As we approach the beginning of the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen in December, international negotiations are focused on developing a climate policy framework for the post-2012 period, when the Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period will have...

According to an October 22nd story in Environment & Energy Daily ("Climate: GOP Fence Sitters Voice Concerns Over Allocations" by Darren Samuelson), several key swing-vote Senate Republicans -- including Senator Lisa Murkowski, ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee -- are voicing skepticism about the...

Let's credit Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) for raising questions in the National Journal about the viability of cap-and-trade versus other approaches for the United States to employ in addressing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions linked with global climate change.

Senator Murkowski says that only one approach -...

Global climate change is a serious environmental threat, and sound public policies are needed to address it effectively and sensibly.

There is now significant interest and activity within both the U.S. Administration and the U.S. Congress to develop a meaningful national climate policy in this country. (If you're interested, please...

For more than two decades, environmental law and regulation was dominated by command-and-control approaches -- typically either mandated pollution control technologies or inflexible discharge standards on a smokestack-by-smokestack basis. But in the 1980s, policy makers increasingly explored market-based environmental policy instruments, mechanisms that provide economic incentives for firms and...

Whether the policy domain is global climate change or local hazardous waste, it's exceptionally important to understand the interaction between public policies and technological change in order to assess the effects of laws and regulations on environmental performance. Several years ago, my colleagues -- Professor Lori Bennear of

With the development of climate legislation proceeding in the U.S. Senate, a key question is whether the United States can cost-effectively reduce a significant share of its contributions to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations through forest-based carbon sequestration. Should biological carbon sequestration be part of the domestic portfolio of compliance activities?

Like any legislation, the Waxman‑Markey bill has its share of flaws, but its cap-and-trade system has medium and long‑term targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are sensible, and the cap‑and‑trade system is -- for the most part -- well designed. With some exceptions, the bill's cap‑and‑trade system will...

The potential impacts of proposed U.S. climate policies on the competitiveness of U.S. industries is a major political issue, and it was one of the key issues in the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives in the design of Henry Waxman and Edward Markey's H.R. 2454...

The headline of this post is not meant to be ironic. Despite all the hand-wringing in the press and the blogosphere about a political "give-away" of allowances for the cap-and-trade system in the Waxman-Markey bill voted out of committee last week, the politics of cap-and-trade systems are...

On My 19th, 2009, President Obama announced new Federal fuel-efficiency standards for motor-vehicles that would make the current standards -- known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy -- or CAFE -- standards significantly more stringent. These CAFE standards measure compliance as the average of a company's entire fleet of cars,...

Critical thinking about "corporate social responsibility" (CSR) is needed, because there are few topics where discussions feature greater ratios of heat to light. With this in mind, two of my Harvard colleagues -- law professor Bruce Hay and business school professor Richard Vietor -- and I co-edited a...

Decisions made today usually have impacts both now and in the future. In the environmental realm, many of the future impacts are benefits, and such future benefits -- as well as costs -- are typically discounted by economists in their analyses. Why do economists do this, and does it give...

With the Major League Baseball season having just begun, I'm reminded of the truism that the best teams win their divisions in the regular season, but the hot teams win in the post-season playoffs. Why the difference? The regular season is 162 games long, but the post-season consists of just...

Despite the potential cost-effectiveness of market-based policy instruments, such as pollution taxes and tradable permits, conventional approaches - including design and uniform performance standards - have been the mainstay of U.S. environmental policy since before the first Earth Day in 1970. Gradually, however, the political process has become more receptive...

A common feature of many environmental policies in the United States is vintage-differentiated regulation (VDR), under which standards for regulated units are fixed in terms of the units' respective dates of entry, with later vintages facing more stringent regulation. In the most common application, often referred to as "grandfathering," units...

Around the world, over-fishing is leading to severe depletion of valuable fisheries. This is as true in U.S. coastal waters as it is in many other parts of the world. In New England waters, for example, after two decades of ever more intensive fishing, the groundfish fishery has essentially collapsed....

Whether they are called "revenue enhancements" or "user charges," fear of the political consequences of taxes restricts debate on energy and environmental policy options in Washington. In a March 7th post on "Green Jobs," in which I argued that it is not always best to try to address two...

Throughout the United States, water management has been approached primarily as an engineering problem, rather than an economic one. Water supply managers are reluctant to use price increases as water conservation tools, instead relying on non-price demand management techniques, such as requirements for the adoption of specific technologies and restrictions...

The January 12, 2009 issue of the New Yorker includes a well-written and in some ways inspiring article by Elizabeth Kolbert, profiling Van Jones, founder and president of Green for All. In the article, "Greening the Ghetto: Can a Remedy Serve for Both Global Warming and Poverty," Kolbert includes...