Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy, volume 6

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy. James Bushnell and Aaron Smith illustrate a new way of modeling uncertainty for the purpose of understanding climate policy effects in the US electricity sector. Xinmin Du, Muye Ru, and Douglas Almond estimate the effect of a federal requirement for oil and gas firms to detect and repair methane leaks, showing that the removal of the regulation in 2020 prompted an increase in emissions. Ivan Rudik, Derek Lemoine, and Antonia Marcheva explore equity and efficiency tradeoffs in climate adaptation funding as part of the 2021 US Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. John Bistline, Kimberly Clausing, Neil Mehrotra, James Stock, and Catherine Wolfram outline a range of different US climate policy options for near-term implementation. Frances Moore considers the potential economic consequences of accounting for non-stationarity in the distribution of weather because of climate change. Finally, Ben Groom and Frank Venmans discuss different ways of quantifying the social value of temporary reductions in atmospheric carbon, with implications for carbon offset markets.