Publication Date:
2015-07-18
Description:
Why have policies aimed at reducing the demand for carbon not succeeded in slowing down global carbon extraction and CO 2 emissions, and why have carbon prices failed to increase over the last three decades? This comment argues that this is because of the Green Paradox, that is, the anticipation of sales by resource owners who try to preempt the destruction of their markets by green policies. Reviewing some of the conditions under which strong and weak versions of the Green Paradox may emerge, it is argued that there is little hope that green replacement technologies will impose hard price constraints that would keep long-run extraction within a fixed carbon budget and that, therefore, even strong versions of the paradox cannot easily be avoided.
Keywords:
O13 - Agriculture
;
Natural Resources
;
Energy
;
Environment
;
Other Primary Products, Q32 - Exhaustible Resources and Economic Development, Q54 - Climate
;
Natural Disasters
;
Global Warming, H23 - Externalities
;
Redistributive Effects
;
Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
Print ISSN:
1750-6816
Electronic ISSN:
1750-6824
Topics:
Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering
,
Political Science
,
Economics