DISCUSSION PAPERS
November 2008
"How to Negotiate and Update Climate Agreements"
By Bard Harstad
Any climate change agreement ought to be negotiated and updated later on, as we learn more about the costs and benefits of abatements. Anticipating such negotiations, countries may distort domestic decisions (regarding R&D and adaptation, for example) trying to increase their future bargaining power. This can make a situation with an agreement worse than no agreement at all — unless one specifies rules governing the negotiation process. This paper argues that harmonization and the use of formulas, the time span for the agreement, the default outcome if the negotiations should fail, the voting rule and a minimum participation requirement can all be efficiency enhancing rules. Each rule would be more credible and efficient if the climate agreement is linked to a trade agreement, since that would discourage members from opting out or free-riding if they should be adversely affected by the rules.
November 2008
"Metrics for Evaluating Policy Commitments in a Fragmented World: The Challenges of Equity and Integrity"
By Carolyn Fischer and Richard Morgenstern
"Despite the uncertainties about the nature and stringency of national emission reduction commitments, some things are clear: the international negotiations not only will include national targets and timetables, but also will have to take account of diverse policies and measures undertaken by individual nations, including those inside the current Kyoto group, as well as among developing countries. The evaluation of these diverse policies poses a number of challenges. For example, how can one assess the fairness of the relative contributions of different nations? And even if fairness is agreed upon, how is it possible to determine the credibility of the commitments?"
November 2008
"Expecting the Unexpected: Macroeconomic Volatility and Climate Policy"
By Warwick McKibbin, Adele Morris and Peter Wilcoxen
"To estimate the emissions reductions and costs of a climate policy, analysts usually compare a policy scenario with a baseline scenario of future economic conditions without the policy. Both scenarios require assumptions about the future course of numerous factors such as population growth, technical change, and non-climate policies like taxes. The results are only reliable to the extent that the future turns out to be reasonably close to the assumptions that went into the model.
In this paper we examine the effects of unanticipated macroeconomic shocks to growth in developing countries or a global financial crisis on the performance of three climate policy regimes: a globally-harmonized carbon tax; a global cap and trade system; and the McKibbin-Wilcoxen hybrid...."
October 2008
"Policies for Developing Country Engagement"
By Daniel S. Hall, Michael A. Levi, William A. Pizer and Takahiro Ueno
A successful global effort to mitigate global climate change will require substantial cooperation between developed and developing countries. Even as the bulk of the developed world is at some stage of enacting significant domestic regulations to meet global stabilization goals, growth in developing country emissions will easily thwart those goals unless a cooperative solution is found. We argue that there is a wide range of options that should be pursued, including domestic policy reforms in developing countries, expanded financing mechanisms to address incremental costs, and diplomatic efforts in a variety of forums, all aimed at increasing developing country mitgation efforts over time.
October 2008
"Global Environmental Policy and Global Trade Policy"
By Jeffrey Frankel, James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth
"The global climate regime and the global trade policy regime are on a collision course. National efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) instill among environmentalists fears of leakage and among businesspeople fears of lost competitiveness. Policy-makers respond to these fears. In 2008, legislative attempts in both Washington, DC, and Brussels to enact long-term targets for reduced emission of GHGs included provisions for possible penalties against imports from countries perceived as non-participating. Trade measures, if well designed, could in theory be WTO-compatible...."
October 31, 2008
"Does Costly Signaling Matter? Preliminary Evidence from a Field Experiment"
By Philip Potter, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 2006-2008 and Julia Gray
This paper presents a preliminary experiment designed to determine whether costly signaling plays a role in political interactions. Drawing on the expansive signaling literature in international relations and elsewhere, we propose that the quality of solicitation materials matters because voters respond to costly signals from candidates as a shortcut for determining both a candidate’s investment in their own campaign and the degree of commitment from other voters to that candidate’s cause.
AP Photo
October 2008
"In-Use Vehicle Emissions in China — Tianjin Study"
By Hongyan He Oliver, Former Research Fellow, Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group, 2004-2009
From March 2005–December 2006, a research team headed by ETIP carried out a project in Tianjin, China, to study emissions from on-road vehicles.
October 2008
"International Climate Technology Strategies"
This paper considers opportunities for improved and expanded international development and transfer of climate technologies. It characterizes the economic scale of the climate technology challenge, and it reviews the pattern of public and private R&D and the rationale for R&D policies within the global innovation system. The paper clarifies the importance of options for inducing technology market demand through domestic GHG pricing, international trade, and international development assistance. It then turns to upstream innovation strategies, including international coordination and funding of climate technology R&D, and knowledge transfer through intellectual property. The paper concludes that a successful international effort to accelerate and then sustain the rate of development and transfer of GHG mitigation technologies must harness a diverse set of markets and institutions beyond those explicitly related to climate, to include those for energy, trade, development, and intellectual property.
October 2008
"A Portfolio System of Climate Treaties"
The current climate regime, which focuses on reducing (net) emissions, can be improved in two ways. First, by breaking up the problem, and addressing each part separately, but treating all parts as a system of agreements, new possibilities emerge for enforcement. Second, by incorporating adaptation, "geoengineering," and the risks associated with mitigation options (such as long term storage of nuclear waste and carbon dioxide) in a portfolio of agreements, more opportunities open up for risk management. A portfolio system of climate treaties would be superior to today's single-track architecture.
October 2008
"International Forest Carbon Sequestration in a Post-Kyoto Agreement"
By Andrew J. Plantinga and Kenneth R. Richards
"Given the size of the global carbon pool in forest vegetation, the potential climatic effects of natural and anthropogenic changes in forests are enormous. Therefore, forest carbon management must be an important element of any international agreement on climate change. In this regard, the Kyoto Protocol has proven ineffective, in part, due to its emphasis on project-based evaluation and the absence of a mechanism for compensating avoided deforestation. We consider alternative ways to include forest carbon management within the framework of an international climate treaty...."
