Economic and Environmental Impacts of Various Climate Policy Scenarios

The purpose of the paper is to compare various climate policies within a cost-benefit analysis framework in a world divided in five regional groups. Global cooperation is compared with non cooperative behavior and partial cooperation (coalition of countries cooperating while others do not) in terms of economic and environmental impacts. The next step is to deviate from an economic analysis of cooperative and non cooperative policies to study the impacts of various hypothetical climate policies as well as policies discussed from the Earth Summit to the Kyoto Protocol: uniform reduction, different stabilization policies and policies associated with the Kyoto Protocol. This more pragmatic issue, which is less aimed at efficiency, demonstrates that an "ideal"scenario does not exist, because economic and environmental objectives do not necessarily coincide. It also shows that the Kyoto Protocol was probably more directed towards an environmental rather than an economic goal and examines an alternative option for retaining the participation of the United Sates