Policies to Reduce CO2 Emissions: Fallacies and Evidence from the United States and California

José A. Tapia Granados and Clive Spash

No 2019/04, SRE-Discussion Papers from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Abstract: Since the 1990s, advocates of policy to prevent catastrophic climate change have been divided over the appropriate economic instruments to curb CO2 emissions-carbon taxes or schemes of emission trading. Barack Obama claimed that policies implemented during his presidency set in motion irreversible trends toward a clean-energy economy, with the years 2008-2015 given as evidence of decoupling between CO2 emissions and economic growth. This is despite California being the only state in the USA that has implemented a specific policy to curb emissions, a cap-and-trade scheme in place since 2013. To assess Obama's claims and the effectiveness of policies to reduce CO2 emissions, we analyze national and state-level data from the USA over the period 1990-2015. We find: (a) annual changes in emissions strongly correlated with the growth conditions of the economy; (b) no evidence for decoupling; and (c) a trajectory of CO2 emissions in California which does not at all support the claim that the cap-and-trade system implemented there has reduced CO2 emissions.

Keywords: Climate change; Cap-and-trade; Carbon emissions trading; Decoupling; Economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://epub.wu.ac.at/6961/ original version (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://epub.wu.ac.at/6961/ [308 PERMANENT REDIRECT]--> https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/6961 [302 FOUND]--> https://research.wu.ac.at/en/publications/66c2dc59-f732-42cb-8a5f-3b5345e75c78)

Related works:
Working Paper: Policies to Reduce CO2 Emissions: Fallacies and Evidence from the United States and California (2019)
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:wiw:wus009:6961

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SRE-Discussion Papers from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WU Library ().