Climat : papiers de recherche moissonnés (24 juillet 2017)

Leaving an emissions trading scheme – insights from the United Kingdom / Richard S.J. Tol. University of Sussex. Energy, 2017, 7 p. (working paper No. 10-2017) http://www.sussex.ac.uk/economics/documents/wps-10-2017.pdf

The United Kingdom may opt to leave the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) for greenhouse gases. If so, a central plank of UK climate policy will need to be replaced at short notice. The UK is a large importer of emission permits, and meeting its climate policy targets would be much harder and dearer without the EU ETS. The impact on the EU would be limited, although UK permits circulating in the rest of the EU would lose their legal standing between Brexit and 2021. Non-EU countries take part in the EU ETS, and this appears to be the best option for the UK post-Brexit.

Thoughts on the Economics of Secondary Benefits between Climate Change Mitigation and Air Pollution Regulation / Kristie L. Ebi, Richard S.J. Tol and Gary W. Yohe. University of Sussex. Energy, 2017, 24 p. (working paper No. 11-2017) http://www.sussex.ac.uk/economics/documents/wps-11-2017.pdf

Secondary benefits (or costs), otherwise known in the literature as co-benefits or ancillary benefits, are the added net benefits that can be attributed to policies that are above and beyond the primary benefits of climate policies. For example, the primary benefit of greenhouse gas emission reduction is to reduce the magnitude of future climate change; the secondary benefits are expressed in terms of changes in the patterns and concentrations of other pollutants and their secondary compounds. The paper follows a brief review of studies that attempted to quantify health co-benefits with a discussion of the basic underlying economic structure built on first principles of economic thought. It not only portrays the complexity that erupts when there are multiple and interdependent positive or negative externalities across different sources, but also examines several, sometimes surprising conjectures that apply more widely to secondary benefit considerations of all stripes. Concludes remarks synthesize these conjectures for health contexts, for more general policy evaluations beyond the health sphere, and for aggregate constructions such as the social cost of carbon.

The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low Carbon Future / Daniele La Porta Arrobas, Kirsten Lori Hund, Michael Stephen Mccormick, Jagabanta Ningthoujam, John Richard Drexhage. Washington, D.C. : World Bank, 2017, 112 p. (Working Paper ; 117581) http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/207371500386458722/The-Growing-Role-of-Minerals-and-Metals-for-a-Low-Carbon-Future 

Climate and greenhouse gas (GHG) scenarios have typically paid scant attention to the metal implications necessary to realize a low/zero carbon future. The 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change indicates a global resolve to embark on development patterns that would significantly be less GHG intensive. One might assume that nonrenewable resource development and use will also need to decline in a carbon-constrained future. This report tests that assumption, identifies those commodities implicated in such a scenario and explores ramifications for relevant resource-rich developing countries. Using wind, solar, and energy storage batteries as proxies, the study examines which metals will likely rise in demand to be able to deliver on a carbon-constrained future. Metals which could see a growing market include aluminum (including its key constituent, bauxite), cobalt, copper, iron ore, lead, lithium, nickel, manganese, the platinum group of metals, rare earth metals including cadmium, molybdenum, neodymium, and indium—silver, steel, titanium and zinc. The report then maps production and reserve levels of relevant metals globally, focusing on implications for resource-rich developing countries. It concludes by identifying critical research gaps and suggestions for future work.

Paris after Trump: An Inconvenient Insight / Christoph Böhringer and Thomas F. Rutherford. 42 p. (ZenTra Working Paper in Transnational Studies No. 72 / 2017) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2988845

With his announcement to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement US President Donald Trump has snubbed the international climate policy community. Key remaining parties to the Agreement such as Europe and China might call for carbon tariffs on US imports as sanctioning instrument to coerce US compliance. Our analysis, however, reveals an inconvenient insight for advocates of carbon tariffs: Given the possibility of retaliatory tariffs across all imported goods, carbon tariffs do not constitute a credible threat for the US. A tariff war with its main trading partners China and Europe might make the US worse off than compliance to the Paris Agreement but China, in particular, should prefer US defection to a tariff war.

Danièle Revel

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