Fiddling while carbon burns: why climate policy needs pervasive emission pricing as well as technology promotion
John Pezzey,
Frank Jotzo and
John Quiggen ()
Additional contact information
John Quiggen: University of Queensland, School of Economics and Political Science
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: John Quiggin
Economics and Environment Network Working Papers from Australian National University, Economics and Environment Network
Abstract:
Effective climate policy requires global emissions of greenhouse gases to be cut substantially, which can be achieved by energy supply technologies with lower emissions, greater energy use efficiency, and substitution in demand. For policy to be efficient requires fairly uniform, fairly pervasive emission pricing from taxes, permit trading, or combinations of the two, as well as significant government support for low-emission technologies. We compare the technology-focused climate policies adopted by Australia and the 'Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate' (AP6), against this ideal policy yardstick. We find that such policies omit the need for emission pricing to achieve abatement effectively and efficiently; they over-prescribe which abatement actions should be used most; they make unrealistic assumptions about how much progress can be achieved by voluntarism and cooperation, in the absence of either adequate funding or mandatory policies; and they unjustifiably contrast technology-focused policy and the Kyoto Protocol approach as the only two policies worth considering, and thus ignore important combined policy options.
Keywords: climate policy; greenhouse gas emissions; abatement; emission taxes; emissions trading; technology policy; innovation; Asia-Pacific Partnership; AP6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2006-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)
Downloads: (external link)
http://een.anu.edu.au/download_files/een0611.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to een.anu.edu.au:80 (No such host is known. )
Related works:
Journal Article: Fiddling while carbon burns: why climate policy needs pervasive emission pricing as well as technology promotion (2008) 
Journal Article: Fiddling while carbon burns: why climate policy needs pervasive emission pricing as well as technology promotion * (2008) 
Working Paper: Fiddling while carbon burns: why climate policy needs pervasive emission pricing as well as technology promotion (2006) 
Working Paper: Fiddling while carbon burns: why climate policy needs pervasive emission pricing as well as technology promotion (2006) 
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:anu:eenwps:0611
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Economics and Environment Network Working Papers from Australian National University, Economics and Environment Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Pezzey ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).