Articles

The effort to address climate change stumbled with the failure to pass cap-and-trade. What should happen now? Five experts, including the Harvard Project's Joe Aldy, discuss the future of U.S. climate and energy policy.

Robert Stavins has launched the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, a two-year effort to identify key design elements of a future international agreement on climate change. The project aims to help develop a plan that is “scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic” and useful to both developing and developed countries.

Harvard economist Robert Stavins has a lead role in setting the climate change agenda and he remains optimistic of progress, as long as the pragmatic approach wins the day.

The 2007 UN-sponsored climate change negotiations opened in Bali, Indonesia this week. By the end of the conference on December 14, the world community may agree to a two-year "roadmap," as called for by the UN Secretary-General, for negotiating an agreement to guide climate change mitigation efforts after the end of the Kyoto Protocol's 2008–2012 commitment period....

The most ambitious application ever attempted of a market-based approach to environmental protection has been for the control of acid rain under the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, which established a sulfur dioxide allowance trading program. This essay identifies lessons that can be learned from this grand experiment in economically oriented environmental policy. The author examines positive political economy lessons, asking why this system was adopted from acid-rain control in 1990, and he considers normative lessons that can be learned from the program's structure and performance, focusing on lessons for the design and implementation of future systems.

This paper develops a methodology whereby estimates of the costs of carbon sequestration can be developed on the basis of evidence from observations of landowners' behavior when confronted with the opportunity costs of alternative land uses.

We describe the basic features of a post-Kyoto international global climate agreement, which addresses three crucial questions: who, when, and how. The respective elements are: first, a means to ensure that key nations-- industrialized and developing-- are involved; second, an emphasis on an extended time path of action (employing a cost-effective pattern over time); and third, inclusion of market-based policy instruments.