Over the past decades, governments have gradually adopted more rigorous environmental policies to tackle challenges associated with pressing environmental issues, such as climate change. The ambition of these policies is, however, often tempered by their perceived negative effects on the economy.

Publisher description

EXPAND YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF HOW ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AFFECTS BUSINESS, THE ECONOMY, AND YOUR LIFE WITH THIS ESSENTIAL RESOURCE Environmental Policy: An Economic Perspective offers readers a comprehensive examination of the ever-broadening scope and impact of environmental policy, law, and regulation. Editors Thomas Walker, Northrop Sprung-Much, and Sherif Goubran walk readers through a variety of subjects while maintaining a global perspective on the expanding role of environmental law. This book takes a pragmatic and practical approach to its subject matter, showing readers the real impact across the world of different kinds of environmental policy. Among other topics, Environmental Policy: An Economic Perspective tackles: Climate change legislation Water conservation and pricing Biodiversity of the marine environment Wildlife ranching Emission trading schemes Green job strategies Sustainable investing Written for undergraduate and graduate students in any field affected by environmental legislation and policy, this book also belongs on the shelves of anyone who seeks to better understand the increasingly important role of environmental policy on their business and life.

An analysis of the economic theory of environmental policy and the factors influencing the quality of life. Recent research in environmental economics is incorporated as well as economic incentives for pollution control.

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy in the United States. Rebecca Davis, J. Scott Holladay, and Charles Sims analyze recent trends in and forecasts of coal-fired power plant retirements with and without new climate policy. Severin Borenstein and James Bushnell examine the efficiency of pricing for electricity, natural gas, and gasoline. James Archsmith, Erich Muehlegger, and David Rapson provide a prospective analysis of future pathways for electric vehicle adoption. Kenneth Gillingham considers the consequences of such pathways for the design of fuel vehicle economy standards. Frank Wolak investigates the long-term resource adequacy in wholesale electricity markets with significant intermittent renewables. Finally, Barbara Annicchiarico, Stefano Carattini, Carolyn Fischer, and Garth Heutel review the state of research on the interactions between business cycles and environmental policy.

The Economics of Sustainable Food details the true cost of food for people and the planet. It illustrates how to transform our broken system, alleviating its severe financial and human burden. The key is smart macroeconomic policy that moves us toward methods that protect the environment like regenerative land and sea farming, low-impact urban farming, and alternative protein farming, and toward healthy diets. The book's multidisciplinary team of authors lay out detailed fiscal and trade policies, as well as structural reforms, to achieve those goals. Chapters discuss strategies to make food production sustainable, nutritious, and fair, ranging from taxes and spending to education, labor market, health care, and pension reforms, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. The authors carefully consider the different needs of more and less advanced economies, balancing economic development and sustainability goals. Case studies showcase successful strategies from around the world, such as taxing foods with a high carbon footprint, financing ecosystems mapping and conservation to meet scientific targets for healthy biomes permanency, subsidizing sustainable land and sea farming, reforming health systems to move away from sick care to preventive, nutrition-based care, and providing schools with matching funds to purchase local organic produce.--Amazon.

This book focuses on describing policy instruments in different countries. Its purpose is not only descriptive but also, to some extent, advocatory. We believe that economic instruments can make an important contribution to an environmentally less disruptive path of development. The design of economic instruments is however a fine art and depends among other things on their political acceptability and this acceptability is of course influenced by experience. It is therefore important to provide information on the use of policy instruments in other countries. Policies are currently developing quite fast and thus a book such as this one can inevitably not capture more than a "snapshot" view at a single moment of time. We would hope that the book encourages more experimentation with economic instruments and that countries will make a fuller use of the whole arsenal of economic policy instruments. If the book does succeed in this sense then it will soon become dated as policies change -but that would be a price well worth paying! The book combines a dozen country monographs together with a few international surveys on particular topics (gasoline pricing, vehicle regulations, acid rain, deforestation and global warming). These papers are intended to illustrate the diversity of policy options available. The actual policies adopted depend on economic as well as ecological conditions. The country studies cover two "Western" countries and then concentrate on formerly planned and developing countries. They show that economic instruments are still generally thought of as new and innovative.