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In Canada, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to remain high despite the federal government's commitment to reduce GHG emissions. Environmental policy across Canadian provinces has largely lacked consistency with some provinces implementing targeted policy such as carbon taxes while others have strongly resisted the federal government's attempts to encourage such policy. This study examines the impact of environmental policy on GHG gas emissions across Canadian provinces with policy uniquely measured by public and business sector spending on environmental protection as well as notable province-specific policies. An extended STIRPAT model is specified with the inclusion of proxies for environmental policy using panel data from Canada's ten provinces from 1995 to 2019. The cointegration and the error correction modelling approaches are employed to estimate the non-stationary panel data. A pooled mean group estimation is applied to provide short run and long run coefficients. The findings indicate that although per capita GDP is the main driver of GHG emissions in Canada, environmental policy has a significant mitigating effect, as shown by the negative association between emissions and private and public sector spending on environmental protection in the long run. Furthermore, provinces with targeted policies, such as Ontario's coal phase-out and British Columbia's carbon tax, experienced significant emissions reductions. The theoretical implication is the successful addition of policy variables to the STIRPAT model, providing the model a new application for future research. [Display omitted] • Assess the impact of environmental protection policies on per capita greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. • Utilize public and private expenditures on environmental protection, along with provincial policies. • Extend the STIRPAT model to incorporate environmental protection policies in an empirical model. • Demonstrate a significant negative relationship between environmental protection policies and GHG emissions. • Offer insights with implications for global environmental sustainability efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given their distinct service and demand characteristics, flight operations at different airports and the resulting emissions are not expected to be uniformly impacted by price-based environmental policies such as carbon offset charges, carbon taxes and carbon credits. In order to understand the variabilities, we explore the relationship among airfare (a proxy for price-based policies), passenger demand, airline capacity decisions, and resulting aviation emissions on several air routes originating from a small and a large airport in the US Midwest. Using a supply-and-demand model, emissions are found to be inelastic to airfare overall, although they appear to respond to airfare tenfold more at the small airport compared to the large one. This inelasticity suggests that price-based measures will have low efficacy towards directly reducing aviation emissions, despite their role in generating financial resources for supporting various carbon removal and reduction technologies and processes. Given that the studied airports are only about a 2-h drive apart, the aforementioned emissions' response variability show that studying and designing price-based policy instruments at national, continental and global scales, as done extensively thus far, may mask significant regional variations. Replicating this more localized approach on airports in different regions of the US as well as other countries may yield a range of insights about where price-based environmental policies could have efficacy and to what extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs the dynamic recursive Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) approach to model Australia's economy. This carbon tax policy is designed based on Australia's economy, starting at A$23/tCO2, increasing over time and imposing uniformly on all industries. This study proposes two carbon tax policies and three revenue recycling approaches, and the prices and GDP variations are estimated during 2020 and 2035. This study confirms introducing a carbon tax policy decreases Australia's carbon emissions and reduces real consumption and GDP if it is not accompanied by a revenue recycling policy. But following a revenue-neutral policy and redirecting the carbon tax revenue into the economy through reducing income taxes and investing in research and development (R&D) projects leads to economic growth. This study confirms the implementation of a carbon tax associated with a suitable revenue recycling approach benefits Australia both economically and environmentally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental policy research has increased due to stricter policies aligned with climate goals. However, to achieve the goal of net-zero emissions, the adoption of even stronger policies and increased carbon taxes is necessary, with transition risk becoming a major concern for companies. Even though governments worldwide have been employing a range of methods such as carbon tax, cap-and-trade, and intensity targets to mitigate the impact of climate change, a pivotal debate around determining the optimal policy that reduces emissions without harming the economy continues. Our paper delves into the environmental policy assessment emphasizing the role of endogenous capital utilization rates, which have hitherto been largely disregarded in literature. We study how endogenous capital utilization rate affects the transmission mechanism of economic shocks and the optimal environmental policy choice. To evaluate the quantitative impact of the transmission mechanism, we introduce distinct features to the environmental-dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (E-DSGE) model, including endogenous capital utilization, time-varying depreciation of capital, and environment quality shocks. We find that the complementarity between energy and capital leads to an amplification effect of the conventional transmission mechanism. Our model with these ingredients ranks any carbon tax below 25% as the best policy in terms of welfare improvement. • Role of variable capital utilization in the presence of environmental regulations. • Tightening environmental policies contribute to fluctuations of energy prices. • Complementarity between energy and capital leads to an amplification effect. • Any carbon tax below 25% improves welfare. • Numerical methods calculate an approximation solution of compensating variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]