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Title: International Climate Agreements under the Threat of Solar Geoengineering
The possibility of overshooting global emissions targets has triggered a de-bate about the role of solar geoengineering (SGE)—using technologies to reflect solar radiation away from Earth—in managing climate change. One major concern is thatSGE technologies are relatively cheap and could potentially be deployed by a single country (the “free driver”). We develop a model to analyze how opportunities to de-ploy SGE impact global abatement and the effectiveness of international environ-mental agreements (IEAs). We show that noncooperative abatement may increase or decrease under the threat of SGE, depending on how damaging the free driver’s level of deployment is to others. When free-driver externalities are significant, other countries have additional incentives to abate—called anti-driver incentives—to reduce the free driver’s deployment. We also show that compared to a world withoutSGE opportunities, stable IEAs can be large (small) if anti-driver incentives are relatively strong (weak).  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2033855
PAR ID:
10527223
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
The University of Chicago Press
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists
Volume:
11
Issue:
4
ISSN:
2333-5955
Page Range / eLocation ID:
853 to 886
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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