Suchergebnisse

We investigate how moral concerns about permit trading affect an endogenous pollution permit trading equilibrium, where governments choose non-cooperatively the amount of permits they allocate to domestic industries. Politicians may feel reluctant to allow permit trading and/or may prefer that abatement is undertaken domestically due to moral concerns. This will have an effect on the initial permit allocations, and, therefore, on global emissions. The impact on global emissions depends on the precise formulation of the moral concerns, but under reasonable assumptions, we show that global emissions may increase. Thus, doing what is perceived as good does not always yield the desired outcome. However, this can be offset by restrictions on permit trading when governments have moral concerns about this trade.

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such as the international Kyoto Protocol, post-Kyoto negotiations, regional initiatives, and unilateral actions. Although most studies on climate change policies in economics have considered efficiency aspects, there is a growing literature on equity and justice. Climate change policy has important dimensions of distributive justice, both within and across generations, but in this paper we survey only studies on the intragenerational aspect, i.e., within a generation. We cover several domains including the international, regional, national, sectoral and inter-personal, and examine aspects such as the distribution of burdens from climate change, climate change policy negotiations in general, implementation of climate agreements using tradable emission permits, and the uncertainty of alternatives to emission reductions.

This paper studies the impacts on Western European CO2 emissions of a reduction in Norwegian gas sales. Such impacts are due to changes in energy demand, energy supply, and environmental and political regulations. The gas supply model DYNOPOLY is used to analyse the effects on Russian and Algerian gas exports of a reduction in Norwegian gas supply. The effects on the demand side and the effects of committing to CO2 targets are analysed using the energy demand model SEEM. If Western European countries commit to their announced CO2 emissions targets, reduced Norwegian gas sales have no impact on emissions. The consumption of oil and coal will increase slightly, while total energy consumption will go down. Also, a reduction in Norwegian gas sales have only minor impacts on the CO2 emissions from Western Europe when no emissions regulations are considered.