What has changed?

摘要

Under the heading 'silly stuff that gets published in academic journals' comes this: New Emissions-Curbing Strategy: Buy Coal in the Ground and Lock Up Supply.The paper was published in the April edition of the Journal of Political Economy and was written by Bard Harstad, an associate professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. It callsforthe developed countries to buy up coal, natural gas and oil deposits in the developing world and take them out of production so as to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.Harstad's argument goes like this: 37 countries committed to binding targets under the Kyoto Protocol. When (and if) these countries introduce regulations to limit CO2, world prices change, markets shift, industries relocate and non-participants may end up emitting more CO2 than they did before. The academic term for this is "leakage."