Topic Climate Policy

Global Climate Targets Achievable without Nuclear Power: Seven Questions to Claudia Kemfert

Leaving Coal Unburned: Options for Demand-Side and Supply-Side Policies

Climate policy consistent with the 2°C target needs to install mechanisms that leave most current coal reserves unburned. Demand-side policies have been argued to be prone to adverse carbon leakage and “green paradox” effects. A growing strain of literature argues in favor of supply-side policies in order to curb future coal consumption. Various concepts with analogies in other sectors are currently ...

Modernization and Innovation in the Materials Sector: Lessons from Steel and Cement

Since 2007, the European cement and steel sectors have been characterized by substantial surplus production capacity. Hence re-investment in primary production of many materials remains limited and endangers the longer-term economic viability of many plants. Opportunities for innovation and modernization could overcome these challenges. They are linked to new demands for more efficient and lower-carbon ...

Combining Dynamic Allocation and Inclusion of Consumption into the EU ETS Would Be Beneficial: Six Questions to Karsten Neuhoff

Leakage Protection for Carbon-Intensive Materials Post-2020

Climate protection is a global challenge that all countries have a common but differentiated responsibility to address. However, not all governments are willing to commit to targets of equal stringency, and individual countries may put different emphases on carbon pricing in their policy mix. Carbon prices may thus continue to differ over longer time horizons. Therefore, measures to protect production ...

Integrating Intermittent Renewable Wind Generation: A Stochastic Multi-Market Electricity Model for the European Electricity Market

In northern Europe, wind energy has become a dominate renewable energy source, due to natural conditions and national support schemes. However, the uncertainty about wind generation affects existing network infrastructure and power production planning of generators, which cannot be fully diminished by wind forecasts. In this paper we develop a stochastic electricity market model to analyze the impact ...

Sowing the Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind? The Effect of Wind Turbines on Residential Well-Being

We investigate the effect of the physical presence of wind turbines on residential well-being in Germany, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and a unique novel panel data set on more than 20,000 wind turbines for the time period between 2000 and 2012. Using a Geographical Information System (GIS), we calculate the proximity between households and the nearest wind turbine as ...

Local Warming and Violent Conflict in North and South Sudan

Our article contributes to the emerging micro-level strand of the literature on the link between local variations in weather shocks and conflicts by focusing on a pixel-level analysis for North and South Sudan between 1997 and 2009. Temperature anomalies are found to strongly affect the risk of conflict, whereas the risk is expected to magnify in a range of 24–31% in the future under a median scenario. ...

Sectors under Scrutiny: Evaluation of Indicators to Assess the Risk of Carbon Leakage in the UK and Germany

One of the central debates surrounding the design of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme is the approach to address carbon leakage concerns. Correctly identifying the economic activities exposed to the risk of carbon leakage represents the first step in mitigating the risk effectively. This paper assesses the robustness of the quantitative assessment criteria used by the European Commission ...

Testing Regulatory Regimes for Power Transmission Expansion with Fluctuating Demand and Wind Generation

Adequate extension of electricity transmission networks is required for integrating fluctuating renewable energy sources, such as wind power, into electricity systems. We study the performance of different regulatory approaches for network expansion in the context of realistic demand patterns and fluctuating wind power. In particular, we are interested in the relative performance of a combined merchant-regulatory ...