The outgoing European Commission has published its Communication on a 2040 climate target as its last major climate policy initiative before the 2024 European elections. By recommending a net emissions reduction target of 90 per cent compared to 1990 levels, it lays the strategic foundations for...

[Conclusion]: The Kyoto Protocol complicates the process of achieving a realistic approach to greenhouse gas abatement. It has created a great deal of uncertainty about how and whether countries are going to achieve the strict quantity targets that have been set by 2008 to 2012. The...

Consumption surveys often record zero purchases of a good because of a short observation window. Only mean consumption rates can then be inferred. We show that propensity scores can be used to estimate each unit's consumption rate, revealing the distribution. We demonstrate the method using the...

Project-based mechanisms for emissions reductions credits, like the Clean Development Mechanism, pose important challenges for policy design because of several inherent characteristics. Participation is voluntary, so it will not occur without sufficient credits. Evaluating reductions requires...

During the combustion of high-moisture lignites (50–60 wt.%) in conventional power plants, a substantial amount of the energy content is required to evaporate the water. With a view to secure and strengthen brown coal's position as high available energy source, in recent years many...

One method to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to subsidize emissions-reducing activities. The question is how to allocate such subsidies. Allocation through auctions is an emerging mechanism. In a controlled experimental market setting, we compare the effects of a variety of auction...

Consider a model for optimal timing of emissions reduction, trading off the cost of the reduction against the time-additive aggregate of environmental damage, the disutility from the pollutant stock M(t) the infrastructure contributes to. Intuitively, the optimal timing for an infinitesimal...

The establishment of low-carbon cities has been suggested all over the World, since cities are key drivers of energy usage and the associated carbon emissions. This paper presents a scenario analysis of future energy consumption and carbon emissions for the city of Beijing. The Long-range Energy...

In the Albufera (València) region of Spain, rice has been farmed for nearly 500 years. Post-harvest flooding of rice fields has become an integral element of wetland refuge for migratory birds. The steady rise in the cost of purchased inputs is causing considerable economic stress to the...

We analyse CO2 emissions reduction costs based on project data from the Climate Cent Foundation (CCF), a climate policy instrument in Switzerland. We draw four conclusions. First, for the projects investigated, the CCF on average pays € 63/t. Due to the Kyoto Protocol, the CCF buys reductions...