The surprisingly inexpensive cost of state-driven emission control strategies

Wei Peng (), Gokul Iyer, Matthew Binsted, Jennifer Marlon, Leon Clarke, James A. Edmonds and David G. Victor
Additional contact information
Wei Peng: Pennsylvania State University
Gokul Iyer: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Matthew Binsted: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Jennifer Marlon: Yale University
Leon Clarke: University of Maryland
James A. Edmonds: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
David G. Victor: University of California San Diego

Nature Climate Change, 2021, vol. 11, issue 9, 738-745

Abstract: Abstract Traditionally, analysis of the costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions has assumed that governments would implement idealized, optimal policies such as uniform economy-wide carbon taxes. Yet actual policies in the real world, especially in large federal governments, are often highly heterogeneous and vary in political support and administrative capabilities within a country. While the benefits of heterogeneous action have been discussed widely for experimentation and leadership, little is known about its costs. Focusing on the United States, we represent plausible variation (by more than a factor of 3) in the stringency of state-led climate policy in a process-based integrated assessment model (GCAM-USA). For a wide array of national decarbonization targets, we find that the nationwide cost from heterogeneous subnational policies is only one-tenth higher than nationally uniform policies. Such results hinge on two critical technologies (advanced biofuels and electricity) for which inter-state trade ameliorates the economic efficiencies that might arise with heterogeneous action.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01128-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:natcli:v:11:y:2021:i:9:d:10.1038_s41558-021-01128-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-021-01128-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().