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It is often argued that dependence on carbon fuels should be reduced as soon as possible - both for fears of our 'running out' of them and of their impact on global warming. But the ideas of 'peak oil' and 'peak gas' are both myths. Indeed, there is little by way of 'renewable' sources of energy being able to secure more than 40% of total energy requirements in 2100. Thus oil, gas and coal will continue to dominate the world's energy supply for many decades. If need be, the only solution in the event of global warming would be by sequestering the carbon underground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of sub-global participation in greenhouse gas mitigation efforts, this paper investigates the effectiveness of a Canada-U.S. emissions bubble under their existing regional trade agreement. It also explores the potential economic impact of carbon tariff harmonization through the implementation of a common Canada-U.S. external border tariff adjustment as a mean to address competitiveness issues. Using a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model the paper finds that the creation of an emission bubble between the two countries could improve efficiency. The findings also suggest that a carbon tariff harmonization policy could give rise to distributional issues among Annex I regions and could fail to mitigate the negative competitiveness impacts of carbon abatement policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter in the production of the commodity. We argue that a particular mode of value-generating life predominates in each commodity circuit: in exotic pet trade, an individualized, 'encounterable' life; in ecosystem services, an aggregate, reproductive life. Second, we find that hierarchies between humans and other beings are highly generative in the formation and effects of lively commodities. On one hand, these hierarchies cast nonhumans in a disposable state that is integral to the functioning of exotic pet trade; on the other hand, these hierarchies are partly what ecosystem services are designed to address. Nevertheless, we find that reproduction of uneven species geographies is at work in both economies. The degree and nature of effect on the material conditions of nonhuman lives is, however, distinct, and our conclusion calls for greater attention to these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages key social theories of transnational mobilities in order to forge the concept of urban 'green' cosmopolitization, posited as a social scientifi c contribution to epochal conversations on climate change. Bringing Ulrich Beck's notion of 'cosmopolitization' to bear on recent work around 'urban policy mobilities', I analyze professional planning practices in large-scale world cities as privileged sites for contemporary imaginings and material implementations of low-carbon sociotechnical change. Focusing on the regions of Europe and Asia, I show how specifi c policies and technologies of urban greening circulate in intercity sustainability networks. These networks, I suggest, serve to organize processes of professional engagement with climate change around notions of innovation, learning, and 'best practice' policy transfer among urban professionals--thereby also excluding more 'radically' alternative futures. The paper then turns to explore how such green cosmopolitization works as a social force within specifi c urban localities, employing two ethnographic case studies into 'ambitious' low-carbon planning projects in Copenhagen and Kyoto, respectively. In particular, my analysis explores how place-based notions of 'culture' are mobilized in the urban visions of architects and engineers as resources for addressing global environmental risks. These spaces of urban green cosmopolitization, I conclude, emerge at the intersection of professional and vernacular ethico-political attachments, thereby reworking--in often contentious ways--how particular urban materials and spaces can be understood in reference to an emerging moral geography of shared climatic risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carbon dioxide emissions abatement in a group of countries can result in increased emissions in non-abating countries. This effect has been referred to as carbon leakage. The Kyoto Protocol calls for a number of industrialized countries to limit their emissions while other countries have no abatement commitments. This paper assesses the sectoral and regional determinants of the leakage in a static multi-sector, multi-regional computable general equilibrium model. In baseline estimates based on our model, the Kyoto Protocol leads to a carbon leakage rate of 10 percent. A decomposition technique is applied which attributes increases in CO[sub 2] emissions by non-participating countries to specific sectors in the abating countries. This information is important for the debate on the tax exemptions for certain industries in the participating countries as it provides information for the most- and least-leakage contributing sectors of the economy. Additional calculations indicate the need for caution in the carbon tax design. Exemptions of any sector from a carbon tax are not justified because they lower welfare in a region. The degree of sectoral and regional data disaggregation, and international capital mobility do not change the leakage rate significantly. Fossil-fuel supply elasticities and trade substitution elasticities are crucial determinants for projecting the total Worm emissions of CO[sub 2]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyse infrastructure needs of the European natural gas market in response to decarbonisation of the European energy system. To this end, we use numerical modelling and apply the Global Gas Model. We investigate three pathways of future natural gas consumption: i) a decreasing natural gas consumption, following the scenarios of the EU Energy Roadmap 2050; ii) a moderate increase of natural gas consumption, along the lines of the IEA's New Policies Scenario; and iii) a temporary increase of natural gas use as a "bridge" technology, followed by a strong decrease after 2030. Our results show that current import infrastructure and intra-European transit capacity are sufficient to accommodate future import needs in all scenarios. This is despite a pronounced reduction of domestic production and a strong increase in import dependency. However, due to strong demand in Asia, Europe must increasingly rely on exports from Africa and the Caspian region, leading to new infrastructure capacity from these regions. When natural gas serves as a "bridge" technology, short-term utilisation rates of LNG import capacity temporarily increase instead of instigating large scale pipeline expansions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rising popularity of emissions trading schemes and the private sector call for a global carbon market, it seems as though there is the chance to solve climate change by simply providing a clear price signal. But how easy will this be, both technically and practically? This paper provides an overview of the challenges in policy design terms involved in directly linking existing emissions trading schemes, and the status of planned emissions trading schemes, in order to set the potential of establishing a policy framework for a global carbon market in a realistic frame. The paper begins by outlining what linking is and setting out the advantages and risks of linking schemes. The key criteria to consider in order to establish compatibility for linking are explored, and then a summary of existing or planned schemes is given to highlight some of the technical challenges involved in linking emissions trading schemes together. The paper goes on to describe how a linked scheme could be set up and then moves on to the political arena, looking more closely at the political benefits and risks of linking and then discussing whether or not linking emissions trading schemes is an element of, or an alternative to, a global climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent climate change statistics attribute over a quarter of carbon emissions to residential energy use in the United Kingdom. To address this, a building standard (Code for Sustainable Homes) was introduced to aim to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption. This paper analyzes how such an environmental standard reconfigures the sociotechnological relations and practices of housing professionals that design, construct, and manage social housing. We focus on how actors engage with the standard’s recommendation for incorporating low and zero carbon technologies into new buildings. We identify diverse practices that emerge from these engagements, which, we contend, have significant consequences for the working relationships of professional actors and for renewable energy provision. By being entwined in, and generative of actors’ practices, we argue that the Code becomes part of the sociotechnological relationships and infrastructures that shape energy provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article excavates the role, function and practices of community within Transition, a grassroots environmentalist movement. It does so to pursue a quest for understanding if, how, and in what ways, community-based environmental movements are 'political'. When community-based low carbon initiatives are discussed academically, they can be critiqued; this critique is in turn often based on the perception that the crucial community aspect tends to be a settled, static and reified condition of (human) togetherness. However community--both in theory and practice--is not destined to be so. This article collects and evaluates data from two large research projects on the Transition movement. It takes this ethnographic evidence together with lessons from post-political theory, to outline the capacious, diverse and progressive forms of community that exists within the movement. Doing so, it argues against a blanket postpolitical diagnosis of community transitions, and opens up, yet again, the consequences of the perceptions and prejudices one has about community are more than mere theoretical posturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With federal policies to curb carbon emissions stagnating in the U.S., California is taking action alone. Sub-national policies can lead to high rates of emissions leakage to other regions as state-level economies are closely connected, including integration of electricity markets. Using a calibrated general equilibrium model, we estimate that California's cap-and-trade program without restrictions on imported electricity increases out-of-state emissions by 45% of the domestic reduction. When imported electricity is included in the cap and "resource shuffling" is banned, as set out in California's legislation, emissions reductions in electricity exporting states partially offset leakage elsewhere and overall leakage is 9%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Beer-Lambert law does not apply strictly to the relationship between radiative forcing (RF) of CO2 and concentration in the atmosphere, i.e., ΔRF = 5.35ln(C/Co). It is an approximation because water vapour competes unevenly with CO2 over the IR absorption wavelength range. We propose a quadratic model as an improved approximation. It links concentration to RF thereby allowing RF calculation at any concentration, not just ΔRF. For example, at 378 ppmv of CO2, the level in 2005, it calculates RF = 8.67 W m-2, or approximately 2.7% of the total RF of all the greenhouse gases. A second and independent method based on worldwide hourly measurements of atmospheric temperature and relative humidity confirms this percentage. Each method shows that, on average, water vapour contributes approximately 96% of current greenhouse gas warming. Thus, the factors controlling the amount of water vapour in the air also control the earth's temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine how theories of sustainable and ethical consumption help us to understand a new, rapidly expanding type of consumer product designed to mitigate climate change: carbon offsets. The voluntary carbon offset market grew by 200% between 2005 and 2006, and there are now over 150 retailers of voluntary carbon offsets worldwide. Our analysis concentrates on the production and consumption of carbon offsets, drawing on ideas from governmentality and political ecology about how narratives and technologies are used to create particular types of consumer subjectivities and shape consumer choice. We critically examine three narratives that offset producers are using to position carbon offsets and examine how these narratives are shaping circuits of carbon offset production and consumption. We assess the implications for the future governance of voluntary carbon offset markets and for the study of alternative consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how the endogenous factors of public projects affect carbon performance. Taking the logical framework approach, a research model and hypotheses are proposed to evaluate the effects of endogenous project factors, including human resources, funding, materials, and project management methodology on project carbon performance. Questionnaires were distributed to project professionals in China and a structural equation model was deployed to analyze these effects. The results show that funding, materials, and project management methodology have a significant influence on public project carbon performance, whereas human resources have no significant effects. Recommendations on how to improve carbon performance are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this second report I discuss research published in 2014 and early 2015. I examine recent debates about elemental geographies, including research on the mobilities associated with air and water, and on how aluminium, steel and carbon facilitate movement. The report then highlights the vibrant materialities and mobilities underpinning events, examining different approaches to processual and molecular mobilities, including work which is critical of the suggestion that everything is moving. In the final section I examine the centrality of mobility to academic practices and biographies, and here I discuss the life and work of the influential cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although stakeholder theory is widely accepted in environmental disclosure research, empirical evidence about the role of stakeholders in firms’ disclosure is still scarce. The authors address this issue for a setting of carbon disclosure. Our international sample comprises the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Global 500, S&P 500, and FTSE 350 reports from 2008 to 2011, resulting in a total of 1,120 firms with 3,631 firm-year observations. The authors apply Tobit regressions to analyze the relationship between carbon disclosure and the relevance of the following stakeholder groups: government, general public, media, employees, and customers. Our results confirm that in addition to carbon performance, all stakeholders are associated with carbon disclosure. Only one stakeholder group (government) acts as a moderator for the relationship between carbon performance and carbon disclosure. Furthermore, the authors find that carbon performance but not the affiliation to a carbon-intensive industry acts as a moderator between stakeholder relevance and carbon disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) has had no significant effect on average global temperature. This deduction employs existing data and the computational mandate that temperature change is in response to the time-integral of the net forcing; not proportionately to the instantaneous value of the net forcing itself. This finding also stongly suggests that Anthropogenic Global Wanning (AGW) is flawed and climate sensitivity (the increase in average global temperature (AGT) due to doubling of CO2 is not significantly different from zero [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the effect of network structure on the carbon performance of firms in emerging economies at an ego network level. Building on the theoretical framework of social networks, we posit that an ego firm’s network position, structural embeddedness, and structural constraint affect carbon performance. We examine the research hypotheses using a panel data set made up of 44 Indian firms that entered into alliances under the Clean Development Mechanism over the 2005-2009 period. Our main results show that the central position of the focal firm in the network and its degree of network embeddedness exert a positive effect on its carbon performance. This article contributes to the literature on climate strategy by exploring the influence of the structural characteristics of the firm’s ego network in the carbon market on its environmental performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the question of how investments in imperfectly competitive electricity markets interact with a price on carbon. The analysis is based on a dynamic numerical Cournot model calibrated to the German market and focuses on (a) the level of investments and technology choice and (b) welfare impacts under optimal carbon pricing. As a special feature, we also restrict access to one technology (coal) to strategic players ("technological market power"). The main results are: (a) In the long-run prices reach competitive levels due to entry by the competitive fringe. If technological market power prevails, this can only be accomplished through high carbon prices. (b) Investment levels and technology choice show different patterns under market power and perfect competition. (c) Apart from driving investments, carbon pricing also renders old carbon-intensive capacities unprofitable and thus induces more extensive fleet turnover. (d) Welfare almost always increases as a result of carbon pricing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biochar is the solid remains of organic material that has been heated to >350°C in an oxygen-limited environment, frequently intended to be mixed with soils. Biochar usually contains 80 - 90% stable aromatic carbon that is resistant to decomposition and mineralization (possibly for hundreds to thousands of years): it is, therefore, a potential way of removing carbon from the atmosphere for storage and has received considerable attention in the specialist media. Because the field is new there is no authoritative scientific assessment of the state-of-knowledge and its certainty. We therefore undertook an internet-based survey (n=145) to elicit expert opinion on the state-of-knowledge on biochar science and engineering. While expert opinion broadly supports the proposed benefits of biochar, the survey also identified a high degree of uncertainty attached to most of the knowledgeclaims: more basic underpinning R&D will be necessary before policymakers will have confidence in implementing biochar projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the centrality of sociological analyses to the understanding of high carbon societies and climate change. This centrality is related to developments in capitalism throughout the 20th century reflecting shifts from low carbon to high carbon economies, increased and unsustainable consumption, and the implementation of societies of social control. The author associated increased global climatic change to a path-dependent form of neoliberal capitalism characterized by increased carbon use.

Despite the many calls to reform the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), its conceptual underpinnings are strong and it will most likely survive in the post-2012 climate regime. Some modifications may be considered in the short term to strengthen the effectiveness and transparency of the mechanism without modifying the Marrakech Accords. In the medium term, substantially increased mitigation efforts in developing countries may require a combination of three possible financial mechanisms: the current activity-based CDM albeit improved, a second market mechanism that would seek to improve the long term emission trends of developing countries by promoting broad-based emission reduction programs primarily in the private sector, and a third-- nonmarket--financial mechanism that would provide an incentive for the adoption of policy changes leading to a low carbon path, but where emission reductions would not be used as international offsets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explores the appropriate specification of cross-country econometric analyses of international trade and pollution using data on carbon emissions across 132 countries from 1950 to 1992. A number of prominent studies implicitly rule out pollution shifting across countries by not interacting trade measures with income. Using a more flexible functional form, it is shown in this article that increased trade intensity raises carbon emissions in lower income countries and lowers carbon emissions in upper income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses the economic effects of carbon emission restrictions in Egypt. Alternative specifications in which the sensitivity of estimates of the costs of emissions restrictions is analyzed; Model constructed for the analysis; Four broad categories which the data requirements to implement the model can be classified; Scenarios of emissions reductions; Effects of increasingly restrictive limits on annual emissions.