Regional Climate Policy under Deep Uncertainty: Robust Control, Hot Spots and Learning

William Brock and Anastasios Xepapadeas

No 1903, DEOS Working Papers from Athens University of Economics and Business

Abstract: We study climate change policies using the novel pattern scaling approach of regional transient climate response, to develop a regional economy-climate model under conditions of deep uncertainty associated with: (i) temperature dynamics, (ii) regional climate change damages, and (iii) policy in the form of carbon taxes. We analyze cooperative and noncooperative outcomes. Under deep uncertainty, robust control policies are more conservative regarding emissions, the higher the aversion to ambiguity is, while damage uncertainty seems to produce more conservative behavior than climate dynamics uncertainty. As concerns about uncertainty increase, cooperative and noncooperative policies tend to move close together. Asymmetries in concerns about uncertainty tend to produce large deviations in regional emissions policy at the noncooperative solution. We calculate the cost of robustness in terms of welfare. If aversion to ambiguity is suciently high, optimal regulation might not be possible. The result is associated with the existence of regional hot spots and temperature spillovers across regions, a situation which emerges in the real world. In such cases, deep uncertainty about the impacts of climate change makes robust regulation infeasible. We show that, if resources are devoted to learning, which reduces uncertainty concerns, robust regulation is facilitated.

Keywords: Regional temperature anomalies; Deep uncertainty; Cooperative solution solutions; Robust Open Loop Nash Equilibrium; Cost of Robustness; Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-gth, nep-res and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wpa.deos.aueb.gr/docs/Regional.Climate.Policy.under.Deep.Uncertainty.pdf First version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aue:wpaper:1903

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DEOS Working Papers from Athens University of Economics and Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ekaterini Glynou ().