I show that commonly proposed emission taxes are not optimal for controlling climate change: they can achieve zero emissions but cannot induce negative emissions. The first-best policy charges firms period by period for leaving a stock of carbon in the atmosphere, not just for injecting carbon...

I study how policymakers can access and act on the information about climate change damages that is dispersed throughout the economy. I analyze a new dynamic deposit-refund instrument (called "carbon shares") that I show can: i) efficiently price emissions conditional on information, ii)...

I show that the nature of the energy resources available to an economy qualitatively determines long-run growth outcomes. A harvested resource such as biomass drags on growth, a mined resource such as coal enables output per capita to hold constant, and both a tapped resource such as oil and a...

An increasingly common type of environmental policy instrument limits the carbon intensity of transportation and electricity markets. In order to extend the policy's scope beyond point-of-use emissions, regulators assign each competing fuel an emission intensity rating for use in calculating...

The benefits and costs of increasing solar electricity generation depend on the scale of the increase and on the time frame over which it occurs. Short-run analyses focus on the cost-effectiveness of incremental increases in solar capacity, holding the rest of the power system fixed. Solar’s...