Economics versus Climate Change

William Pizer

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: This paper argues against the common-sense conclusion that climate change demands a global market-based solution, such as international emissions trading. First, current experience suggests global cooperation is not necessary for initial mandatory actions. Second, when domestic targets vary across nations, there are a variety of reasons why international emissions trading, even though it creates aggregate economic gains for all nations, may not be desirable. These reasons include concerns over legitimizing target variations for future negotiations, real and perceived consequences of capital flows across nations, and distributional impacts within nations. Finally, the underlying need for global technology solutions suggests domestic mitigation policies that balance clear emissions price signals, incentives for technology development and deployment, and mechanisms to finance deployment to developing countries. International efforts, in turn, might focus on encouraging these domestic actions, facilitating the developing country investment mechanisms, and providing credible reviews of national action.

Keywords: climate; change; international; treaty; Kyoto; emissions trading (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 D63 H87 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-06-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-06-04.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-06-04.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-06-04.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:rff:dpaper:dp-06-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Resources for the Future ().