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Mark Jaccard: Economic Efficiency vs Political Acceptability Trade-offs in GHG-reduction Policies
Mark Jaccard, Professor in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University, VancouverAbstractThere are obvious reasons why for three decades most jurisdictions have failPublic surveys and observation of real-world GHG reduction successes suggest that explicit carbon pricing (carbon tax and perhaps cap-and-trade) can be substantially more politically difficult than certain regulatory policies for shifting the energy system on to a deep decarbonization trajectory. Nonetheless, some people have argued that carbon pricing is an essential GHG reduction policy, suggesting that sincere politicians must do carbon pricing no matter how politically difficult. But the claim that carbon pricing is essential is factually incorrect. Deep decarbonization can be achieved entirely with regulations. Regulatory policies are unlikely to be as economically efficient as carbon pricing. But not all regulations perform identically when it comes to the economic-efficiency criterion. Flexible regulations have some attributes that make them low cost relative to regulations that require adoption of specific technologies.This talk provides evidence that assesses both the relative economic efficiency of policies and their relative political acceptability. The findings reported here suggest that some kinds of flexible regulations can perform significantly better than explicit carbon pricing in terms of relative political cost per tonne reduced while performing only marginally worse in terms of economic cost per tonne reduced. Presumably, this type of trade-off information could be of value to politicians who sincerely want deep decarbonization but would also like to be rewarded with re-election so that they and competing politicians see the value in ambitious and sustained GHG reduction efforts.
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IFFS and Aftonbladet present - The New World
Karin Pettersson, Martin Hägglund, Georg Diez The Institute for Futures Studies together with Aftonbladet Kultur are proud to present the new podcast collaboration: The New World - a podcast series whe
High impact: Report to Joe Biden cites IFFS research
Research on population change, ageing and the economy, by Dean Spears, researcher in the project “Sustainable population in the time of climate change” at IFFS, is cited in "The Economic Report of the".
Ethical machine decisions and the input-selection problem
Synthese 199 Abstract This article is about the role of factual uncertainty for moral decision-making as it concerns the ethics of machine decision-making (i.e., decisions by AI systems, such as autonomo
Three Mistakes in the Moral Reasoning About the Covid-19 Pandemic
Institute for Futures Studies Working Paper Series 2020:12 Abstract The response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the public discourse about the pandemic, can be used to illustrate three common mistakes in
Three Mistakes in the Moral Reasoning About the Covid-19 Pandemic
Orri Stefánsson, philosopher at the Institute for Futures Studies and decision theorist, dissects the moral reasoning about the Covid-19 pandemic. (This text is part of the Institute for Futures Studie)

Julia Mosquera
I defended my dissertation in philosophy at the University of Reading, UK 2017. My dissertation, Disability, Equality, and Future Generations,is an attempt to answer the question of how egalitarian soc