Climate change and its mitigation is rapidly becoming an item of social concern.
Climate change mitigation involves reduction of atmospheric greenhouse gas
concentrations through emissions reduction and or sequestration enhancement
(collectively called offsets). Many have asked how agriculture and forestry can
participate in mitigation efforts. Given that over 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions
arise from the energy sector, the role of agriculture and forestry depends critically on the
costs of the offsets they can achieve in comparison with offset costs elsewhere in the
economy. A number of researchers have examined the relative offset costs but have
generally looked only at producer level costs. However there are also costs incurred
when implementing, selling and conveying offset credits to a buyer. Also when
commodities are involved like bioenergy feedstocks, the costs of readying these for use
in implementing an offset strategy need to be reflected. This generally involves the
broadly defined category of transaction costs. This dissertation examines the possible
effects of transactions costs and storage costs for bioenergy commodities and how they affect the agriculture and forestry portfolio of mitigation strategies across a range of
carbon dioxide equivalent prices. The model is used to simulate the effects with and
without transactions and storage costs. Using an agriculture and forestry sector model
called FASOMGHG, the dissertation finds that consideration of transactions and storage
costs reduces the agricultural contribution total mitigation and changes the desirable
portfolio of alternatives. In terms of the portfolio, transactions costs inclusion
diminishes the desirability of soil sequestration and forest management while increasing
the bioenergy and afforestation role. Storage costs diminish the bioenergy role and favor
forest and sequestration items. The results of this study illustrate that transactions and
storage costs are important considerations in policy and market design when addressing
the reduction of greenhouse gas concentrations in climate change related decision
making.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2011-05-9546 |
| Date | 2011 May 1900 |
| Creators | Kim, Seong Woo |
| Contributors | McCarl, Bruce A. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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