Assessment of climate change policies requires aggregation of costs and benefits over time and across generations, a process ordinarily done through discounting. Choosing the correct discount rate has proved controversial and highly consequential. To clarify past analysis and guide future work,...

We demonstrate the advantages of a climate treaty based solely on rules for international permit markets when there is uncertainty about abatement costs and environmental damages. Such a ‘Rules Treaty’ comprises a scaling factor and a refunding rule. Each signatory can freely choose the...

Policies aimed at reducing emissions from fossil fuels may increase climate damages. This 'Green Paradox' emerges if resource owners increase near-term extraction in fear of stricter future policy measures. Hans-Werner Sinn (2008) showed that the paradox occurs when increasing resource taxes are...

This paper identifies a previously unnoticed problem important for the efficient reduction of GHG emissions: the pricing of off-peak electricity. There may be many opportunities to reduce emissions by substituting relatively clean and inexpensive off-peak electricity in place of a more...

This paper examines the key design mechanisms of existing and proposed cap-and-trade markets. First, it is shown that the hybrid systems under investigation (safety-valve with offsets, price floor using a subsidy, price collar, allowance reserve, and options offered by the regulator) can be...

I propose a new climate policy, called greenhouse gas (GHG) property, that makes atmospheric GHG stocks the unit of regulation. The initial extractor or importer of a fossil fuel would own tradable carbon property that would become carbon dioxide (CO2) property upon combustion. This CO2 property...

Many people remain opposed to climate change mitigation policies. This opposition is an obstacle to policy action and, therefore, important to understand. We explore how unusually high temperatures (heat waves), which observably increase the salience of climate change-related issues, affect...

Global warming is the most significant threat to ecosystems and people’s health and living standards, especially in small island states in the Caribbean and elsewhere. This paper contributes to the debate by analyzing different options to scale up climate change mitigation and adaptation. In...

The proposal put forth in this paper is called Effective capital. The objective is to scale resources brought to bear on the SDG’s as efficiently as possible by focusing on outcomes that are normalized across projects and efforts. This allows individual actors and small projects to escape the...

There is growing appreciation of the importance of low-probability, high-consequence climate change outcomes given the speed and scale at which greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are increasing. Deep uncertainty in equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), the eventual temperature increase in response...