Common Resources

The Value of Being First: Climate Policy Perspectives from California and Sweden

When it comes to climate policy, it seems like pessimism is the only thing that rivals greenhouse gas emissions in terms of volume. Last week, the daily atmospheric content of CO2 popped up over 400 parts per million, pushing the stated goal of keeping worldwide temperatures to a 2˚C increase even further from reach. Beneath […]

Resources Magazine: Ensuring Competitiveness under a US Carbon Tax

Tax exemptions, industry rebates, and border tax adjustments can help protect the competitiveness of industries affected by a carbon tax, but they are not equally efficient at achieving economic and environmental goals. In the latest issue of Resources, Richard Morgenstern, Nathan Richardson, and I examine the issues. Read more here.

Linking Carbon Markets Offers More Than Economic Benefits

Economists have long recognized that linking carbon markets reduces the overall cost of achieving emissions reductions. This economic benefit originates from allowance flows between previously isolated markets that help identify and achieve emissions reductions in the most efficient way. Linking, however, provides non-economic benefits that can be just as important as efficient mitigation. In a […]

Aligning Carbon Markets: The Case of California and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

Incrementally aligning policies in distinct carbon markets—linking by degrees—can allow programs to experience immediate benefits of sharing best practices in program design. Together with colleagues at RFF and Yale, we’ve examined the details and prospects for the cap-and-trade programs in California and the Northeast. Read more here.

The Washington Post on California’s Cap and Trade Program

Just before the new year, the Washington Post ran a surprisingly conflicted editorial on California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions. It endorsed the use of pricing as the most efficient approach to regulate carbon, suggested that it might be ineffective anyway because California is initially acting alone, and expressed criticism because California is not doing more […]

RFF Feature: The Coming US Carbon Market

RFF experts have developed several background memos on cap-and-trade and carbon tax systems to provide informative overviews and highlight current work, available data, and potential research limitations. Click here to read the rest of this feature.

While International Climate Negotiations Continue, the World’s Ninth Largest Economy Takes an Important Step Forward

This post originally appeared on Robert Stavins’s blog, An Economic View of the Environment. A little more than two weeks ago, while some 195 nations prepared to meet in Doha, Qatar, for the Eighteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-18) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in an ongoing effort to hammer […]

Policy Outfit Threatens to Sue EPA, Seeking Aviation Cap-and-Trade

Can EPA set up a cap-and-trade system for the transportation sector? If so, can it be forced to do so?The Institute for Policy Integrity, an (excellent) policy research and advocacy outfit affiliated with NYU, today announced it plans to sue EPA, aiming to find out. This is a provocative and interesting move, but I doubt […]

California’s First Carbon Auction Successful

Results from California’s first auction of greenhouse gas emissions allowances indicate the emissions reductions goals of the state are obtainable, apparently at lower cost than many observers thought likely. The first sale of emissions allowances in California attracted substantial attention because of competing claims about the design and expected performance of the auction. In that […]

Substitutes and Complements

At yesterday’s RFF/AEI/Brookings carbon tax conference, the first two speakers correctly emphasized that with the right price in place, we wouldn’t need the panoply of indirect alternative policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as renewable portfolio standards and clean energy subsidies. The following speaker, however, referred to these indirect policies as “complementary.” That characterization […]