Research

Published Research
Environmental Policy

From Zero to Hero?: Why Integrated Assessment Modeling of Negative Emissions Technologies Is Hard and How We Can Do Better

Authors: Jay Fuhrman, Haewon McJeon, Scott C. Doney, William Shobe, Andres F. Clarens

Efforts by the United Nations and others to develop a coordinated global response to climate change rely heavily on an ensemble of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to make projections linking human activities to climate outcomes (IPCC, 2014, 2018). IAMs are coupled models of the global economic and climate systems, first developed to represent fossil fuel emissions from the energy system (Reister and Edmonds, 1977), and later expanded to include land use change and forestry emissions, as well as non-CO2 emissions (Di Vittorio et al., 2014).

Learn more
Published Research
Environmental Policy

Elements of emission market design: An experimental analysis of California's market for greenhouse gas allowances

Authors: Charles Holt, William Shobe, Thaddeus Huetteman

We use a set of economic experiments to test the effects of some novel features of California’s new controls on greenhouse gas emissions. The California cap and trade scheme imposes limits on allowance ownership, uses a tiered price containment reserve sale, and settles allowance auctions based on the lowest accepted bid.

Learn more
Published Research
Environmental Policy

Rethinking Environmental Federalism in a Warming World

Authors: William Shobe

Climate change policy analysis has focused almost exclusively on national policy and even on harmonizing climate policies across countries, implicitly assuming that the harmonization of climate policies at the subnational level would be mandated or guaranteed. We argue that the design and implementation of climate policy in a federal union will diverge in important ways from policy design in a unitary government. 

Learn more