Since the 1990s, advocates of policy to prevent catastrophic climate change have been divided over
the appropriate economic instruments to curb CO2 emissions-carbon taxes or schemes of emission
trading. Barack Obama claimed that policies implemented during his presidency set in motion
irreversible trends toward a clean-energy economy, with the years 2008-2015 given as evidence of
decoupling between CO2 emissions and economic growth. This is despite California being the only
state in the USA that has implemented a specific policy to curb emissions, a cap-and-trade scheme in
place since 2013. To assess Obama's claims and the effectiveness of policies to reduce CO2
emissions, we analyze national and state-level data from the USA over the period 1990-2015. We
find: (a) annual changes in emissions strongly correlated with the growth conditions of the economy;
(b) no evidence for decoupling; and (c) a trajectory of CO2 emissions in California which does not at
all support the claim that the cap-and-trade system implemented there has reduced CO2 emissions. / Series: SRE - Discussion Papers
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6961 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Granados, José A. Tapia, Spash, Clive L. |
| Publisher | WU Vienna University of Economics and Business |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Paper, NonPeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Relation | http://www.wu.ac.at/mlgd, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6961/ |
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