Economic Effects of Legislation to Reduce Greenhouse-Gas Emissions

摘要

Global climate change poses one of the nations most significant long-term policy challenges. Human activities are producing increasingly large quantities of greenhouse gases, especially CO2. A strong consensus has developed in the expert community that, if allowed to continue unabated, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will have extensive, highly uncertain, but potentially serious and costly impacts on regional climates throughout the world. Those impacts are expected to include widespread changes in the physical environment, changes in biological systems (including agriculture), and changes in the viability of some economic sectors. Moreover, the risk of abrupt and even catastrophic changes in climate cannot be ruled out. Those expected and possible harms may motivate policy actions to reduce the extent of climate change. However, the cost of doing so may be significant because it would entail substantial reductions in global emissions over the coming decades. U.S. emissions currently account for roughly 20 percent of global emissions. As a result, substantially reducing global emissions would probably entail large reductions in U.S. emissions as well as emissions in other countries. Achieving such reductions would probably involve transforming the U.S. economy from one that runs on CO2-emitting fossil fuels to one that increasingly relies on nuclear and renewable fuels, accomplishing substantial improvements in energy efficiency, or implementing the large-scale capture and storage of CO2 emissions.