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Without participation of the United States, the world?s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, mitigation of global climate change seems hardly conceivable. Despite the U.S. rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the reluctance of the Bush administration to engage in Post-Kyoto negotiations, recent developments suggest that the U.S. position towards climate policy might change in the medium run. This study provides an overview on current trends in U.S. climate policy. Besides the main elements of national climate policy proposals and state-level initiatives the climate contents in the U.S. presidential candidates? agendas are outlined. Based on this overview recent trends in U.S. climate policy are related to the European approach to combat climate change. Furthermore, we elaborate on the aspects which may be important for Europe to design its own domestic and international climate policy in order to achieve the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations.

We analyze the productivity effects of environmental (green) investment as well as of environmental expenditures and energy expenditures. For this purpose, we follow a production function approach where we account for these investment and expenditure categories as inputs. Based on a panel dataset for the German manufacturing industry between 1996 and 2002 we find that both environmental and energy expenditures do not contribute to production growth. In contrast, environmental investment positively impinges upon production growth as a productivity driver. We thus conclude that environmental regulation should stimulate investment in order to be compatible with economic goals such as productivity.

This paper quantifies the macroeconomic impacts of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol based on a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of international trade and energy use. Employing project-based CDM supply data we assess the relative importance of transaction costs and investment risks as well as CDM regulations through supplementarity and additionality criteria. Our numerical results show that the macroeconomic impacts of transaction costs and investment risks are negligible: Given the large supply of cheap project-based emissions credits in developing countries, compliance to the Kyoto Protocol can be achieved at a very low cost. However, regulatory restrictions such as a supplementarity criterion can substantially curtail the potential efficiency gains from where-flexibility in climate policy.

This paper analyses the macroeconomic costs of environmental regulation in European energy markets on the basis of existing macroeconomic simulation studies. The analysis comprises the European emssion trading scheme, energy taxes, measures in the transport sector, and the promotion of renewable energy sources. We find that these instruments affect the European economy, in particular the energy intensive industries and the industries that produce internationally tradeable goods. From a macroeconomic point of view, however, the costs of environmental regulation appear to be modest. The underlying environmental targets and the efficient design of regulation are key determinants for the cost burden.

Energy markets and energy-intensive industries in all EU member states – especially in Germany – are subject to a diverse set of policies related to climate change. We analyse the potential efficiency losses from simultaneous application of emission taxes and emissions trading in qualitative and quantitative terms within a partial equilibrium framework for the EU. It turns out that those firms within the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) which at the same time are subject to domestic energy or carbon taxes will abate inefficiently much while other firms within the EU ETS will benefit from lower international emission permit prices. The same logic disproves the argument that additional national emission taxes will reduce inefficiencies in abatement supposed to be resulting from allowance (over-) allocation. In essence, unilateral emission taxes within the EU ETS are ecologically ineffective and subsidise net permit buyers. Thus, all firms that are subject to emissions trading and any CO2 emission taxes at the same time should be exempt from the latter. The foregone tax revenue could be generated by auctioning a small fraction of the permits instead. This would be cheaper for the emissions trading sectors as a whole and could be compatible even with the tight auctioning restrictions of the EU directive.

Since January 1st the European Union has launched an EU-internal emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) for emission-intensive installations as the central pillar to comply with the Kyoto Protocol. The EU ETS may be linked at some time to a Kyoto emissions market where greenhouse gas emission allowances of signatory Kyoto countries can be traded. In this paper we investigate the implications of Russian market power for environmental effectiveness and regional compliance costs to the Kyoto Protocol taking into account potential linkages between the Kyoto emissions market and the EU ETS. We find that Russia may have incentives to join the EU ETS as long as the latter remains separated from the Kyoto international emissions market. In this case, Russia can exert monopolistic price discrimination between two separated markets thereby maximizing revenues from hot air sales. The EU will be able to substantially reduce compliance costs when it does not restrain itself to EU-internal emission regulation schemes. However, part of the gains from extra-EU emissions trading will come at the expense of environmental effectiveness as (more) hot air will be drawn in.

We analyze a dynamic multi-pollutant problem where abatement costs of several pollutants are not separable. The pollutants can be either technological substitutes or complements. Environmental damage is induced by the stock of accumulated pollution. We find that optimal emission paths are qualitatively different for substitutes and complements. We derive general properties governing optimal emission paths and present numerical examples to illustrate our main results. In particular we find that optimal emission paths need not be monotonic, even for highly symmetric pollutants. Finally, we describe a comparatively simple method to implement the optimal path without explicitly knowing its shape.

Implementation of an EU-wide emissions trading system by means of National Allocation Plans is at the core of European environmental policy agenda. Member States are faced with the problem of allocating their national emission budgets under the EU Burden Sharing Agreement between energy-intensive sectors that are eligible for international emissions trading and the remaining segments of their economies that will be subject to complementary domestic emission regulation. The country-specific segmentation of national emission budgets between trading sectors and non-trading sectors will determine the cost efficiency of the EU emissions trading system and the gains for each Member State vis-?-vis domestic abatement policies. We present an interactive simulation model where users can specify the design of National Allocation Plans for each EU Member State and then evaluate the induced economic effects. Our numerical framework is based on marginal abatement cost curves for (emissions) trading and non-trading sectors of the EU-15 economies. Illustrative simulations highlight the importance of a coordinated design of National Allocation Plans in order to avoid substantial excess costs of regulation and drastic burden shifting between nontrading and trading sectors.