Browsing by Subject "greenhouse gas emissions"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Climate Finance for Just Transitions: Building Low-Carbon Development Pathways in an Age of US-China Rivalry
    (2022-09-14) Phillips, Jonathan; Ewing, Jackson; Rao, Abhay; Teji, Liilnna; Plutshack, Victoria; Jeuland, Marc
    This paper investigates challenges throughout the international climate finance landscape and recommends pathways for how investments into low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) can more effectively drive low-carbon development. The paper focuses on three issue areas: (1) aligning national climate strategies and international finance, (2) finding avenues for positive climate finance outcomes in an era of growing rivalry between Chinese and Group of Seven—particularly US—public financiers, and (3) reforming major climate finance practices and institutions to more effectively cater to the needs of LMIC stakeholders. This paper is part of a series of work under the New Frontiers in Climate Finance project, led by the James E. Rogers Energy Access Project, which is scoping the challenges and opportunities inherent to climate finance in LMICs, and seeking to help increase the scale and transformational impact of climate finance to these economies. The project aims to mobilize key stakeholder organizations around a common vision for aligning the tools of development finance with the needs and strategies of LMICs, and to build low-carbon development pathways that support poverty alleviation while reducing the next global wave of greenhouse gas emissions.
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    Increasing Emissions Certainty under a Carbon Tax
    (2016-10-13) Murray, Brian; Pizer, William; Reichert, Christina
    To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, some groups have proposed that the United States consider use of a carbon tax. But whether the nation will achieve a specific emissions goal is uncertain because the economy’s response to such a tax is uncertain. Ultimately, there is an underlying tradeoff between certainty about emissions and certainty about prices and costs. To reduce uncertainty about whether a tax will achieve specific emissions goals, additional mitigation measures could be called on if emissions exceed those goals by a given amount. However, such additional measures introduce uncertainty about costs. At the extreme, a commitment to achieve emissions targets at all costs would imply that costs could be quite high. Discussions of policy mechanisms to increase price and cost certainty under several current cap-and-trade programs confronted this same dilemma: how much uncertainty about emissions outcomes is acceptable given reciprocal uncertainty about costs? Viewed through a slightly different lens, mechanisms that balance emissions and cost uncertainty can be viewed as a way to structure a more careful compromise between economic and environmental interests. This policy brief discusses mechanisms that could increase emissions certainty under a carbon tax. It draws from recent discussions between the authors and other policy experts, and its goal is to introduce ideas for further exploration. It begins with a discussion of how to measure emissions performance, or what it means to be achieving or not achieving an emissions goal. This performance would presumably provide the basis for pursuing remedial mechanisms. Next, the brief turns to a taxonomy of such mechanisms and the challenges and opportunities of each. It discusses ideas for initiating these mechanisms, either through some automated or discretionary procedure. The brief concludes with areas for additional research. The brief intentionally raises more questions than it answers—questions will be important to explore in ways that can provide guidance to policy decisions and design.
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    Life Cycle Assessment and Carbon Offset Potential for Cultured Milk Protein
    (2021-03-18) Bhandari, Pradnya; Mason, Sara; Olander, Lydia
    Cultured milk proteins are proteins manufactured in a lab through fermentation rather than from traditional animal farming methods. These proteins are identical to those found in milk (casein and whey), but are created using bacteria or fungi instead of any part of an animal. As humanity faces the problem of feeding an exponentially growing population, cultured proteins have emerged as one potential way to generate consumable protein without the harmful environmental impacts of expanding agricultural production. This paper focused on answering two primary questions: (1) How does the environmental footprint of cultured milk protein compare to that of traditional milk protein (derived from cows)? (2) If there is a significant difference in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between production of cultured and traditional milk protein, would developing carbon credits for cultured protein production be profitable for cultured protein producers? By comparing a generic cultured milk protein life cycle assessment (LCA) to published LCAs on traditional milk protein, we attempted to estimate the difference in environmental impact and assess whether the GHG emission differential might warrant carbon credit creation for cultured protein projects.
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    Modeling Energy Efficiency as a Supply Resource
    (2017-08-22) Gumerman, Etan; Vegh, Tibor
    Energy efficiency may be an inexpensive way to meet future demand and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet little work has been attempted to estimate annual energy efficiency supply functions for electricity planning. The main advantage of using a supply function is that energy efficiency adoption can change as demand changes. Models such as Duke University’s Dynamic Integrated Economy/Energy/Emissions Model (DIEM) have had to rely on simplistic or fixed estimates of future energy efficiency from the literature rather than on estimates from energy efficiency supply curves. This paper attempts to develop a realistic energy efficiency supply curve and to improve on the current energy efficiency modeling. It suggests an alternative approach based on saved-energy cost data from program administrators and explains the methodologies employed to create the supply curve. It illustrates this approach with results from DIEM for various electricity demand scenarios. The analysis suggests that an additional 5%–9% of energy efficiency is deployed for every 10% increase in the cost of electricity. Therefore, DIEM “invested” in energy efficiency up to an inelastic point on the energy efficiency supply curve. By contrast, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s energy efficiency approach assumes that realized energy efficiency is fixed, and has no elasticity, regardless of changes to marginal costs or constraints that affect emissions or economics.