"Eyes on a Climate Prize: Rewarding Energy Innovation to Achieve Climate Stabilization," explores the use of inducement prizes as a means to develop technology to stabilize
green house gas contributions to global climate change. The author, Jonathan H. Adler, presents the current state of the policy debate concerning greenhouse gases (GHG) and
global climate change. The premise of the paper is that the level of technological innovation necessary to make atmospheric stabilization affordable—and therefore a politically

The economics of innovation typically treats winning a patent as the equivalent of winning a prize, where the reward for getting a patent is the profit the winning innovator1 can extract from the exclusive right to produce a particular item or utilize a particular process. What little there is on this question primarily involves the theoretical benefits and practical problems with having

Meeting the climate policy challenge will require policymakers to expand their policy toolkit. Specifically, the federal government should shift a substantial portion of climate-related research and development funding from grants to prizes. Instead of doling out billions to researchers in the hope they will invent something that will help solve the global warming challenge, the government should offer substantial rewards to those who invent or develop technologies that solve particular climate-related problems.

Energy regulation plays an important role in China’s economic development. Focusing on the electricity industry, four shortcomings of the country’s current energy regulation become apparent: first, overemphasis on energy supply and neglect of other aspects of the industry’s impacts; second, an unclear system of regulation for the energy sector; third, over-regulation of the energy market; and fourth, insufficient environmental regulation.

A potential federal action under §404(c) of the Clean Water Act to prohibit or restrict the disposal of mine wastes from large-scale hardrock mines like the proposed Pebble Mine in waters of the Bristol Bay Watershed, which supports the world’s largest commercial sockeye salmon fishery, calls for a takings analysis.

A new economic framework based on institutional economics is needed for the climate disruption problem. A more effective framework would change the focus of economics from the near to the long term, substitute a goal of systemic risk avoidance for economic efficiency, and favor economic dynamic analysis, a specific form of institutional economic analysis, over cost-benefit analysis. Economic dynamic analysis requires evaluation of economic incentives that takes into account bounded rationality, countervailing incentives, and uncertainty (through scenario analysis).

Regulation is the most direct and predictable mechanism for controlling environmental behavior. Strong compliance and enforcement programs that punish violators and deter violations by others are, of course, essential to any successful regulatory system. It is increasingly clear, though, that regulation cannot by itself produce the behavioral changes needed to achieve sustainable environmental outcomes.

The credibility of a human health risk assessment depends, in the first instance, on what it actually says. The facts need to be accurate, the analysis needs to be rigorous, and the conclusions need to flow rationally from the underlying facts and analysis. The credibility of a risk assessment may also depend, however, on what it does not say.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), on April 13, 2012, promulgated proposed new source performance standards (NSPS) to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new electric-generating units (EGUs) greater than 25 megawatt electric (MWe) located in the continental United States.1 The standards are based on the emissions produced by a natural gas combined- cycle (NGCC) facility.

The management of high-value natural resources in post-conflict situations depends, among other things, on the context, including the causes and trajectory of the conflict; the characteristics of the natural resources in question and their role in conflict; the quality of domestic institutions; regional dynamics and international markets; and current and previous approaches to the management of natural resources and the associated revenues. Thus, no one set of policies or programs can ensure success.