Topic Climate Policy

Why Investing in New Nuclear Plants Is Bad for the Climate: Commentary

Meeting Climate Targets Can Only Spur on Economic Growth with the Right Combination of Measures

Reducing carbon emissions is essential to meeting climate targets. What is unclear, however, is which measures are required to do so and what impact they would have on economic growth. In this Weekly Report, a macroeconomic model is used to observe four scenarios in comparison to a baseline scenario without emissions reduction. It is analyzed which effects different measures, such as technological ...

A Collective Blueprint, Not a Crystal Ball: Overcoming Political Stalemates: The German Stakeholder Commission on Phasing out Coal

The future of coal remains contested in many countries, hindering necessary energy transitions. Collaborative governance approaches, such as stakeholder commissions, have been proposed as potential solution to resolve such societal conflicts. In Germany, a stakeholder commission process managed to overcome the existing stalemate situation, leading to the adoption of a coal phase-out by 2038. Celebrated ...

Bidirectional Coupling of the Long-term Integrated Assessment Model REgional Model of INvestments and Development (REMIND) v3.0.0 with the Hourly Power Sector Model Dispatch and Investment Evaluation Tool with Endogenous Renewables (DIETER) v1.0.2

Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are a central tool for the quantitative analysis of climate change mitigation strategies. However, due to their global, cross-sectoral and centennial scope, IAMs cannot explicitly represent the temporal and spatial details required to properly analyze the key role of variable renewable energy (VRE) in decarbonizing the power sector and enabling emission reductions ...

New Coal Mines in the Australian Galilee Basin Are Not Economically Viable and Are Prone to Become Stranded Assets

To limit the effects of climate change, we must significantly curtail the trading and use of coal as an energy source. Although the rise of renewable energy sources has already led to a reduction in the demand for and use of coal, new export-oriented coal mine projects are still being approved, and they often receive strong political support. However, whether these projects are economically viable ...

Investments in Energy-Efficient Building Renovation Are on a Downward Slide

According to the latest review report of the Council of Experts on Climate Change, the German building sector failed to meet its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in 2022. This is in part because investments in energy-efficient building refurbishment—supported by all kinds of policy measures— has neither been low nor shown a consistently positive trend over the past ten years. Furthermore, ...

Communicating Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss with Local Populations: Exploring Communicative Utopias in Eight Transdisciplinary Case Studies

Climate change and biodiversity loss trigger policies targeting and impacting local communities worldwide. However, research and policy implementation often fail to sufficiently consider community responses and to involve them. We present the results of a collective self-assessment exercise for eight case studies of communications with regard to climate change or biodiversity loss between project teams ...

De-Fueling Externalities: Causal Effects of Fuel Taxation and Mediating Mechanisms for Reducing Climate and Pollution Costs

This paper provides the most comprehensive assessment of how fuel taxation reduces climate and pollution externalities with a quasi-experimental evaluation of the world’s largest environmental tax reform. Leveraging multiple causal inference methods, we compare carbon and air pollutant emissions of the actual and counterfactual German transport sector following the 1999 eco-tax reform and demonstrate ...

Climate Transition Plans: State of Play in EU Legislation and Policy Recommendations

Social Partners in the Green Transition of the EU

Der Beitrag untersucht die Rolle der Sozialpartnerschaft zur Reduzierung von Treibhausgasemissionen in Mitgliedsstaaten der Europäischen Union. Einerseits können die Sozialpartner dazu beitragen den Übergang zu niedrigeren Emissionen zu erleichtern, indem sie mit den betroffenen Arbeitnehmern über die Kosten und den Nutzen von Maßnahmen zur Verringerung des Klimawandels verhandeln. Andererseits ist ...