Many of the nation’s leading environmental and energy economists gathered in Washington D.C. to discuss the results of a year-long project focusing on the design and implementation of U.S. climate policy. The project is an effort of the National Bureau of Economic research, the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization.
The project has gathered more than two dozen economists working on 20 different aspects of climate policy implementation ranging from regulatory policy design and enforcement to energy consumption in buildings and vehicles. The results will be compiled in a forthcoming book to be published by the University of Chicago Press and edited by Don Fullerton (University of Illinois and NBER) and Catherine Wolfram (U.C. Berkeley and NBER)
Iowa State University’s James Bushnell has contributed a chapter on the economics of carbon offsets. While carbon offsets hold great potential to extend active climate policy to regions and sectors unlikely to fall under direct regulation, the mechanisms have also been very controversial. Much of the criticism has been directed at funding of projects whose reductions are not truly “additional” to what would have resulted without offset payments. However, Bushnell argues that the regulatory focus on additionality tends to paint these problems with too broad a brush.
The collected chapters are available online at: http://www.nber.org/confer/2010/DICPs10/summary.html