Revisiting the economics of climate change: the role of geoengineering

Technically simple measures to directly reduce mean global temperatures could be available in the near future. We introduce “geoengineering” into a simple analytical model of climate change. We model the technical and economic characteristics of geoengineering in line with the recent literature from physical and environmental management sciences. We investigate: (i) under which circumstances geoengineering can substitute, partly or completely, for traditional abatement strategies, (ii) under which conditions and at what level geoengineering is optimally employed, and (iii) whether geoengineering can mitigate free-riding problems.     

The Incredible Economics of Geoengineering

The focus of climate policy so far has been on reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gases. That approach, however, requires broad international cooperation and, being expensive, has been hindered by free riding; so far, little action has been taken. An alternative approach is to counteract climate change by reducing the amount of solar radiation that strikes the Earth—“geoengineering.” In contrast to emission reductions, this approach is inexpensive and can be undertaken by a single country, unilaterally. But geoengineering also has worrying consequences: it may harm some countries; it would not address ocean acidification; it would pose new risks. The fundamental challenge posed by this new technology is not free riding but governance: who should decide if and under what circumstances geoengineering should be used?     

Talking in the present,caring for the future: Language and environment

This paper identifies a new source that explains environmental behaviour: the presence of future tense marking in language. We predict that languages that grammatically mark the future affect speakers’ intertemporal preferences and thereby reduce their willingness to address environmental problems. We first show that speakers of languages with future tense marking are less likely to adopt environmentally responsible behaviours and to support policies to prevent environmental damage. We then document that this effect holds across countries: future tense marking is an important determinant of climate change policies and global environmental cooperation. The results suggest that there may be deep and surprising obstacles for attempts to address climate change.     

A Voting Architecture for the Governance of Free‐Driver Externalities,with Application to Geoengineering

Abating climate change is an enormous international public‐goods problem with a classical “free‐rider” structure. However, it is also a global “free‐driver” problem because geoengineering the stratosphere with reflective particles to block incoming solar radiation is so cheap that it could essentially be undertaken unilaterally by one state perceiving itself to be in peril. This exploratory paper develops the main features of a free‐driver externality in a simple model motivated by the asymmetric consequences of type‐I and type‐II errors. I propose a social‐choice decision architecture, embodying the solution concept of a supermajority voting rule, and derive its basic properties.     

Aviation and Climate Change: Practising Green Governmentality across the North-South Divide

This article seeks to re-understand climate change in terms of its constitutive state practices. Existing analyses tend to frame climate change as a security discourse, or as a manner of green governmentality normalising the uneven relations between the Global North and South, but seldom is the practical process realising climate change’s logics delineated. Using aviation as an example, this article traces how climate change, as discourse, contingently takes shape through three episodes in aviation’s environmental evolution: a) an initial period of conceptual experimentation and consolidation (1992–2005); b) a major policy break catalysed by the EU ETS that destabilised previous discursive formations (2005–2012); and c) diplomatic attempts to re-gain international consensus following the EU ETS’s extension to aviation (2012–present). These practices will be charted across numerous spaces, including supra-national forums, national governments, technical bodies, consulting agencies, and political summits. By elucidating this geopolitical praxis across the North-South divide, I demonstrate how climate change cannot simply be reduced to a rationality in green governmentality, but must be understood as an outcome of strategic practices among differently positioned states.     

团队生产的纳什均衡及合作博弈空间

本文在霍姆斯特姆所做贡献的基础上认为团队生产问题在本质上等同于囚徒困境问题,并指出霍姆斯特姆的实施强制契约的解决方法存在逻辑漏洞,在现实社会中一般是无效的.本文依据社会经济人个人效用最大化的条件定义了团队生产的合作战略博弈空间,合作战略博弈空间的均衡极点(即个人效用最大化点)就是团队生产收益分配博弈的纳什均衡解.如果个人收益的总和等于集体收益的最优值,那么个人理性与集体理性之间就达到统一,处于帕累托最优状态,即不存在道德风险;反之,则说明存在道德风险.并给出了在团队生产中通过改变合作战略博弈空间达到帕累托最优的一个特例,指出了科学合理地改变合作战略博弈空间在社会经济发展中的重要作用     

Beyond Kyoto, plan B: A climate policy master plan based on transparent metrics

Many scholars analyze the Kyoto–Copenhagen process, and offer corrective suggestions for identified flaws in the present design. Based on various proposals in the literature, this article adopts a global master-plan perspective, leaving executive architecture to sovereign participants. Transparent, flexible and fair top-down rules must synchronize the numerous bottom-up initiatives while addressing the diversity of national circumstances in the drastic transformation of the world's energy economies.Plan B refutes absolute emission reduction targets on old or speculative baselines. It criticizes global tax and permit trade instruments for being ineffective, inefficient and unfair when uniformly applied on a tremendous differentiated world. Plan B is built on three annually observed variables measuring percentage progress against rolling baselines (the variables' values in the previous year): the ratio of net climate tax revenues to GDP, the commercial energy intensity of GDP, and the carbon intensity of commercial energy use. The three variables together indicate countries' progress affecting emissions per person, a metric that must converge to lower bands when climate change is addressed seriously. Long-term scenarios of global convergence “funnels” serve as guidance to frame near-term actions rich and poor countries individually propose to take. The global regime is common for all countries, and is ranked by GDP per person to determine whether a nation is a donor or a beneficiary in a Global Climate Transfer Fund. Fund payments and drawing rights depend on that ranking but also on the performances of the countries in realizing committed progress. The transparent mechanisms of the design and of the fund persuasively invite countries to participate in a fair, self-enforcing agreement.     

Beyond Kyoto,plan B: A climate policy master plan based on transparent metrics

Many scholars analyze the Kyoto–Copenhagen process, and offer corrective suggestions for identified flaws in the present design. Based on various proposals in the literature, this article adopts a global master-plan perspective, leaving executive architecture to sovereign participants. Transparent, flexible and fair top-down rules must synchronize the numerous bottom-up initiatives while addressing the diversity of national circumstances in the drastic transformation of the world's energy economies.Plan B refutes absolute emission reduction targets on old or speculative baselines. It criticizes global tax and permit trade instruments for being ineffective, inefficient and unfair when uniformly applied on a tremendous differentiated world. Plan B is built on three annually observed variables measuring percentage progress against rolling baselines (the variables' values in the previous year): the ratio of net climate tax revenues to GDP, the commercial energy intensity of GDP, and the carbon intensity of commercial energy use. The three variables together indicate countries' progress affecting emissions per person, a metric that must converge to lower bands when climate change is addressed seriously. Long-term scenarios of global convergence “funnels” serve as guidance to frame near-term actions rich and poor countries individually propose to take. The global regime is common for all countries, and is ranked by GDP per person to determine whether a nation is a donor or a beneficiary in a Global Climate Transfer Fund. Fund payments and drawing rights depend on that ranking but also on the performances of the countries in realizing committed progress. The transparent mechanisms of the design and of the fund persuasively invite countries to participate in a fair, self-enforcing agreement.     

Cooperation and Competition in Climate Change Policies: Mitigation and Climate Engineering when Countries are Asymmetric

We study a dynamic game of climate policy design in terms of emissions and solar radiation management (SRM) involving two heterogeneous countries or group of countries. Countries emit greenhouse gasses (GHGs), and can block incoming radiation by unilateral SRM activities, thus reducing global temperature. Heterogeneity is modelled in terms of the social cost of SRM, the environmental damages due to global warming, the productivity of emissions in terms of generating private benefits, the rate of impatience, and the private cost of geoengineering. We determine the impact of asymmetry on mitigation and SRM activities, concentration of GHGs, and global temperature, and we examine whether a tradeoff actually emerges between mitigation and SRM. Our results could provide some insights into a currently emerging debate regarding mitigation and SRM methods to control climate change, especially since asymmetries seem to play an important role in affecting incentives for cooperation or unilateral actions.     

Population–Environment Interactions: European Migration, Population Composition and Climate Change

The paper addresses the collision of two twenty-first Century transitions—the unprecedented change in the size, composition, density and distribution of the human population, and rapid change in the earth’s natural environment, in part a response to the above. It argues that it is important to consider these aspects of population change and environment together in order to understand the reality of any mitigation that may be made. Following a review of research which is beginning to address not only the environmental impact of population growth, but also of changes in density, distribution and composition, the paper turns to explore the interaction of population composition and density with environmental change through addressing interactions between migration, ageing populations and climate change. It considers a key population question facing the EU, that of the demographic deficit, and addresses how the mitigating role of migration will be affected by future climate change. It thus considers whether migration is a valid policy approach in the context of Europe’s demographic deficit and the impact of climate change on this relationship.     

Neoliberal and neostructuralist perspectives on labour flexibility,poverty and inequality: A critical appraisal

Numerous recent reports by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academics and international organisations have focused on so-called ‘climate refugees’. This article examines the turn from a discourse of ‘climate refugees’, in which organisations perceive migration as a failure of both mitigation and adaptation to climate change, to one of ‘climate migration’, in which organisations promote migration as a strategy of adaptation. Its focus is the promotion of climate migration management, and it explores the trend of these discourses through two sections. First, it provides an empirical account of the two discourses, emphasising the differentiation between them. It then focuses on the discourse of climate migration, its origins, extent and content, and the associated practices of ‘migration management’. The second part argues that the turn to the promotion of ‘climate migration’ should be understood as a way to manage the insecurity created by climate change. However, international organisations enacts this management within the forms of neoliberal capitalism, including the framework of governance. Therefore, the promotion of ‘climate migration’ as a strategy of adaptation to climate change is located within the tendencies of neoliberalism and the reconfiguration of southern states' sovereignty through governance.     

Characterization of a second-best rationalizable choice function with full domain

The idea of equating the concept of ‘rationality’ with that of the ‘choice of best elements’ unnecessarily limits the sense and scope of ‘rationality’. The existing internal consistency conditions that are popularly used in the social choice theory to assess a choice function are insufficient to analyze several non-standard choice patterns. This paper makes a modest effort to address this limitation. The paper accepts a broader definition of rationality and characterizes choice behaviors where an individual chooses a second best element when available and chooses a best element only when a second best is not available.     

A general equilibrium assessment of climate change–induced loss of agricultural productivity in Nepal

The impact of climate change on agriculture has been one of the most discussed topics in the literature on climate change. Multi-regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) models have frequently been used to examine the impact of climate change on agriculture. However, these studies do not focus on country-specific issues related to the link between climate change and agriculture. This paper aims to address this gap by investigating the economy-wide impacts of climate change on Nepalese agriculture. Nepal makes an interesting case study as it has one of the most vulnerable agricultural economies in South Asia. This paper develops a comparative static multi-household CGE model to trace the direct and indirect impacts of climate change in Nepal. The results suggest that climate change has a significant negative impact on the overall Nepalese economy due to the induced loss of agricultural productivity. The results further reveal that rural households in Nepal, whose livelihoods primarily depend on subsistence farming, will face additional climate change–induced stresses due to already overstrained poverty and a weak social welfare system. The results indicate an urgent need to mainstream adaptation strategies to lessen the negative impacts of any climate change–induced loss of agricultural productivity in Nepal.     

Social media networks,fake news,and polarization

We study how the structure of social media networks and the presence of fake news affects the degree of misinformation and polarization in a society. For that, we analyze a dynamic model of opinion exchange in which individuals have imperfect information about the true state of the world and exhibit bounded rationality. Key to the analysis is the presence of internet bots: agents in the network that spread fake news (e.g., a constant flow of biased information). We characterize how agents’ opinions evolve over time and evaluate the determinants of long-run misinformation and polarization in the network. To that end, we construct a synthetic network calibrated to Twitter and simulate the information exchange process over a long horizon to quantify the bots’ ability to spread fake news. A key insight is that significant misinformation and polarization arise in networks in which only 15% of agents believe fake news to be true, indicating that network externality effects are quantitatively important. Higher bot centrality typically increases polarization and lowers misinformation. When one bot is more influential than the other (asymmetric centrality), polarization is reduced but misinformation grows, as opinions become closer the more influential bot’s preferred point. Finally, we show that threshold rules tend to reduce polarization and misinformation. This is because, as long as agents also have access to unbiased sources of information, threshold rules actually limit the influence of bots.     

Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?

In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that fails to address the underlying contradictions related to the commodification of nature. In addition, they increase risks to society and the domination of economic elites. While carbon markets further subject social and ecological relations to market mechanisms, we examine degrowth as a possible response to climate change that prioritises social and environmental goals over economic growth. While degrowth continues to be dismissed as impractical or impossible, a growing number of scholars, scientists and activists argue it is the only way to address global climate change. In contrast to carbon markets, we argue degrowth could represent a genuine Polanyian counter-movement in response to climate change. In addition, degrowth could help all those disenfranchised by market fundamentalism by addressing the triple crises related to the commodification of land, labour and money.     

Group membership,team preferences,and expectations

Group membership is a powerful determinant of social behaviour in a variety of experimental games. Its effect may be channelled primarily via the beliefs of group members, or directly change their social preferences. We report an experiment with a prisoner's dilemma with multiple actions, in which we manipulate players’ beliefs and show that group identity has a consistent positive effect on cooperation only when there is common knowledge of group affiliation. We also test the robustness of the minimal group effect using three different manipulations: one manipulation fails to induce group identity, and we observe an unsystematic effect of group membership when knowledge of affiliation is asymmetric.     

中国和平发展战略对全球应对气候变化行动的影响

2005年中国首次发布《中国的和平发展道路》白皮书,2011年9月6日中国再次发布《中国的和平发展》白皮书,向全世界公布中国和平发展的战略。中国采取什么样的发展战略,不仅对全球世界政治经济格局具有重要影响,同时也对全球应对气候变化的行动产生重要影响。重点分析了中国和平发展战略对全球应对气候变化行动的影响:(1)中国的和平发展,坚持以科学发展为指导,本身就是全球应对气候变化行动的重要组成部分;(2)中国的和平发展,推动了世界的和平与发展,有利于创造全球应对气候变化的良好政治经济环境;(3)中国的和平发展,推动了全球资源合理有效配置,有利于提高全球应对气候变化的实际成效;(4)中国的和平发展,提倡的是国际合作,有利于推动全球应对气候变化的国际协同。     

The Militarisation and Marketisation of Nature: An Alternative Lens to ‘Climate-Conflict’

Policies addressing climate change are driving major transformations in access to global land, forests and water as they create new ‘green’ markets that reinforce, and attracts the financial grid and its speculators. This leads us to examine the rise of state violence and subsequent environmental policies in forests, transferring into both ‘fortress’ and ‘participatory’ conservation, enhancing this relationship with new environmental commodity markets. We go on to document how the new and intensifying commodification of the environment associated with climate change is manifest in conflicts linked to the UN-REDD+ programme, industrial tree plantations (ITPs), and land-use practices associated with conservation and biofuels. We trace conflicts to business practices associated with land acquisitions and mining practices which claim to address climate change and mitigate ecological crises. This paper thus grapples with systemic issues of the modern industrial economy and the mechanisms legitimising and advancing the militarisation and marketisation of nature.     

Identification of national priority areas for adaptation to climate change in China

The problem of global warming has been identified as the first in the list of the top ten environmental problems in the world. As climate change will seriously affect the social and natural world that people live in, so it may lay serious repercussions on economic progress, social improvement, and sustainable development. International bodies everywhere and many of the countries＇ governments are responding urgently to this call In recent years, climate change has affected different regions in China in different ways. In its national agenda, the Chinese government should address the problem of climate change and its negative impact on socio-economic development. In this endeavor the nation should introduce policies which will help its people and economy to adapt to these effects and changes. Priority-fields of adaptation to climate change are the sensitive areas or departments which are more vulnerable to the negative influences of climate change. The negative impacts of climate change in some parts of China are considered to be very serious indeed as they affect the whole economy and community. As a result, priority should be given to these more affected regions for the limited state financing. This paper defines adaptation and discusses the basic principles and programs in the identi.fication of national priority areas where adaptation should be exercised. Based on the past studies, four priority areas in China are identified, namely, disaster prevention and mitigation, water resources, agriculture, and ecosystem. An analysis on the identification procedures, and the reasons and tasks involved are given for each.     

行为委托-代理激励新模型及分析框架

标准委托-代理激励模型及分析框架沿袭新古典经济学中关于理性经济人、偏好不变、预期效用等基本假定，存在一些无法解释的现象和悖论。本文从行为经济学对主流经济学的新古典经济学基本假设的挑战出发，对标准委托-代理激励模型及分析框架中代理人完全理性和风险规避等基本假设所带来的缺陷进行了系统分析，探究了如何利用期望理论的价值函数替代期望效用函数、有限理性替代完全理性来构建新的委托一代理激励模型及分析框架。新模型和框架考虑了代理人的心理特征和非理性行为，将增强激励模型及分析框架对现实制度的解释力和适用性。