Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effect Of Allowing Pollution Offsets With Imperfect Enforcement, Hilary A. Sigman, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

Several pollution control regimes, including climate change policies, allow polluters in one sector subject to an emissions cap to offset excessive emissions in that sector with pollution abatement in another sector. The government may often find it more costly to verify offset claims than to verify compliance with emissions caps, and concerns about difficulties in enforcement may lead regulators to restrict the use of offsets. In this paper, we demonstrate that allowing offsets may increase pollution abatement and reduce illegal pollution, even if the government has a fixed enforcement budget. We explore the circumstances that may make it preferable to …

Mitigation And The Geoengineering Threat, Juan B. Moreno-Cruz

Juan B. Moreno-Cruz

Recent scientific advances have introduced the possibility of engineering the climate system to lower ambient temperatures without lowering greenhouse gas concentrations. This possibility has created an intense debate given the ethical, moral and scientific questions it raises. In this paper I examine the economic issues introduced when geoengineering becomes available in a standard two-period two-country model where strategic interaction leads to suboptimal mitigation. Geoengineering introduces the possibility of technical substitution away from mitigation, but it also affects the strategic interaction across countries: mitigation decisions made in the first period directly affect the geoengineering decisions made in the second period. With …

Mass Media Coverage Of Global Warming: An Update., John Fisher

Dr. John R. Fisher

A consensus may no longer exist about the causes of climate change. Only last year most media and many people supported the view that climate change was caused by people’s use of fossil fuels. However, the public view of global warming appears to have changed. Much of this change in people’s attitudes came from media coverage. This was augmented by concern for the economy and the effect of global warming legislation on the economy.

While few studies exist of mass media saturation using the diffusion of innovation model, research of global warming coverage by Dispensa and Brulle (2003) and Fisher …