Mitigation Policy Studies, Cost Analysis, and Policy Design

oint Program analyses confirm the view among climate scientists that, in the absence of significant mitigation efforts, nations face a risk of significant and damaging climate change. To aid in public discussion and policymaking the Program seeks to evaluate what would be required in terms of policy, economic cost, and technology to mount a response. carboncounterApplying the IGSM and other facilities, this effort includes long-term studies on mitigation requirements needed to achieve various targets for atmospheric stabilization or maximum temperature change and analysis of various forms of international agreement. Also, research and analyses emphasize issues of policy design by investigating the performance of measures undertaken or proposed by the U.S. and other large nations. For the U.S., analyses also include consideration of state and regional-level policies.

A central focus of Program effort is analyses of climate-change mitigation policies under consideration in domestic and international policy discussions. The Program does not see its role as advocating for a particular policy solution or designing yet another proposal for the world to adopt. Rather, the goal is to investigate carefully the implications of different strategies and proposals, looking for weak points and finding relative strengths. Economic efficiency is an over-riding criterion in the evaluation, but equity and fairness—however those are perceived—are equally important if policy is to be sustained.

Climate policy discussions have evolved from grand schemes and architectures to the reality of the difficulties of implementing legislation in a less than ideal world (How (and why) do climate policy costs differ among countries?). This policy history can be followed in the Program's publications as they evolved to respond to international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol to policies of the European Union, the U.S., and Japan (Climate change taxes and energy efficiency in Japan. The analyses ask questions about the costs and effectiveness of various proposals, how climate policy would interact with existing tax policy and about the details of mitigation strategies comparing greenhouse gas taxes with a trading regime, lessons learned about allowance allocations or how to include land-use sources and sinks in a trading system.

The Program's work emphasizes that climate mitigation policy will have costs, and those costs may be borne disproportionately and in ways many would perceive as "unfair." One needs to be concerned that this message might slow the passage of critical climate measures. But, if those measures are implemented and the full implications are only discovered later, that may undermine support for the policy and for its further strengthening. The climate issue is not one that will be solved as a one-shot deal, and so the Program works on the assumption that the fullest information possible, even if it seems to slow progress for a time, is the only way to move ahead surely. For that reason, many who are in the position of designing mitigation policy have come to rely on the Program's analyses as providing a fair but unvarnished analysis.

We have entered now a next phase of climate policy analysis where the proposals are far more specific, implementation is underway, and the first data behind policy implementation are available to allow evaluation of what worked as expected and what didn't. This has led to several new initiatives -- projecting outcomes and evaluating them against actual market performance (European greenhouse gas emissions trading: A system in transition), and major new initiatives to evaluate the European experience, and to develop an elaborated model of the U.S. that could be extended to other countries.