In this paper, we review some of the basic energy balance and climate change impact issues associated with biofuels. For both the basic energy and greenhouse gas balances of producing and using a range of fuels, and for the increasingly debated and important issues of non-greenhouse gas impacts...

We synthesized a range of geographically-explicit forest, grassland and cropland biomass and soil carbon input data sources and used geographic information systems (GIS) software to calculate new estimates of soil and biomass carbon stocks for use with global economic models, particularly for...

With the recent adoption by the California Air Resources Board of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, and USEPA’s Energy Independence and Security Act, greenhouse gas releases from indirect land use change triggered by crop-based biofuels have taken center stage in the debate over the...

The purpose of the agro-ecological zone emission factor model (AEZ-EF) is to estimate the total CO2-equivalent emissions from land use changes, e.g., from an analysis of biofuels impacts or policy analyses such as estimating the effect of changes in agricultural productivity on emissions from...

A rapid coal phase-out is needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, but is hindered by serious challenges ranging from vested interests to the risks of social disruption. To understand how to organize a global coal phase-out, it is crucial to go beyond cost-effective climate mitigation...

Financing productive public capital through distortionary taxes typically creates a trade-off: the optimal investment is determined as a compromise between efficiency-enhancing public investment and perturbing market efficiency, but is never socially optimal. In contrast, such a trade-off can...

Economists argue that land rent taxation is an ideal form of taxation as it causes no deadweight losses and has therefore no adverse effects on growth. Nevertheless, pure land rent taxation is rarely applied and, if so, revenues collected remain rather small. Property taxes share some of the...