Cost Containment in Climate Change Policy: Alternative Approaches to Mitigating Price Volatility

Gilbert Metcalf ()

No 15125, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Cap and trade systems are emerging as the front-running policy choice to address climate change concerns in many countries. One of the apparent attractions of this approach is the ability to achieve hard limits on emissions over a control period. The cost of achieving this certainty on emission limits is price volatility. I discuss and evaluate various approaches within cap and trade systems to reduce price volatility. A fundamental trade-off exists between certainty of emission limits and price volatility. A pure carbon tax sacrifices certainty of emission limits in favor of price stability. I discuss how a hybrid carbon tax can be designed to achieve a balance between price stability and emissions certainty. This hybrid, dubbed the Responsive Emissions Autonomous Carbon Tax (REACT), combines the short-run price stability of a carbon tax with the long-run certainty of emission reductions over a control period.

JEL-codes: H23 Q4 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
Date: 2009-07
Note: EEE PE

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15125.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15125

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15125
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().