Assessing the Costs of Compliance: the Kyoto Protocol

Dismantling of a Breakthrough: The Kyoto Protocol – Just Symbolic Policy!

We show that U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol is straightforward under political economy considerations. The reason is that U.S. compliance costs exceed low willingness to pay for dealing with global warming in the U.S. The withdrawal had a crucial impact on the concretion of the Protocol prior to its likely ratification at the end of 2002. Remaining non-EU Parties to the Kyoto Protocol ...

A Critical Appraisal of Climate Policy

Ten years after the initial Climate Change Convention from Rio in 1992, the developed world is likely to ratify the Kyoto Protocol which has been celebrated as a milestone in climate protection. Standard economic theory, however, casts doubt that Kyoto will go beyond symbolic policy. In this paper we show that the final concretion of the Kyoto Protocol obeys the theoretical prediction: Kyoto mo...

Kyoto and technology at the European Union: costs of emission reduction under flexibility mechanisms and technology progress

This paper presents the analysis of the consequences of CO2 emission reduction policies, as derived, in a European Union perspective, from the Kyoto Protocol for the 2010 horizon. The first section provides a thorough assessment, based on the PRIMES model results, of the marginal and total costs of compliance to the Kyoto Protocol for a ‘no trading’ case and for two cases of emission trading, r...

US Rejection of the Kyoto Protocol: the impact on compliance costs and CO2 emissions

Capping the cost of compliance with the Kyoto Protocol and recycling revenues into land-use projects.

There is the concern among some countries that compliance costs with commitments under the Kyoto Protocol may be unacceptably high. There is also the concern that technical difficulties with the inclusion of land use, land-use change, and forestry activities in non-Annex I countries might lead to an effective exclusion of such activities from consideration under the Protocol. This paper is prop...