the formation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial districts. Today geographical concentrations of scientific and creative knowledge are the key resource. But these require a support system, ranging from major injections of basis research funding, to varieties of financial investment and management, and specialist incubators for economic value to be realized. These are also specialized forms of knowledge that contribute to a serious imbalance in the distribution of economic opportunity."--Jacket.

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John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer rethinks economics, focusing on ecological rather than political concepts, and discussing how an economy centered around the raw materials that support human life can help the world achieve a more sustainable way of life and address concerns over resource depletion and pollution.