Natural gas could play an increasing role in the German energy system following the coal exit decided in July 2020 by the German parliament. However, natural gas has no climate benefit compared to coal. What is more, Europe risks to become a battleground for the conflict between Russia and the United States. The construction of the Baltic Sea pipeline Nordstream 2 has set in motion a downward...
The European Green Deal includes the goal of enshrining the long-term objective of climate neutrality by 2050 in legislation and increasing the EU’s climate by 2030. In this context, the Green Deal emphasized that “should differences in levels of ambition worldwide persist, as the EU increases its climate ambition, the Commission will propose a carbon border adjustment mechanism, for...
The project looks at different options of a per-capita rebate of revenues from CO2 pricing in Germany. The German government has decided to introduce a national emissions trading system for the heat and transport sectors in its Climate Action Programme 2030. Such a CO2 pricing implies distributional challenges, since lower-income and middle-income households are more exposed to CO2 prices relative...
While the economic voting hypothesis is a well-researched approach to explain behavior at the ballot box, a broader perspective of economic, social and environmental issues regarding a government’s chances to get re-elected is still missing in the literature. In this context, this paper makes use for the first time of the Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the comprehensive ...
Political decisions and trends regarding coal use for electricity generation developed differently in the UK and Germany, despite being subject to relatively similar climate protection targets and general political and economic conditions. The UK agreed on a coal phase-out by 2024. In Germany, a law schedules a coal phase-out by 2038 at the latest. This paper investigates reasons for the different ...
All 193 UN member states have pledged to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), following the guiding principle to leave no one behind. At the same time, rising populist movements increasingly influence the political debate in many countries by challenging multilateral cooperation and liberal democracy. This paper contains the first empirical study of the relationship between the SDGs and ...
We fit CES and VES production functions to data from a numerical bottom-up optimization model of electricity supply with clean and dirty inputs. This approach allows for studying high shares of clean energy not observable today and for isolating mechanisms that impact the elasticity of substitution between clean and dirty energy. Central results show that (i) dirty inputs are not essential for production. ...
The political discussion to reduce the carbon footprint of Germany’s electricity sector,focusing on coal, is intensifying. In this paper, we develop scenarios for phasing out lignite and hardcoal power plants in Germany prior to the end of their technical lifespan (“coal-exit”). Our analysisbases upon two coal-exit instruments, the retirement of coal generation capacities and the limitingof how much ...
I posit that hourly changes in air pollution affect criminality through two distinct pathways, via physiological effects on the criminal and by changes in the tightness of the market for criminal activities. To disentangle individual from market effects, I develop a behavioral model of the individual decision to transgress and a model of search-and-matching frictions between criminals and crime opportunities. ...
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