Better leverage of public funding is essential in order to trigger the invest-ment needed for energy efficiency. In times of austerity governments in-creasingly look at policy instruments not funded by public expenditure and Energy Savings Obligations represent one option. Because Energy Savings...

In this paper, we discuss the results of a sensitivity analysis of Res-IRF, an energy-economy model of the demand for space heating in French dwellings. Res-IRF has been developed for the purpose of increasing behavioral detail in the modeling of energy demand. The different drivers of energy...

Competitiveness and carbon leakage are major concerns for the design of CO2 emissions permits markets. In absence of a global carbon tax and of border carbon adjustments, output based allocation is a third best solution and is actually implemented (Australia, California, New Zealand). The EU has...

White certificate obligations impose energy savings targets on energy companies and allow them to trade energy savings certificates. They can be seen as a means of internalizing energy-use externalities and addressing energy efficiency market failures. This paper reviews existing evaluations of...

We investigate how moral hazard problems can cause sub-optimal investment in energy efficiency, a phenomenon known as the energy efficiency gap. We argue that such problems are likely to be important for home energy retrofits, where both the seller and the buyer can take hidden actions. The...

Decision makers facing abatement targets need to decide which abatement measures to implement, and in which order. Measure-explicit marginal abatement cost curves depict the cost and abating potential of available mitigation options. Using a simple intertemporal optimization model, we...

This case study describes the social aspects of Total's CO2 integrated capture, transport and storage pilot project in Frontsouthwestern France, from the initial press conference February 8th, 2007 to the announce of its end in 2013. The economic and social context was favorable. The company...

We discuss, by a philosophical method inspired of Quine, the nature of the risk posed by GMOs. Our analysis concludes to the religious origin of the belief of researchers to overall resilience of nature to perturbations of the genetic molecular combination.

The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS), presented as the ''flagship'' of European climate policy, is subject to many criticisms from different stakeholders. Criticisms include the insufficient carbon emissions reduction, the competitiveness losses and the induced carbon leakages,...

We study the impact on employment in France of the implementation of the energy transition scenario built by négaWatt (2011), which provides a massive development of energy savings (through measures of sufficiency and energy efficiency) and renewable energy between 2012 and 2050. Compared to...