Suchergebnisse

The era of publicly mandated GHG emissions restrictions in the United States has begun with recent legislation in California and seven northeastern states. Commercial and industrial buildings can improve the carbon-efficiency of end-use energy consumption by installing technologies such as on-site cogeneration of electricity and useful heat in combined heat and power systems, thermally-activated cooling, solar electric and thermal equipment, and energy storage -- collectively termed distributed energy resources (DER). This research examines a collection of buildings in California, the Northeast, and the southern United States to demonstrate the effects of regional characteristics such as the carbon intensity of central electricity grid, the climate-driven demand for space heating and cooling, and the availability of solar insolation. The results illustrate that the magnitude of a realistic carbon tax ($100/tC) is too small to incent significant carbon-reducing effects on economically optimal DER adoption. In large part, this is because cost reduction and carbon reduction objectives are roughly aligned, even in the absence of a carbon tax.

Even though the Carbon Capture & Sequestration Technologies (CC & ST) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology initiated carbon emission research in late 1990s (CSI, 2013), carbon emissions has only become a hot topic in the last decade since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted on December 11, 1997 in Kyoto, Japan. CC & ST is a protocol to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC or FCCC) to overcome global climate change due to human activity. The protocol entered into force on February 16, 2005 and the entire Annex I countries ratified the protocol, with the exception of the United States. The U.S. already had a policy in place so that the country`s carbon emissions were to be reduced by 7% from 1990 emission levels by 2012. Federal and state governments along with the private sector need to prepare for reductions in carbon emissions. The construction industry contributes over 40% of carbon emissions and generates significant amount of construction and demolition debris which is deposited into landfills. While some of the debris can be reused, recycled, and used as biomass fuel for energy. Building operations consume significant amounts of energy, but there are only a few comprehensive studies that estimate carbon emissions considering the whole building lifecycle. Many of these studies are conducted in independent carbon phases, which may miss emissions that an end-to-end review would capture. The purpose of this research is to develop methods to estimate and evaluate the carbon emissions and the environmental impact throughout a building lifecycle (from building construction to building demolition). This research integrates prior models and methods, in order to establish comprehensive models and methods that would more accurately measure, track and quantify carbon- and environmental-related features, factors and variables. This research uses information and data that span four projects ranging from current green building designs, ways to determine the carbon emissions ...

Carbon emissions and real GDP are strongly correlated over the U.S. business cycle. This relationship suggests that macroeconomic shocks inducing cyclical fluctuations in output should also account for the cyclical behavior of emissions and motivates our analysis. We begin by expanding the set of technology shocks in a popular emissions-augmented dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model from the literature, and show that the model generates positive emissions-GDP comovements to each shock through distinct channels. We then estimate the emissions' response to empirically identified technology shocks using structural vector autoregressions (SVARs). Using the SVARs, we also rank the shocks in terms of explaining the emissions' forecast error variation. While emissions tend to rise gradually after most shocks, consistent with their theoretical counterparts, the impulse responses are not statistically significant. Unanticipated technology shocks account for less than 10 percent of the variation in emissions. By contrast, anticipated investment technology shocks account for 25 percent of the variation. Government spending and monetary policy shocks account for less than 1 percent. Importantly, close to two thirds of the variation in emissions appears to be due to a structural shock not yet identified in the literature.

"This book explores the determination of China's carbon emission targets, especially with regard to the allocation of responsibility of China's import and export carbon emissions, and carbon emission quota allocations across different time periods, industries, and regions. Research outside of China tends to focus on methods and approaches of carbon emission reduction policies and the impact of their implementation. Instead, within China, the focus has been on discussion of the necessity and conditions for China's development of a low-carbon economy as well as its introduction as a concept in the light of overseas comparisons. This book utilizes game theory, mechanism design, input-output theory, econometric theory and other methods to scrutinize China's carbon emissions and carbon emissions targets across different periods, industries, and regions. The result is a detailed theoretical and empirical investigation of carbon emission issues in the Chinese context. The book will be essential reading for students and scholars of economics, especially those with a focus on Chinese economic development and policymakers in the low-carbon economy sphere"--

In this paper we empirically compare the transaction costs from monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of two environmental regulations directed to cost-efficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions: a carbon dioxide (CO2) tax and a tradable emissions system. We do this in the case of Sweden, where a set of firms are covered by both types of regulations, i.e., the Swedish CO2 tax and the European Union's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). This provides us with an excellent case study as it allows us to disentangle the costs of each regulation from other firm-specific variables that might affect the overall cost of MRV procedures. Our results indicate that the MRV costs of CO2 taxation do not depend on firms' emissions, while they do in the case of the EU ETS. For firms of equivalent emissions' size, the MRV costs are lower for CO2 taxation than for the EU ETS, which confirms the general view that regulating emissions upstream by means of a CO2 tax yields lower transaction costs vis-á-vis downstream regulation by means of emission trading.