DISCUSSION PAPERS
September 2008
"Industrialized-Country Mitigation Policy and Resource Transfers to Developing Countries: Improving and Expanding Greenhouse Gas Offsets"
By Andrew G. Keeler and Alexander Thompson
"The role of developing country commitments and actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions is central to worldwide progress in reducing the risks of anthropogenic climate change. Industrialized-country governments and publics are increasingly concerned that their emissions reduction commitments are unrequited by action in some of the world's largest emitters, especially India and China. Developing countries respond by pointing to the historical responsibility of the global North and stressing their desire to avoid measures that could undermine economic development. This paper offers a proposal for partially resolving this impasse by enhancing existing mechanisms for greenhouse gas offsets, which allow rich countries to finance developing country actions and thereby transfer resources to poorer ones...."
September 2008
"Justice and Climate Change"
By Eric A. Posner and Cass R. Sunstein
"Climate change raises complex issues of science, economics, and politics; it also raises difficult issues of justice. Poor nations are especially vulnerable to rising temperatures, in part because they are poor. Wealthy nations have less at risk, in part because they are wealthy. It is both tempting and plausible to suggest that for either emissions reductions or adaptation, wealthy nations owe special obligations to poor ones. In this paper, we address this general question by focusing on a much narrower one: how should permits be allocated in a global cap-and-trade system?"
September 2008
"A Proposal for the Design of the Successor to the Kyoto Protocol"
By Larry Karp and Jinhua Zhao
"The successor to the Kyoto Protocol should impose national ceilings on rich countries' greenhouse gas emissions and promote voluntary abatement by developing countries. Our proposal gives signatories the option of exercising an escape clause that relaxes their requirement to abate. This feature helps to solve the participation and compliance problems that have weakened the Protocol. We support the use of carefully circumscribed trade restrictions in order to reduce the real or perceived problem of carbon leakage."
August 2008
"The EU Emission Trading Scheme: A Prototype Global System?"
"The European Union's Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is the world's first multinational cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. As an agreement between sovereign nations with diverse historical, institutional, and economic circumstances, the EU ETS can be seen as a prototype of an architecture for an eventual global climate regime."
July 2008
"Toward a Post-Kyoto Climate Change Architecture: A Political Analysis"
By Robert O. Keohane and Kal Raustiala
"Any international agreement to address climate change must rest on broad public support in developed nations for mitigation actions. We propose an international climate architecture that builds on such public support — which we hope will be forthcoming — and uses multilateral international institutions to extend its effects to countries without such "green" publics."
AP Photo
June 2008
"Analysis of Policies to Reduce Oil Consumption and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions from the U.S. Transportation Sector"
By Kelly Sims Gallagher, Director, Energy Technology Innovation Policy and Gustavo Collantes, Former Research Fellow, Energy Technology Innovation Policy Research Group/Enviroment and Natural Resources Program, 2007-2008
This study examines different policy scenarios for reducing GHG emissions and oil consumption in the U.S. transportation sector using a variant of the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS).
May 2008
"Returns to Scale in Carbon Capture and Storage Infrastructure and Deployment"
By Jeffrey Bielicki, Research Fellow, Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group
In this Belfer Center discussion paper, Bielicki describes SimCCS, a cost-minimizing geospatial deployment model used to deploy CCS for a variety of combinations of CO2 sources and injection reservoirs. The purpose of SimCCS is to determine the returns to scale for CCS deployment and to unravel the determinants thereof.
May 16, 2008
"Biofuels and the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Program: The Statute, Policy Issues, and Alternatives"
By Gustavo Collantes, Former Research Fellow, Energy Technology Innovation Policy Research Group/Enviroment and Natural Resources Program, 2007-2008
This paper investigates the relationship between the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program and the supply of biofuels in the United States.
April 14, 2008
"Addressing Global Climate Change with a Comprehensive U.S. Cap-and-Trade System"
By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board
There is a growing impetus for a domestic U.S. climate policy that can provide meaningful reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The paper describes and analyzes an up-stream, economy-wide CO2 cap-and-trade system which implements a gradual trajectory of emissions reductions (with inclusion over time of non-CO2 greenhouse gases), and includes mechanisms to reduce cost uncertainty.
Carsten Karl
Winter 2007/08
"Cleaner Power in India: Towards a Clean-Coal-Technology Roadmap"
By Ananth Chikkatur, Research Associate, Energy Technology Innovation Policy and Ambuj Sagar, Former Research Fellow, Energy Technology Innovation Policy Research Group, 1996-2002; Former Senior Research Associate, Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, 2007-2008;
Investigating the role of coal in India's energy sector, Chikkatur and Sagar emphasize the need for a technology roadmapping process. They highlight the interlinkages between technology innovation and public policy and provide an analytical framework to help delineate the kinds of questions that scholars and practitioners need to ask in addressing India's coal sector.
