U.S. Senate Archives - Page 11 of 13 - An Economic View of the Environment

Too Good to be True?

Global climate change is a serious environmental threat, and sound public policies are needed to address it effectively and sensibly.

There is now significant interest and activity within both the U.S. Administration and the U.S. Congress to develop a meaningful national climate policy in this country. (If you’re interested, please see some of my previous posts: “Opportunity for a Defining Moment” (February 6, 2009); “The Wonderful Politics of Cap-and-Trade: A Closer Look at Waxman-Markey” (May 27, 2009); “Worried About International Competitiveness? Another Look at the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Proposal” (June 18, 2009); “National Climate Change Policy: A Quick Look Back at Waxman-Markey and the Road Ahead” (June 29, 2009). For a more detailed account, see my Hamilton Project paper, A U.S. Cap-and-Trade System to Address Global Climate Change.)

And as we move toward the international negotiations to take place in December of this year in Copenhagen, it is important to keep in mind the global commons nature of the problem, and hence the necessity of designing and implementing an international policy architecture that is scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic.

Back in the U.S., with domestic action delayed in the Senate, several states and regions in the United States have moved ahead with their own policies and plans. Key among these is California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, intended to return the state’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2020 to their 1990 level. In 2006, three studies were released indicating that California can meet its 2020 target at no net economic cost. That is not a typographical error. The studies found not simply that the costs will be low, but that the costs will be zero, or even negative! That is, the studies found that California’s ambitious target can be achieved through measures whose direct costs would be outweighed by offsetting savings they create, making them economically beneficial even without considering the emission reductions they may achieve. Not just a free lunch, but a lunch we are paid to eat!

Given the substantial emission reductions that will be required to meet California’s 2020 target, these findings are - to put it mildly – surprising, and they differ dramatically from the vast majority of economic analyses of the cost of reducing GHG emissions. As a result, I was asked by the Electric Power Research Institute – along with my colleagues, Judson Jaffe and Todd Schatzki of Analysis Group – to evaluate the three California studies.

In a report titled, “Too Good To Be True? An Examination of Three Economic Assessments of California Climate Change Policy,” we found that although some limited opportunities may exist for no-cost emission reductions, the studies substantially underestimated the cost of meeting California’s 2020 target — by omitting important components of the costs of emission reduction efforts, and by overestimating offsetting savings some of those efforts yield through improved energy efficiency. In some cases, the studies focused on the costs of particular actions to reduce emissions, but failed to consider the effectiveness and costs of policies that would be necessary to bring about those actions. Just a few of the flaws we identified lead to underestimation of annual costs on the order of billions of dollars. Sadly, the studies therefore did not and do not offer reliable estimates of the cost of meeting California’s 2020 target.

This episode is a reminder of a period when similar studies were performed by the U.S. Department of Energy at the time of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations. Like the California studies, the DOE (Interlaboratory Work Group) studies in the late 1990s suggested that substantial emission reductions could be achieved at no cost. Those studies were terribly flawed, which was what led to their faulty conclusions. I had thought that such arguments about massive “free lunches” in the energy efficiency and climate domain had long since been laid to rest. The debates in California (and some of the rhetoric in Washington) prove otherwise.

While the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 sets an emissions target, critical policy design decisions remain to be made that will fundamentally affect the cost of the policy. For example, policymakers must determine the emission sources that will be regulated to meet those targets, and the policy instruments that will be employed. The California studies do not directly address the cost implications of these and other policy design decisions, and their overly optimistic findings may leave policymakers with an inadequate appreciation of the stakes associated with the decisions that lie ahead.

On the positive side, a careful evaluation of the California studies highlights some important policy design lessons that apply regardless of the extent to which no-cost emission reduction opportunities really exist. Policies should be designed to account for uncertainty regarding emission reduction costs, much of which will not be resolved before policies must be enacted. Also, consideration of the market failures that lead to excessive GHG emissions makes clear that to reduce emissions cost-effectively, policymakers should employ a market-based policy (such as cap-and-trade) as the core policy instrument.

The fact that the three California studies so egregiously underestimated the costs of achieving the goals of the Global Warming Solutions Act should not be taken as indicating that the Act itself is necessarily without merit. As I have discussed in previous posts, that judgment must rest – from an economic perspective – on an honest and rigorous comparison of the Act’s real benefits and real costs.

What is the Future of U.S. Coal?

Climate concerns have gone mainstream, even in the United States. This has been reflected in the passage by the U.S. House of Representatives of HR 2454, the so-called Waxman-Markey bill, and will soon be reflected in the debates in the U.S. Senate. (I have written a number of blog posts on this topic. If you’re interested, please see: “Opportunity for a Defining Moment” (February 6, 2009); “The Wonderful Politics of Cap-and-Trade: A Closer Look at Waxman-Markey” (May 27, 2009); “Worried About International Competitiveness? Another Look at the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Proposal” (June 18, 2009); “National Climate Change Policy: A Quick Look Back at Waxman-Markey and the Road Ahead” (June 29, 2009). For a more detailed account, see my Hamilton Project paper, A U.S. Cap-and-Trade System to Address Global Climate Change.)

At the center of much political attention in the United States is “the future of coal,” a subject that was illuminated by the 2007 MIT study with that title, authored by John Deutch and Ernest Moniz, as well as several reports issued by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

CO₂ emissions from coal consumption accounted for 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2005, and nearly all resulted from coal’s use in generating electricity. According to EIA forecasts, the vast majority of coal demand over the coming decades will be from existing power plants, with currently existing plants still accounting for two-thirds of total demand in 2030. Therefore, while much attention has been given to how climate policy and technological advances may affect new power plants, over the next two decades a policy that affects both existing and new coal-fired power plants would have far greater impacts than a policy that affects only new plants.

Potential climate policies can be grouped into four major categories: standards, subsidies or credit-based programs, carbon taxes, and cap-and-trade (like Waxman-Markey). The cost of retrofitting existing plants to meet CO₂ emission standards would likely be so high that standards could be imposed only on new plants. While such standards may dampen investments in new coal-fired power plants – as they may require expensive carbon-capture-and-storage at any new coal plant (see below) – standards would be unlikely to affect operations of existing plants. In fact, by increasing the cost of new plants, such standards can encourage generators to extend the life of existing plants. Hence, new source standards hold little promise in this domain.

Likewise, while subsidies or credit-based programs – including renewable portfolio standards — may displace some new coal-fired generation with other types of generation, they will have little, if any, effect on the operation of existing coal-fired power plants. And carbon taxes are opposed by the regulated community because of the additional costs they would place on private industry, and are opposed by environmentalists because of the political challenges.

This leaves cap-and-trade. Such a system would cover both new and existing emission sources, and could have a more pervasive effect on coal use than standards, subsidies, or credit-based programs. For this and other reasons, most policy attention in the United States has been focused on potential cap-and-trade systems.

Coal combustion generates the most CO₂ emissions per unit of energy. As a result, a cap-and-trade system’s effect on the cost of coal use would be significantly greater than its effect on the cost of gasoline or natural gas consumption. For example, a $100 per ton of CO₂ allowance price would increase the average cost of electricity generation from coal-fired power plants by about 400%, the average cost of electricity generation from natural gas plants by about 100%, and gasoline prices by about $1.00 per gallon.

The competitiveness of conventional coal-fired electricity generation relative to other technologies diminishes as the stringency of an emissions cap increases. Therefore, much attention is being given to opportunities to employ carbon-capture-and-storage (or CCS) technologies, which would separate carbon dioxide from other stack gases, liquify it, and store it underground for long periods of time.

Three important caveats about CCS should be considered. First, it is likely that CCS will be economically practical only for new plants, and only when CO₂allowance prices exceed $100 per ton of CO₂ for early adopters (cost estimates have increased over the past few years, as technological and institutional challenges have become clearer). Second, there is significant uncertainty about the cost of CCS, because it has not yet been commercially demonstrated. And third, CCS significantly reduces, but does not eliminate, CO₂ emissions from coal-fired generation.

In light of the growing momentum toward a mandatory U.S. climate policy, the anticipated impacts of such policies on coal use are an important issue. But the remaining uncertainties are great. Impacts of a climate policy on coal use will depend upon the type of climate policy employed, the stringency of the policy, the future price of natural gas, the future cost and penetration of nuclear and renewable technologies, and the cost of coal-fired generation with carbon capture and storage technologies. Are all promising topics for future posts.

Cap-and-Trade: A Fly in the Ointment? Not Really

For more than two decades, environmental law and regulation was dominated by command-and-control approaches — typically either mandated pollution control technologies or inflexible discharge standards on a smokestack-by-smokestack basis. But in the 1980s, policy makers increasingly explored market-based environmental policy instruments, mechanisms that provide economic incentives for firms and individuals to carry out cost-effective pollution control. Cap-and-trade systems, in which emission permits or allowances can be traded among potential polluters, continue today to be at the center of this action.

Most recently, this has been in the context of deliberations regarding possible U.S. actions to reduced carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions linked with global climate change, as in HR 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as in proposals developing in the Senate. (I have written a number of blog posts on this topic. If you’re interested, please see: “Opportunity for a Defining Moment” (February 6, 2009); “The Wonderful Politics of Cap-and-Trade: A Closer Look at Waxman-Markey” (May 27, 2009); “Worried About International Competitiveness? Another Look at the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Proposal” (June 18, 2009); “National Climate Change Policy: A Quick Look Back at Waxman-Markey and the Road Ahead” (June 29, 2009). For a more detailed account, see my Hamilton Project paper, A U.S. Cap-and-Trade System to Address Global Climate Change.)

But the transition from command-and-control regulation to market-based policy instruments has not always been easy. Sometimes policy can outrun basic understanding, and the claims made for the cost-effectiveness of cap-and-trade systems can exceed what can be reasonably anticipated. Among the factors that can adversely affect the performance of such systems are transaction costs.

In general, transaction costs — those costs that arise from the exchange, not the production, of goods and services — are ubiquitous in market economies. They can arise from any exchange: after all, parties to transactions must find one another, communicate, and exchange information. It may be necessary to inspect and sometimes even measure goods to be transferred, draw up contracts, consult with lawyers or other experts, and transfer title.

In cap-and-trade markets, there are three potential sources of transaction costs. The first source, searching and information-collection, arises because it can take time for a potential buyer of a discharge permit to find a seller, though — for a fee — brokers can facilitate the process. Although less obvious, a second source of transaction costs — bargaining and deciding — is potentially as important. A firm entering into negotiations incurs real resource costs, including time and/or fees for brokerage, legal, and insurance services. Likewise, the third source — monitoring and enforcing — can be significant, although these costs are typically borne by the responsible governmental authority and not by trading partners.

The cost savings that may be realized through cap-and-trade systems depend upon active trading. But transaction costs are an impediment to trading, and such impediments thereby can limit savings. So, transaction costs reduce the overall economic benefits of allowance trading, partly by absorbing resources directly and partly by suppressing exchanges that otherwise would have been mutually (indeed socially) beneficial. But when transaction costs can be kept to a minimum, high levels of trading — and significant cost savings – are the result.

Since David Montgomery’s path-breaking work in 1972, economists have asserted that the post-trading allocation of control responsibility among sources and hence the aggregate costs of control are independent from the initial permit allocation. This is an extremely important political property, but does this still hold in the presence of transaction costs? This is a question I investigated in an article titled, “Transaction Costs and Tradable Permits,” which was published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 1995 (and which the publisher lists as one of the ten most cited articles in the journal’s history, going back to 1974).

The answer to this question is: “it depends.” If incremental transaction costs are independent of the size of individual transactions, the initial allocation of permits has no effect on the post-trading allocation of control responsibility and aggregate control costs. But if incremental transaction costs decrease with the size of individual trades, then the initial allocation will affect the post-trading outcome.

This is of great political importance, because it means that in the presence of transaction costs, the initial distribution of permits can matter not only in terms of distributional equity, but in terms of cost-effectiveness or efficiency. This can reduce the discretion of the Congress (or other legislature or agency) to distribute allowances as they please (in order to generate a constituency of support for the program), and may thereby reduce the political attractiveness and feasibility of a cap-and-trade system.

Empirical evidence, however, indicates that transaction costs have been minimal, indeed trivial, in enacted and implemented cap-and-trade systems, including the U.S. EPA’s leaded-gasoline phasedown in the 1980s, and the well-known SO₂allowance trading system, enacted as part of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.

That’s good news, surely. But nevertheless, going forward, choices between conventional, command-and-control environmental policies and market-based instruments should reflect the imperfect world in which these instruments are applied. Such choices are not simple, because no policy panacea exists.

On the one hand, even if transaction costs prevent significant levels of trade from occurring, aggregate costs of control will most likely be less than those of a conventional command-and-control approach. A trading system with no trading taking place will likely be less costly than a technology standard (because the trading system provides flexibility to firms regarding their chosen means of control) and no more costly than a uniform performance standard.

But the existence of transaction costs may make the choice between conventional approaches and cap-and-trade more difficult because of the ambiguities that are introduced. With transaction costs — as with other departures from frictionless markets — greater attention is required to the details of designing specific systems. This is the way to lessen the risk of over-selling such policy ideas and ultimately creating systems that stand the best chance of being implemented successfully.