How Inertia and Limited Potentials Affect the Timing of Sectoral Abatements in Optimal Climate Policy

Vogt-Schilb, Adrien ; Meunier, Guy ; Hallegatte, Stephane

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ABATEMENT;    ABATEMENT COSTS;    ABATEMENT POTENTIAL;    ABATEMENT STRATEGIES;    AMOUNT OF ABATEMENT;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6154
RP-ID  :  WPS6154

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper investigates the optimaltiming of greenhouse gas abatement efforts in amulti-sectoral model with economic inertia, each sectorhaving a limited abatement potential. It defines economicinertia as the conjunction of technical inertia -- a socialplanner chooses investment on persistent abating activities,as opposed to choosing abatement at each time periodindependently -- and increasing marginal investment costs inabating activities. It shows that in the presence ofeconomic inertia, optimal abatement efforts (in dollars perton) are bell-shaped and trigger a transition toward alow-carbon economy. The authors prove that optimal marginalabatement costs should differ across sectors: they depend onthe global carbon price, but also on sector-specific shadowcosts of the sectoral abatement potential. The paperdiscusses the impact of the convexity of abatementinvestment costs: more rigid sectors are represented withmore convex cost functions and should invest more in earlyabatement. The conclusion is that overlapping mitigationpolicies should not be discarded based on the argument thatthey set different marginal costs (`"different carbonprices"') in different sectors.