IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rff/dpaper/dp-04-17.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Model, Model on the Screen, What's the Cost of Going Green?

Author

Listed:
  • Dowlatabadi, Hadi
  • Boyd, David
  • MacDonald, Jamie

Abstract

How much a policy is expected to cost and who bears the brunt of that cost play a significant role in the debates that shape regulations. We do not have a good track record of predicting costs and their ultimate distribution, but systematic reviews of past assessments have identified some of the factors that lead to errors. A wide range of expected costs of climate policy have been hotly debated, but all are likely to be wrong. This does not mean that we should continue a debate using ill-informed analyses. On the contrary, we need early small experiments to shed light on key unknowns. Environmental stewardship is a long-term challenge and an adaptive regulatory approach promises to inform policy targets and improve controls through sequential regulatory phases that promote: innovation, flexibility and diffusion of best technologies.

Suggested Citation

  • Dowlatabadi, Hadi & Boyd, David & MacDonald, Jamie, 2004. "Model, Model on the Screen, What's the Cost of Going Green?," RFF Working Paper Series dp-04-17, Resources for the Future.
    • Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-04-17
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-04-17.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hazilla, Michael & Kopp, Raymond J, 1990. "Social Cost of Environmental Quality Regulations: A General Equilibrium Analysis," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(4), pages 853-873, August.
    2. Winston Harrington & Richard D. Morgenstern & Peter Nelson, 2000. "On the accuracy of regulatory cost estimates," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 19(2), pages 297-322.
    3. Burtraw, Dallas, 1998. "Cost Savings, Market Performance, and Economic Benefits of the U.S. Acid Rain Program," Discussion Papers 10885, Resources for the Future.
    4. Boyd, James, 1998. "Searching for the Profit in Pollution Prevention: Case Studies in the Corporate Evaluation of Environmental Opportunities," Discussion Papers 10614, Resources for the Future.
    5. Richard D. Morgenstern & William A. Pizer & Jhih-Shyang Shih, 2001. "The Cost Of Environmental Protection," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 83(4), pages 732-738, November.
    6. Weber, Christoph & Perrels, Adriaan, 2000. "Modelling lifestyle effects on energy demand and related emissions," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 28(8), pages 549-566, July.
    7. Dallas Burtraw, 1996. "The So2 Emissions Trading Program: Cost Savings Without Allowance Trades," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 14(2), pages 79-94, April.
    8. Felder Stefan & Rutherford Thomas F., 1993. "Unilateral CO2 Reductions and Carbon Leakage: The Consequences of International Trade in Oil and Basic Materials," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 25(2), pages 162-176, September.
    9. Ellerman, A. Denny & Montero, Juan-Pablo, 1998. "The Declining Trend in Sulfur Dioxide Emissions: Implications for Allowance Prices," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 26-45, July.
    10. Nordhaus, William D, 1977. "Economic Growth and Climate: The Carbon Dioxide Problem," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 67(1), pages 341-346, February.
    11. DeCanio, Stephen J, 1998. "The efficiency paradox: bureaucratic and organizational barriers to profitable energy-saving investments," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 26(5), pages 441-454, April.
    12. Dowlatabadi, Hadi & Morgan, M. Granger, 1993. "A model framework for integrated studies of the climate problem," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 21(3), pages 209-221, March.
    13. Dowlatabadi, Hadi, 1998. "Sensitivity of climate change mitigation estimates to assumptions about technical change," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(5-6), pages 473-493, December.
    14. Dowlatabadi, Hadi & Hahn, Robert H. & Kopp, Raymond J. & Palmer, Karen & DeWitt, Diane, 1993. "How reliably can climate change and mitigation policy impacts on electric utilities be assessed?," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 3(3), pages 261-268, July.
    15. Christoph Böhringer & Thomas Rutherford, 2002. "Carbon Abatement and International Spillovers," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 22(3), pages 391-417, July.
    16. Richard J. Mccann, 1996. "Environmental Commodities Markets: ‘Messy’ Versus ‘Ideal’ Worlds," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 14(3), pages 85-97, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dowlatabadi, Hadi & Boyd, David R. & MacDonald, Jamie, 2004. "Model, Model on the Screen, What's the Cost of Going Green?," Discussion Papers 10806, Resources for the Future.
    2. Stavins, Robert & Hahn, Robert & Cavanagh, Sheila, 2001. "National Environmental Policy During the Clinton Years," RFF Working Paper Series dp-01-38, Resources for the Future.
    3. Curtis Carlson & Dallas Burtraw & Maureen Cropper & Karen L. Palmer, 2000. "Sulfur Dioxide Control by Electric Utilities: What Are the Gains from Trade?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 108(6), pages 1292-1326, December.
    4. Popp, David & Newell, Richard G. & Jaffe, Adam B., 2010. "Energy, the Environment, and Technological Change," Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, in: Bronwyn H. Hall & Nathan Rosenberg (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 873-937, Elsevier.
    5. Revesz, Richard & Stavins, Robert, 2004. "Environmental Law and Policy," Working Paper Series rwp04-023, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    6. Böhringer, Christoph & Garcia-Muros, Xaquin & Gonzalez-Eguino, Mikel & Rey, Luis, 2017. "US climate policy: A critical assessment of intensity standards," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(S1), pages 125-135.
    7. Stavins, Robert, 2001. "Lessons From the American Experiment With Market-Based Environmental Policies," RFF Working Paper Series dp-01-53, Resources for the Future.
    8. Böhringer, Christoph & Fischer, Carolyn & Rosendahl, Knut Einar, 2014. "Cost-effective unilateral climate policy design: Size matters," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 67(3), pages 318-339.
    9. John Loomis & Bryon Allen, 2008. "Using Non Market Valuation to Inform the Choice Between Permits and Fees in Environmental Regulation," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 40(3), pages 329-337, July.
    10. Winston Harrington & Richard D. Morgenstern & Peter Nelson, 2000. "On the accuracy of regulatory cost estimates," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 19(2), pages 297-322.
    11. Böhringer, Christoph & Lange, Andreas & Rutherford, Thomas F., 2014. "Optimal emission pricing in the presence of international spillovers: Decomposing leakage and terms-of-trade motives," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 101-111.
    12. Hahn, Robert W., 2000. "The Impact of Economics on Environmental Policy," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 375-399, May.
    13. Kuosmanen, Timo & Vöhringer, Frank & Dellink, Rob B., 2004. "A Proposal for the Attribution of Market Leakage to CDM Projects," HWWA Discussion Papers 262, Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWA).
    14. Stowe, Robert C & Stavins, Robert Norman & Chan, Gabriel Angelo & Sweeney, Richard Leonard, 2012. "The SO2 Allowance Trading System and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990: Reflections on Twenty Years of Policy Innovation," Scholarly Articles 8160721, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
    15. Olivier Rousse & Benoît Sévi, 2005. "Behavioral Heterogeneity in the US Sulfur Dioxide Emissions Allowance Trading Program," ERSA conference papers ersa05p550, European Regional Science Association.
    16. Elliott, Joshua & Fullerton, Don, 2014. "Can a unilateral carbon tax reduce emissions elsewhere?," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 6-21.
    17. Burtraw, Dallas & Palmer, Karen L., 2003. "The Paparazzi Take a Look at a Living Legend: The SO2 Cap-and-Trade Program for Power Plants in the United States," Discussion Papers 10665, Resources for the Future.
    18. Wei, Yi-Ming & Mi, Zhi-Fu & Huang, Zhimin, 2015. "Climate policy modeling: An online SCI-E and SSCI based literature review," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 57(PA), pages 70-84.
    19. Christoph Böhringer & Jared C. Carbone & Thomas F. Rutherford, 2016. "The Strategic Value of Carbon Tariffs," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 8(1), pages 28-51, February.
    20. Pizer, William A. & Kopp, Raymond, 2005. "Calculating the Costs of Environmental Regulation," Handbook of Environmental Economics, in: K. G. Mäler & J. R. Vincent (ed.), Handbook of Environmental Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 25, pages 1307-1351, Elsevier.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    cost estimation; climate policy; modeling; adaptive management;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Theory
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
    • O31 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-04-17. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Resources for the Future (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rffffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.