Green paradox and the role of life cycle engineering (original) (raw)
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Climate Policy to Defeat the Green Paradox
AMBIO, 2010
Carbon dioxide emissions have accelerated since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol. This discouraging development may partly be blamed on accelerating world growth and on lags in policy instruments. However, it also raises serious question concerning whether policies to reduce CO 2 emissions are as effective as generally assumed. In recent years, a considerable number of studies have identified various feedback mechanisms of climate policies that often erode, and occasionally reinforce, their effectiveness. These studies generally focus on a few feedback mechanisms at a time, without capturing the entire effect. Partial accounting of policy feedbacks is common in many climate scenarios. The IPCC, for example, only accounts for direct leakage and rebound effects. This article attempts to map the aggregate effects of different types of climate policy feedback mechanisms in a cohesive framework. Controlling feedback effects is essential if the policy measures are to make any difference on a global level. A general conclusion is that aggregate policy feedback mechanisms tend to make current climate policies much less effective than is generally assumed. In fact, various policy measures involve a definite risk of 'backfiring' and actually increasing CO 2 emissions. This risk is particularly pronounced once effects of climate policies on the pace of innovation in climate technology are considered. To stand any chance of controlling carbon emissions, it is imperative that feedback mechanisms are integrated into emission scenarios, targets for emission reduction and implementation of climate policy. In many cases, this will reduce the scope for subsidies to renewable energy sources, but increase the scope for other measures such as schemes to return carbon dioxide to the ground and to mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases from wetlands and oceans. A framework that incorporates policy feedback effects necessitates rethinking the design of the national and regional emission targets. This leads us to a new way of formulating emission targets that include feedback effects, the global impact target. Once the full climate policy feedback mechanisms are accounted for, there are probably only three main routes in climate policy that stand a chance of mitigating global warming: (a) returning carbon to the ground, (b) technological leaps in zero-emission energy technology that make it profitable to leave much carbon in the ground even in Annex II countries and (c) international agreements that make it more profitable to leave carbon in the ground or in forests.
The costs and benefits of environmental sustainability
Sustainability Science, 2021
The natural science in GEO-6 makes clear that a range and variety of unwelcome outcomes for humanity, with potentially very significant impacts for human health, become increasingly likely if societies maintain their current development paths. This paper assesses what is known about the likely economic implications of either current trends or the transformation to a low-carbon and resource-efficient economy in the years to 2050 for which GEO-6 calls. A key conclusion is that no conventional cost–benefit analysis for either scenario is possible. This is because the final cost of meeting various decarbonisation and resource-management pathways depends on decisions made today in changing behaviour and generating innovation. The inadequacies of conventional modelling approaches generally lead to understating the risks from unmitigated climate change and overstating the costs of a low-carbon transition, by missing out the cumulative gains from path-dependent innovation. This leads to a f...
Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2015
conclusively demonstrated, in 1958, that pediatric X-rays doubled the risk of childhood leukemia. Nevertheless, doctors continued X-raying mothers-to-be until 1980. Margaret Heffernan's (2011) book, Willful Blindness: Why What could better signify serious corporate commitment than a quantified and measurable target based on a company's fair share of saving the planet? However, by advancing the mistaken notion that companies can substitute for public policy when it comes to addressing the fundamental economic externality that is leading to climate change in the first place, science-based targets can easily take us backward in our effort to address climate change. We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, documents this and numerous other examples of our skill at ignoring information that points to something we don't want to know. Specifically, on the topic of climate change, Heffernan notes: "[I]n failing to confront the greatest challenge of our age-climate change-all the forces of willful blindness come together, like synchronized swimmers in a spectacular water ballet." When it comes to corporate sustainability, we're seeing some recent efforts to get past willful blindness. In 2013, we saw examples such as Auden Schendler (co-author of this piece) and Michael Toffel's (2013) publication in Grist, Corporate Sustainability is Not Sustainable, which itself built upon Professor Robin Craig's (2012) article provocatively entitled "Climate Change Means the Death of Sustainability." More recently, in Lima, Unilever's Paul Polman said that ".. most CEOs. .. know that their companies cannot prosper in a world with runaway climate change." Perhaps, after years of corporate sustainability flag waving, it is no longer possible to ignore the fact that much of what companies classify as "sustainability" is, at best, green fluff that is fundamentally out of touch with the realities of anticipated climate change. Significantly, chief executive officers (CEOs) themselves are questioning the historic focus on corporate sustainability poli
Unintended Detrimental Effects of Environmental Policy: The Green Paradox and Beyond
CESifo Working Paper Series No. …, 2011
Well-intended policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions may have unintended undesirable consequences. Recently, a large literature has emerged showing under what conditions this so-called 'Green Paradox' may occur. We review this literature and identify the key mechanisms behind these paradoxical policy outcomes and highlight avenues for future research.
“the Green Paradox Phenomenon: A European Union Empirical Application”
The green paradox describes an undesirable and socially inefficient phenomenon caused by the expansionary reactions of the Supply as a response to the various mechanisms that combat climate change. This article seeks to understand and aggregate the different drivers of this phenomenon portrayed in the literature, as well the empirical evidence associated and the proposed solutions. For this purpose, compilation and systematization of the various scientific contributions up to date in this context have been elaborated, which led to the identification of five major drivers of the paradox: (i) Environmental Taxes, (ii) Green Supports, (iii) Uncertain Property Rights, (iv) Temporal Lag and (v) Emission limits (Cap). Moreover, we evaluate its effective impact on the European scenario in the last two decades, and we have obtained evidences that the hiatus in the implementation of the European emission cap mechanism has generated a strong green paradox. Moreover, a robust reflection regard...
Everyday people have been experiencing changes in weather and climate. The question is that we are really on the top of a tendency or we just overstate the weather change because of our heuristic mentality. If the negative tendency of change is adopted we should put into the front the climate-technologies in the strategic decision making process of the enterprise. The main motor of the strategy is the profit. It is hard to estimate the complete profitability of the green technologies. In case of latest green technologies the problem is that hard to quantify the real profitability. The real profitability is also depend on external effects. Against with the classical investment analysis the cost-benefit analysis is able to take into account negative and positive external effects. In case of strategic decision do not forgot the new technologies or methods also confronted with resistance. In the strategic decision making process we should calculate with these resistances too. The aim of these study to highlight those long-term calculation methods and business models which are able to calculate with the external effects of the projects and examine the real profitability and break-even point in case of the scenario of bad climate tendency. In this paper we show a new methods which include the cost-benefit analysis and the change equation.
Global Warming and the Green Paradox: A Review of Adverse Effects of Climate Policies
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2015
This article examines the possible adverse effects of well-intended climate policies. A weak Green Paradox arises if the announcement of a future carbon tax or a sufficiently fast rising carbon tax encourages fossil fuel owners to extract reserves more aggressively, thus exacerbating global warming. We argue that such policies may also encourage more fossil fuel to be locked in the crust of the earth, which can offset the adverse effects of the weak Green Paradox. We show that a subsidy on clean renewables has similar weak Green Paradox effects. Green welfare (the complement of environmental damages) drops (i.e., the strong Green Paradox) if the beneficial climate effects of locking up more fossil fuel do not outweigh the short-run weak Green Paradox effects. Neither the weak nor the strong Green Paradox occurs for the first-best Pigouvian carbon tax. We also pay attention to dirty backstops, spatial carbon leakage and green innovation.
Technology and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: An IntegratedScenario Analysis
The common perception among many policy makers and industry leaders is that the twin objectives of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting a more competitive economy are inherently contradictory. Many believe that anything done to lower such emissions will necessarily restrict economic activity. Others argue that if the economy moves forward at current levels of efficiency, growth in greenhouse gas emissions will be inevitable and the global climate will be seriously damaged. Because of the "unavoidable tradeoff" between these two objectives, the various industry, government and environmental groups wage a constant policy battle over which objective merits the greater support. From a perspective of cost-effective investments in technology, however, it becomes increasingly clear that these two goals are not at all contradictory. The reason is that the U.S. economy falls short of an optimal level of overall carbon efficiency. Figure ES-1 on the following page illustrates the different points of view in a schematic way. The curves on this graph represent different "Production Possibility Frontiers" that characterize the relationship between carbon emissions mitigation and economic activity. The frontier defines the outer boundary of what is feasible given a set of technologies and economic activity levels.
Sustainable development under ambitious medium term target of reducing greenhouse gases
Procedia Environmental Sciences, 2010
Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama declared the commitment that Japan would decrease 25% of greenhouse gases compared with 1990 emissions. This commitment was highly evaluated worldwide. However, some experts criticize that it is impossible to maintain sustainable development under such severe target. This article aims at investigating whether we could realize sustainable development under such ambitious target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. For this purpose, we first evaluated possible technology options and system innovation along with economic options. Technology options include efficiency improvement, renewable energy technologies and nuclear power technologies. Economic options include carbon tax, emissions trading scheme and feed-in-tariff for renewable energies. Once the promising technologies and policy options were listed up, we integrated these options in a computable general equilibrium model for Japan, which we developed, so as to evaluate the impact to national economy. As results, we identified the condition, how we could realize sustainable development under the 25% target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, we investigated the applicability of the same concept to other countries or regions.