京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第23448号 / 経博第646号 / 新制||経||299(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 諸富 徹, 教授 岡 敏弘, 准教授 長谷川 誠, 特定准教授 Rudolph Sven / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DFAM

Idag är det få som motsäger sig att människan är ansvarig för de klimatförändringar vi börjat uppleva. Globala överenskommelser visar sig vara svåra att formulera men regioner såsom EU har infört handeln med utsläppsrätter och allt fler enskilda nationer och verksamheter sätter nu upp egna mål för reduktioner av skadliga utsläpp. Vissa verksamheter går steget längre och har skapat interna kompensationssystem för sina aktiviteters klimatkonsekvenser. Studien har med hjälp av kvalitativa intervjuer undersökt sex verksamheter i Sverige som frivilligt valt att klimatkompensera internt. Här presenteras bakgrunderna till det interna valet, hur arbetena utformats liksom vilka lärdomar som kan dras från deras erfarenheter. Resultatet visar på en viss misstro till externa kompensationsprojekt men främst en vilja att ta ansvar och förbättra på hemmaplan först. Utformningarna skiljer sig och det är många praktiska omständigheter att ha i åtanke när verksamhetsintern klimatkompensation ska införas. Klimatnyttan av dessa arbeten är svår att beräkna, men verksamheterna vittnar om att det skapar en medvetenhet, vilken på sikt kan leda till förändrat beteende som sparar både pengar och miljö. / Nowadays, few people resist the fact that mankind is responsible for the climatic changes we are now beginning to experience. Global agreements seem difficult to form, but regions like the European Union has introduced an Emissions Trading Scheme, EU ETS. More and more nations and organizations are now also setting up their own emission reduction goals. Some organizations takes it even further and have created systems of carbon offsetting within their own organizations.This study has executed qualitative interviews with six Swedish organizations that have chosen internal carbon offsetting. Here you find their motives to compensate internally, how the work is designed and what lessons to be learned from their experiences. The results show a certain mistrust in external compensation-projects, but they mainly report a desire to take responsibility and to start improvements locally. The design of these works vary and there are many aspects of practicality to bear in mind when implementing internal carbon offsetting. The climatic benefits from these works are difficult to calculate, but the organizations claim that it creates a an awareness that, in the long run, can lead to an altered behavior, saving both money and the environment.

Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments established a market-based incentive approach to pollution control through the use of tradable allowances for sulfur dioxide (SO₂) emissions by electric utilities. Many researchers have theorized that this approach will be compromised by state regulatory policies that create incentives for utilities to invest in costly pollution control equipment, inhibiting the formation of a free and competitive allowance market. The pUrpose of this research is to investigate the impact of state regulatory policies on the development of the SO₂ allowance market. More specifically, this research examines whether the geographic distribution of traded SO₂ allowances (as determined by an analysis of EPA Allowance Tracking System data) has been affected by the actions of state regulators. The research also investigates the effect of Title IV on the Virginia coal industry. Several trends in the allowance market are identified in this study, including the declining price of allowances, over compliance at Phase I units, and the geographic patterns of trading. This research only partially supports earlier predictions that states with regulatory policies biased towards costly capital investments in flue gas desulfurization (scrubber) retrofits would become net allowance sellers in the national market. However, the research finds that these state policies, along with several other factors (including the Phase I Extension program, the tax treatment of allowances, and the risk-averse nature of utilities) have contributed to the slow growth in the allowance market. The research also concludes that Virginia low-sulfur coal producers are not benefiting from Title IV implementation. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning

Växthusgasnivåerna i atmosfären har nått nivåer som påverkar klimatet på jorden. Det här ställer krav på politiska överenskommelser som effektivt kan verka för en minskning av växthusgaser i atmosfären. Kyotoprotokollet implementerades 1997 och innehåller lagbindande krav på medlemsländerna att minska sina växthusgasutsläpp och presenterar utsläppsrätter som styrmedel för att nå målen. Utsläppsrätter innebär att politiker sätter ett pris på rätten att släppa ut och låter verksamheter som förorenar handla med rätterna, vilket enligt nationalekonomisk marknadsteori är det mest effektiva sättet att gå tillväga. Detta kan däremot kritiseras av ekologiska ekonomer som motsätter sig prissättande av miljön. Diskursteori används för att studera vad som har normaliserats med införandet av utsläppsrättssystem och därför inte ifrågasätts. Analysen visade att två diskurser primärt råder i den utvalda empirin; ekonomisk liberalism och teknologisk tilltro. Fokus på vinst, tillväxt, kostnadseffektivitet samt teknikoptimism återkom i alla tre dokumenten och framställs som avgörande för att nå målen för utsläppsreduktion. Utsläppsrätter är ett ekonomiskt styrmedel vars styrka ligger i marknadsmekanismer, men ur ett hållbarhetsperspektiv finns problematik med prissättande av miljön; framförallt att det vilar på svag hållbarhet. Även marknadens otillräckliga förmåga att ta hänsyn till moraliska angelägenheter, prissättning av miljön och att ansvarsförskjutning mot företag placerar en större klyfta mellan människa och miljö kan tolkas som problematiskt. / The levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached levels that are now affecting the climate on earth. This poses a dire need for politicians to reach agreements to balance the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. The Kyoto protocol was introduced in 1997 and contains binding requirements to reduce emissions and presented emissions trading systems as an economic instrument to reach the abatement goals. Emissions trading allows politicians to put a price on the environment and places it on a market, which according to economic theory is the most efficient solution. However, this can be criticized from an ecological economic view that opposes pricing of the environment. Discourse analysis theory allows the study of what is considered normal and therefore not questioned. The study showed that mainly two discourses appear in the empirical material; economic liberalism and trust in new technology. A focus on profit, growth, cost effectiveness and technical optimism appeared in all three documents and are portrayed as paramount to reach the goals of emissions abatement. Although emissions trading is a financial instrument, which strength lies in market mechanisms, there are certain problems which primarily are based on weak sustainability. It also lacks considerations to moral aspects, pricing of the environment and the fact that shifting responsibilities toward companies place a greater gap between the people and the environment.

In 1970, the United States Congress and President Richard Nixon created a federal regulatory regime to meet public demands for improved environmental quality. As it happened, the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the enactment of the first national environmental standards coincided with the disruption of the postwar prosperity that had helped fuel the environmental movement. Valuing the Air provides the first sustained historical study of policy making at EPA during the formative period between 1970 and 1990, when the embattled agency preserved its original mission to protect Americans’ right to clean air. To justify strong regulations in an era of rising inflation and unemployment, EPA officials turned to the new field of environmental economics, funding pioneering research that concluded that the benefits of environmental protection outweighed the costs. Such pecuniary evidence allowed EPA to shield its regulatory interventions from business lobbying and to rebut rhetorical campaigns in which corporate executives threatened communities across the country with the loss of industrial jobs if they supported strong environmental health regulations. While this dollars and cents valuation proved persuasive to policy makers, it ran contrary to environmentalist notions of priceless nature and environmental advocates fought doggedly to prevent EPA from fully adopting a cost/benefit approach to policymaking. As environmentalists recognized, EPA’s embrace of economic measurement elevated the stature of economists at the agency, raising the possibility that recently established natural rights to clean air and water might be undercut by a dehumanized pricing of externalities. Regulatory reforms enacted by the Carter administration, such as emissions trading and the bubble policy, signaled a new willingness among liberals to use economic incentives and markets approaches in place of direct regulations – a development that environmentalists regarded warily. In 1981, the Reagan administration upset a bipartisan consensus for market based reforms with the announcement of drastic budget and staffing cuts at EPA. Reagan’s attack on EPA marked the ascent of a new conservative ideology that held unrestrained free enterprise to be the greatest social good, irrespective of the actual economics of regulatory interventions. Finding environmental economics to be a powerful, if imperfect, ally against such assaults, many environmental organizations softened their critiques of economic valuation and began to borrow the language and logic of economics to make their case. With this growing support from environmental organizations, EPA ushered in the commodification of pollution rights in the era of cap and trade. The inflection of contemporary environmental advocacy with economic measurement and value demonstrates the political utility of economics while also underscoring the foreclosure of an earlier environmentalism’s more radical questioning of the desirability of an unbounded market economy. At the same time, EPA continues to resist economists’ efforts to derive public preferences from market exchange, insisting that fundamental choices about underlying environmental value be made through the democratic process.

No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to present and analyse the role of the environmental groups and the trade unions on the issue of the environmental protection through the economic methodology. The specific groups have strong connection with the environmental issue since the beginning of the environmental movement. However, the two groups stand on different positions in the market and in the society, therefore they have different objectives and different tools for the achievement of their targets. Following the groups' different characteristics, I analyse their targets and how these could influence the firms' technological choice, the level of the production, the profits and finally the level of the emissions released by the firms' production. In the second chapter, a deeper analysis on the behavior and the strategy of the environmental groups is provided in order to shed more light on their objectives from the beginning of the environmental movement. Following a review of the literature an analytical framework for studying targets or motivations of the environmental groups is analysed. Three interrelated factors which affect the strategy and the decisions of the group are identified; the group s size, their budget and the weight of impure altruism in their individual and collective objectives. A positive relation exists between the group s size and the financial contributions, and the interaction of the personal expectations with the collective objectives encourages and benefits the group s actions. In the third chapter following the experience from the real world, the participation of the environmental groups in the emissions trading system (ETS) is analysed. Concretely, a competition in an ETS as a game between two firms and environmental group is modelled. According to the results, there is a U-shape relationship between how polluting the chosen technology is and the degree of the environmentalists impure altruism. Firms choose a more polluting technology in the presence of the environmentalists than in their absence if they are characterised by a high enough degree of impure altruism. Finally, in the fourth chapter the influence of the trade unions on the firms' environmental technological choice is analysed. However, in addition to the literature and according to the real world experience the unions care for the environmental protection. Particularly, the decentralised structure is compared with the centralised structure under a Cournot duopoly. I conclude that the decentralised structure could always provide higher incentives to the firms for the adoption of a better (less polluting) technology. Furthermore, there is an inverse U-shape relation between the firm s emissions and the size of the market. Finally, the emissions could be less under the centralised case compared to the decentralised for relatively low market size.

In order to meet the US EPA's National Ambient Air Quality Standards as set under the provisions of the Clean Air Act, states and regions throughout the United States are designing cap and trade programs aimed at reducing the emissions of the two dominant precursors for ozone, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). While emission cap and trade programs are becoming more common, relatively few analyses have examined the air quality implications of moving emissions from one location to another (due to trading of emissions between facilities), from one sector to another (due to the use of technologies such as Plug-in Electric Hybrid Vehicles - PHEVs), and changing the temporal distribution of emissions (through emissions trading among facilities with different temporal profiles). This thesis will examine, in detail, the air quality implications of two emission cap and trade programs. The first program is a NOx trading program that covers Electricity Generating Units (EGUs) in the Northeastern United States. Results show that refining the temporal limits on this cap and trade program, by charging facilities more to emit NOx on days when ozone is most likely to form, has the potential to significantly reduce NOx emissions and ozone concentrations. Additionally, this research also shows that, for this region, the spatial redistribution of NOx emissions due to trading leads to greater ozone reductions than similar amounts of NOx emission reductions applied evenly across all facilities. Analyses also indicate that displacing emissions from the on-road mobile sector (vehicles) to the EGU sector through the use of PHEVs decreases ozone in most areas, but some highly localized areas show increases in ozone concentration. The second trading program examined in this thesis is limited to Houston, Texas, where a VOC trading program is focused on a sub-set of four Highly Reactive Volatile Organic Compounds (HRVOCs), which have been identified as having substantial ozone formation potential. Work presented in this thesis examined whether this trading program, in its current form or in an expanded form, could lead to air pollution hot spots, due to spatial reallocation of emissions. Results show that the program as currently designed is unlikely to lead to ozone hot spots, so no further spatial limitations are required for this program. Expanding the trading to include Other VOCs, fugitive emissions and chlorine emissions, based on reactivity weighted trading, is also unlikely to lead to the formation of ozone hot spots, and could create more flexibility in a trading market that is currently not very active. Based on these air quality modeling results, policy suggestions are provided that may increase participation in the trading market. These case studies demonstrate that use of detailed air analyses can provide improved designs for increasingly popular emission cap and trade programs, with improved understanding of the impacts of modifying spatial and temporal distributions of emissions. / text

The Canadian greenhouse gas offset system was proposed and developed with the objective of assisting Canada in achieving its Kyoto target by means of low cost emission reduction. This study estimates the potential of agricultural soils in Canada to provide carbon credits. Carbon sequestration practices such as moderate till, no-till and perennial crop activities were considered in the analysis. Crops under different tillage regimes, hay and alfalfa were also included in the study. Simulation analysis was undertaken using the Canadian Regional Agricultural Model (CRAM) for carbon prices ranging from $5 to $100/t of CO2e. Carbon credits generated as a result of the sequestration activities were estimated by endogenizing a carbon price for the sequestration activity into the CRAM model. The analysis was done regionally, provincially, and nationally. Two scenarios were investigated; one that included tillage practices and perennial crops (Policy All) and the other that only included tillage practices (Policy Till). Cropping pattern changes, carbon sequestration levels, carbon revenues, and adoption rates were estimated in the simulation. In addition, the role of transaction costs in the offset system was also examined. / The results of the simulation indicated that crop shifts towards hay and alfalfa occurred in the Policy All scenario, while practice shifts towards moderate and no-till occurred in the Policy Till scenario. Simulation analysis indicated that carbon sequestration levels vary by province and region. Among the provinces, the Prairie provinces had the highest carbon sequestration levels ranging from 50 percent under the Policy Till scenario, while under the Policy All scenario it was close to 97 percent. Nationally at a medium price of $15/t of CO2 approximately 1.08 Mt of CO2 and 0.11 Mt of CO2 were sequestered under Policy All and Policy Till scenario. When transaction costs were included in the analysis, approximately 30 to 40 percent less sequestration from the baseline was estimated. The results varied by province and region.

Canada's commitment to the Kyoto Protocol provides agricultural producers with an opportunity to supply carbon offset credits to a domestic carbon market and receive revenue from the sale of these credits. This study employed the multiple bounded discrete choice method to estimate Quebec hog producers' willingness to accept compensation to adopt two management practices that reduce carbon emissions; i.e. reduced protein feeding and adopting a manure storage cover. The average willingness to accept compensation for reduced protein feeding was $46.71 per tonne of CO2 equivalent and for the manure storage cover was $40.40 per tonne of CO2 equivalent. In addition, hog producers were asked what cost they would be willing to bear if they received $20 per animal unit in carbon offset credit revenue. The average cost they were willing to bear was $11.88. Key factors that influenced producers' decisions were identified. Results can be used to improve the institutional rules and public policy associated with developing a domestic carbon emission trading mechanism. Starting-point and sequencing bias were tested for with the convolution approach. Starting-point bias was found in all the hypothetical situations; while sequencing bias was not found.