The UK election and Brexit - David Miller and Gustaf Arrhenius

On midnight, the 31:st of January 2020, Britain left the EU. This was possible in part because the Concervative party won a landslide in the general election on December 12 2019. Why did they win so b

The UK election and Brexit - David Miller and Gustaf Arrhenius

On midnight, the 31:st of January 2020, Britain left the EU. This was possible in part because the Concervative party won a landslide in the general election on December 12 2019. Why did they win so b

Professor Jennifer Saul, Director of Research, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield.ABSTRACTUntil recently, it was widely believed that explicit expressions of racism would doom a politic

Did you take part in Earth Hour last month? On the 24th of March each year a big part of the earth’s population in the most energy consuming countries turn the lights off for one hour to stress the en

“Who in your class would you not like to sit next to?” This question was posed to almost 5000 pupils (age 14–15) at Swedish high schools 2010/2011. Many adolescents experience systematic rejection duri

Professor Larry Temkin, a prominent figure within moral philosophy, is retiring. His career was celebrated at a conference at Rutgers University by a number of notable speakers and participants. Our d

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.