Climate Change Economics and Policy: Global Warming

To reduce the GHG emission, two types of policy are taken: mitigation policy and adaptation policy. In mitigation policy options, there are two broad responses: regulatory approaches and the market based approaches. The main instruments for market based approach are GHG tax and emission trading schemes or ETS. These are the major implications for the mitigation for GHG.

2 a) The Minister for the Environment has a media interview about a proposed carbon tax. As the principal advisor of the Minister for the Environment, some suggestions can be made. The following three points explain the government’s intervention to mitigate the climate change.

• Today the world is facing through many problems. One of the major problems is climate change due to air pollution. Some other problems are greenhouse gas emission, global warming etc. Climate change is an example of negative externality.
• The effects of climate change are increasing over time. Another feature of climate change is that significant uncertainties exist about the possible type, size and timing of impacts. To produce the socially efficient outcome will be another intervention of the government to mitigate the climate change.
• To gather information about the rural economies and research on how they utilize agro biodiversity to cope with the climate change is another objective of the government to mitigate the climate change.

1. b) A carbon tax is the preferred policy than the emission trading schemes or ETS because

• This is a market based policy instrument that involves the behavioural change. It provides opportunities and incentives to decrease the cost of mitigation and therefore provides an efficient outcome.
• This policy uses the power of market price. According to many researchers, carbon pricing is the most efficient mechanism.
• Imposing a tax on carbon will make the market forces to reduce the demand for carbon based industries like fuels (Fahimnia et al. 2015).

3. The most economists put their trust in ‘market based’ solutions as opposed to direct government interventions to mitigate GHGs. In the modern life, energy is very essential. The present method of producing the energy generates carbon dioxide and leads to the depletion of the global climate. There is a need to find a way to reduce carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. It may be done through some alternative energy technology or by changing people’s consumption patterns focussing on the items that require less energy. The problem is associated with a large number of possible solutions. Now the difficulty is to select the correct solution that will achieve the required reduction in emission along with the minimum disruption and also economic cost. That is another problem. For instance, in decreasing the emissions from the transport, the possible solutions may be the using of more efficient private cars, more expansion of the public transport and the usage of telecommunication such as the email, phone calls as an alternative of face-to-face meetings. There may be some other solutions also. Another solution for government may be to recruit some experts to recognize the suitable methods of decreasing emissions and to adapt some regulations or other types of direct action to make sure that those methods are introduced properly (Grimes and Kentor 2015).

Reference list: 

Grimes, P. and Kentor, J., 2015. Exporting the Greenhouse: Foreign Capital Penetration and CO? Emissions 1980 1996. journal of world-systems research, 9(2), pp.261-275. 

Fahimnia, B., Sarkis, J., Choudhary, A. and Eshragh, A., 2015. Tactical supply chain planning under a carbon tax policy scheme: A case study.International Journal of Production Economics, 164, pp.206-215.