Comparing Greenhouse Gases for Policy Purposes

Richard Schmalensee

The Energy Journal, 1993, vol. Volume 14, issue Number 1, 245-256

Abstract: In order to derive optimal policies for greenhouse gas emissions control, the discounted marginal damages of emissions from different gases must be compared. The greenhouse warming potential (GWP) index, which is most often used to compare greenhouse gases, is not based on such a damage comparison. This essay presents assumptions under which ratios of gas-specific discounted marginal damages reduce to ratios of discounted marginal contributions to radiative forcing, where the discount rate is the difference between the discount rate relevant to climate-related damages and the rate of growth of marginal climate-related damages over time. If there are important gas-specific costs or benefits not tied to radiative forcing, however, such as direct effects of carbon dioxide on plant growth, there is in general no shortcut around explicit comparison of discounted net marginal damages.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=1106 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Comparing Greenhouse Gases for Policy Purposes* (1993)
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:aen:journl:1993v14-01-a10

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().