Policies and Measures in the USA
Policies and Measures to Reduce CO2 Emissions in the United States:
An Analysis of Options through 2010
Abstract
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported that in order to prevent global climate disruption and its attendant ecological, economic, geo-physical, demographic and political consequences, it is necessary to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases well below the levels that would result if greenhouse gases continued to accumulate along current trends. Protecting global climate will therefore require that annual emissions of greenhouse gases be reduced by at least 60 percent below present rates. As the principal greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, which is released in the energy production and use at the heart of industrial economies, this daunting objective will require two complementary, sustained initiatives. First, the industrialized nations must dramatically reduce their carbon emissions from current levels. Second, industrializing nations must economically develop along a path of low carbon-intensity. Arguably, the United States, whose current per capita carbon emissions are roughly five times the present global average, must radically decrease emissions as its contribution to climate protection.
This study finds that the U.S. can reduce its annual carbon emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2005 and to 22 percent below 1990 levels by 2010, at net savings to its economy relative to the present energy-intensive and fossil-based path. The U.S. can achieve this by implementing an ambitious set of targeted policies, beginning in 1998, which would overcome market and institutional barriers and stimulate more rapid introduction of advanced technologies and fuels that are cleaner and more efficient. These near-term carbon reductions, and the technologies and policies that underlie them, establish a trajectory and a basis for the much deeper long-term cuts that are needed for climate protection.
This study was commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as a companion to parallel studies of the European Union (Blok et al. 1996) and Japan (Morita et al. 1997), which together with the U.S. are responsible for roughly 40 percent of the world's annual carbon emissions. The study builds and expands upon another study entitled Energy Innovations: A Prosperous Path to a Clean Environment (EI 1997), which was recently released by five non-profit energy and environmental policy research organizations. This study strengthens, accelerates and adds to the policies identified and analyzed in Energy Innovations to build an augmented policy package that more aggressively captures near-term carbon emissions reductions.
This report is a revised version of Policies and Measures to Reduce CO2 Emissions in the United States: An Analysis of Options for 2005 and 2010 , which was released in October 1997. The underlying analysis has not been changed. The principal differences embodied herein are the following: i) cost-of-saved-carbon results have been provided for the policies explored; ii) the year in which constant dollars and present value dollars are reported has been changed from 1993 to 1997; iii) Table 1 has been modified to include energy savings at refineries owing to industrial sector policies; iv) Figure 8 has been revised to include additional policy-induced on-site cogeneration in the industrial sector, as well as baseline cogeneration sales to the grid; v) Figure 8b now refers to the Climate Protection scenario, as opposed to the electric supply-side policies alone; vi) Table 3 in the original report has been omitted; vii) small changes have been made to the text; viii) the title has been changed to reflect the intertemporal nature of the analysis; and ix) the results have been slightly refined in places.