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Power generation under the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) can reduce greenhouse gas emissions below the baseline level, so entities may argue to use this attribute to meet the goal of Emission Trading Scheme (ETS). Although these two quantity-based regulation systems have different policy objectives, both mechanisms are implicitly linked by credit conversions depending on credit prices. This paper builds an analytic partial equilibrium model and derives market equilibria in a closed form to demonstrate how each mechanism influences the other by policy instruments such as a renewable requirement, a reduction target in greenhouse gas emission, levels of penalties, or marginal costs. We can compare "direct vs indirect" effectiveness of a regulatory changes across both markets with the case where converting renewable offsets are completed prohibited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kyoto Protocol entered into force on February 16, 2005. Emissions reductions targets established by the protocol will be met by domestic policies and by three international flexible mechanisms: clean development, joint implementation, and emissions trading. Following a value-theoretic and class-based approach, the purpose of this paper is to analyze these flexible mechanisms. In particular, the paper investigates the nature and adoption of flexible mechanisms, and their class and environmental links and implications. Carbon-intensive capitalist firms and developed economies are found to be exerting great influence on the shaping and implementation of flexible mechanisms. Environmental effectiveness and justice, and equal sustainable development raised and claimed by worker-citizens, social movements, local communities, and developing countries have not been secured. Thus flexible mechanisms do not present a real challenge to current institutions and practices for sustainable climate conditions for the workers-citizen of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emissions trading has created new forms of exchangeable property which become commodities when traded in markets designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and mitigate climate change. This paper analyzes a set of social processes which influence who benefits from reductions in emissions generated by primary production from forest ecosystems. Informed by commodification literature, and property and access theory, we suggest that farmers and rural communities cannot derive full benefits from carbon sequestration because they lack key structural and relational mechanisms, such as capital, knowledge, expertise, technology, and, in some cases, even labour. We illustrate this argument by examining three ongoing carbon-forestry projects in China, Ecuador, and Mexico and we highlight its implications for future forestry mitigation projects and programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greenhouse gas emissions trading (ET) systems have become the centerpiece of climate change policy at multiple scales, unexpectedly largely outside of the UN climate governance process. The diffusion of ET is best described as a case of polycentric diffusion, where ET systems diffused to multiple loci of governance, but where they all serve similar goals under a broad policy framework guided loosely by the UN-based climate regime. Using network analysis combined with qualitative data, we explain how this polycentric pattern of policy development emerged, who carried and spread it and how, and how the idea has spread into a polycentric governance system. We contribute to the policy diffusion literature in a novel way to explain diffusion toward polycentric governance, show the limits of the existing literature to explain the diffusion of ET, and show the utility of network analysis in understanding the process and mechanism of polycentric diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]