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Carbon coalitions
The cost and effectiveness of energy agreements to alter trajectories of atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions
Jae Edmonds, Marshall Wise and David W Barns
Global Environmental Change Program, Pacific Northwest Laboratories, 901 D Street SW, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20024-2115, USA
This paper examines the potential regional costs and benefits of participation in a set of hypothetical protocols to stabilize fossil fuel carbon emissions. We show that the particular construct of a stabilization agreement can greatly influence the potential acceptability and stability of that agreement. Any agreement to control fossil fuel carbon emissions, no matter how skillfully crafted, will require a process of constant revision in the terms of participation, because the economic needs of its participants will be evolving.
Keywords: International agreements; Carbon emissions; Tradable permits
1 Such studies include Grubb (1989); Anderson (1990); Epstein and Gupta (1990); Rose and Stevens (1992); Solomon and Ahuja (1991); Okada and Yamaji (1993).2 The research results presented in this paper served as background for a report produced by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) on climate treaties and modeling: OTA ( 1994).
