Effective climate action depends on dismantling the assumptions and oversimplifications that have become the basis of climate policy. The assumption that greenhouse gases (GHG) are fungible and the use of single-point values in normalizing GHG species to CO2-equivalents can propagate inaccuracies in carbon accounting and have already led to failures of carbon offset systems. Separate emission reduction targets and tracking by GHG species are recommended to achieve long-term climate stabilization.
Until recently, analysis of optimal global climate policy has focused on mitigation. Exploration of policies to meet the 1.5°C target have brought carbon dioxide removal (CDR), a second instrument, into the climate policy mainstream. Far less agreement exists regarding the role of solar geoengineering (SG), a third instrument to limit global climate risk. Integrated assessment modelling (IAM) studies offer little guidance on trade-offs between these three instruments because they have dealt with CDR and SG in isolation. Here, I extend the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and Economy (DICE) …
Recent attempts at cooperating on climate change mitigation highlight the limited efficacy of large-scale agreements, when commitment to mitigation is costly and initially rare. Bottom-up approaches using region-specific mitigation agreements promise greater success, at the cost of slowing global adoption. Here, we show that a well-timed switch from regional to global negotiations dramatically accelerates climate mitigation compared to using only local, only global, or both agreement types simultaneously. This highlights the scale-specific roles of mitigation incentives: local incentives capit…
Given the importance of public support for policy change and implementation, public policymakers and researchers have attempted to understand the factors associated with this support for climate change mitigation policy. In this article, we compare the feasibility of using different supervised learning methods for regression using a novel socio-economic data set which measures public support for potential climate change mitigation policies. Following this model selection, we utilize gradient boosting regression, a well-known technique in the machine learning community, but relatively uncommon …
Technologies can help strengthen the resilience of our economy against existential climate-risks. We investigate climate change adaptation technologies (CCATs) in US patents to understand (1) historical patterns and drivers of innovation; (2) scientific and technological requirements to develop and use CCATs; and (3) CCATs' potential technological synergies with mitigation. First, in contrast to mitigation, innovation in CCATs only slowly takes off, indicating a relatively low awareness of investors for solutions to cope with climate risks. Historical trends in environmental regulation, energy…
We study strategic interactions between firms with heterogeneous beliefs about future climate impacts. To that end, we propose a Cournot-type equilibrium model where firms choose mitigation efforts and production quantities such as to maximize the expected profits under their subjective beliefs. It is shown that optimal mitigation efforts are increased by the presence of uncertainty and act as substitutes; i.e., one firm's lack of mitigation incentivizes others to act more decidedly, and vice versa.
Carbon offsets from voluntarily avoided deforestation projects are generated based on performance vis-à-vis ex-ante deforestation baselines. We examined the impacts of 27 forest conservation projects in six countries on three continents using synthetic control methods for causal inference. We compare the project baselines with ex-post counterfactuals based on observed deforestation in control sites. Our findings show that most projects have not reduced deforestation. For projects that did, reductions were substantially lower than claimed. Methodologies for constructing deforestation baselines …
Expanding multi-country emissions trading system is considered as crucial to fill the existing mitigation gap for the 2\degree C climate target. Trustworthy emissions accounting is the cornerstone of such a system encompassing different jurisdictions. However, traditional emissions measuring, reporting, and verification practices that support data authenticity might not be applicable as detailed data from large utilities and production facilities to be covered in the multi-country emissions trading system are usually highly sensitive and of severe national security concern. In this study, we p…
Robustness to Model Uncertainties Drives More Rapid CO2 Emissions Reductions
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Environmental Protection Agency（美国环境保护署）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Ensuring resilience to extreme weather events increases the ambition of mitigation scenarios on solar power and storage uptake: a study on the Italian power system
Climate change has become intertwined with the global economy. Here, we describe the importance of inertia to continued growth in energy consumption. Drawing from thermodynamic arguments, and using 38 years of available statistics between 1980 to 2017, we find a persistent time-independent scaling between the historical time integral $W$ of world inflation-adjusted economic production $Y$, or $W\left(t\right) = \int_0^t Y\left(t'\right)dt'$, and current rates of world primary energy consumption $\mathcal E$, such that $λ= \mathcal{E}/W = 5.9\pm0.1$ Gigawatts per trillion 2010 US dollars. This …
Knowledge is known to be a pre-condition for an individuals behavior. For the most efficient informational strategies for education, it is essential that we identify the types of knowledge that promote behavior effectively and investigate their structure. The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine the factors that affect Kenyan farmers, environmental citizenship behavior (ECB) in the context of Adaptation and mitigation (Climate smart agriculture). To achieve this objective, a theoretical framework has been developed based on value belief norm (VBN) theory. Design/methodology/approach, …
Technology interactions reshape the economics of China's coal power decarbonization
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Stockholm University（斯德哥尔摩大学）；Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；Adelphi University（阿德尔菲大学）
To analyze climate change mitigation strategies, economists rely on simplified climate models - climate emulators. We propose a generic and transparent calibration and evaluation strategy for these climate emulators that is based on Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 5 (CMIP5). We demonstrate that the appropriate choice of the free model parameters can be of key relevance for the predicted social cost of carbon. We propose to use four different test cases: two tests to separately calibrate and evaluate the carbon cycle and temperature response, a test to quantify the transient climat…
Climate change is a non-uniform phenomenon. This paper proposes a new quantitative methodology to characterize, measure, and test the existence of climate change heterogeneity. It consists of three steps. First, we introduce a new testable warming typology based on the evolution of the trend of the whole temperature distribution and not only on the average. Second, we define the concepts of warming acceleration and warming amplification in a testable format. And third, we introduce the new testable concept of warming dominance to determine whether region A is suffering a worse warming process …
AI worsens climate change, integrated assessment shows
Hebei University of Technology（河北工业大学）；International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)（国际应用系统分析研究所）；University of Sussex（萨塞克斯大学）；Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；Tinbergen Institute（丁伯根研究所）；CESifo；Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业学院）；City University of Macau（澳门城市大学）
