ESG post-midterm Flashcards
Explain the competitive equilibrium with a negative externality
SMC = PMC + Xternal Costs
Private Marginal Costs VS Societies Marginal Costs
MB: Marginal Benefits
The equilibrium quantity is significantly lower when we calculate in the negative externality & by default the price is much higher as well
How do we apply the marginalist principle to pollution
What are some examples of abatement?
Installation of scrubbers
waste Treatment
Carbon Capture and Storage
What does the PMB of abatement mean
The Private Marginal Benefit of Abatement is less than the Social Marginal Benefit which means that private firms are incentivized to generate less abatement
Deadweight loss under abatement
Occurs under a positive externality due to the fact that the social amount of abatement is higher than the privately produced abatement.
The social MB is higher than the private MB
How does carbon capture and sequestration work?
What are the solutions to environmental externalities?
- Internalize the externalities by unified ownership (mergers)
- Quality controls or standards
- Taxes on polluting activities
- Subsidies for abatement
- Assignment of property rights
- 1 Coasian theory of property rights
- 2 Torts/ legal remedies
- 3 Creation of a market: Trade permits allocate “pollution rights” that can be priced and traded
- Social responsibility & Utilitarian ethics
Explain internalization via mergers
When 2 firms exert negative or positive externalities on each other then the externality can be corrected by merger, possibly even increasing profits
EXAMPLE: Fishery and pulp mill
What is an externality associated with fish farming that could not be easily corrected from internalization.
Farmed salmons have escaped and passed bacteria and parasites to wild salmon reducing their numbers
Explain Cap and Trade
What does it incentivize?
Government can reduce DWL associated with pollution by setting a maximum overall amount and issuing pollution permits.
It incentivizes firm pollution reduction for those that it is easy to do and they can trade their permits
What are the different options for initial allocations of cap and trade permits?
Auctioning or grandfathering
Cap and trade makes sense when _____________?
Firms differ in their marginal benefits and costs of emission
Explain Taxing Bads
When taxing goods govmnt gets revenue, but at the cost of DWL, when taxing bads govmnt gets revenue while reducing DWL
How has the carbon tax in BC worked?
It has been creating a pogressive carbon tax $10/ton to $30/ton -> 6.67cents/litre to gas prices.
Has led to a carbon emission decrease of approximately 15%
How do we set a tax for externalities?
such that the tax = externality
PMC + t = PMC + x = SMC
What are some complaints around pollution taxes?
That they pass off the cost to consumers and that consumers may be unresponsive to the change as well as have a high cost to low income earners.
How does geography and jurisdiction impact externalities?
Whether there is global or local pollution i.e. air pollution(local), acid rain (cross-boarder), CFC and GHG (global)
Global externalities lead to lower set taxes
Need protocols
Rapa Nui people on Easter Island around 1500AD
Simple “Population” Model
- Entity reproduces without competition
- More entity there is more reproduction
- Crowding effect kicks-in
- Eventually stock of entities reaches its maximum size where growth is zero, this is “carrying capacity”
Crowding Effect
Newborn entities must compete with large existing entities stocks for survival
Carrying Capacity
When stock of entities reaches its maximum size where growth is zero
Explain the variables in the growth curve
- G is the dependent variable, growth (births - Deaths) of a stock S (independent variable)
- r is the intrinsic growth rate of the stock ( absent “competition”)
- K carrying capacity
- G/S is the growth rate of stock
- M is the point where the crowding effect is such that the change is the growth amount is zero
What is the formula for the growth curve?
G= rS (1-S/K)
When we look at the harvest curve, where could we harvest sustainably harvest 1 and 2. Where H2 is at the apex of the curve and H1 bisects it in the middle
H1, at 2 points where the stock level intersects with the curve, one will be lower than the other
H2 at one point where change in growth amount is zero, aka M where the crowding effect kicks in
When we look at the harvest Equilibria explain which is stable?
Harvesting H1 at SH is stable. If there is a shock that reduces stocks, the growth amount is above the harvesting amount and the equilibrium will self-restore.
When we look at the harvest Equilibria explain which is unstable?
Harvesting H1 at SL is unstable. If there is a shock that reduces stocks, the growth amount is below the harvest amount and the stock will be driven to extinction.
When we look at the harvest Equilibria explain which is semi-stable?
Harvesting H2 at M is semi-stable. If there is a shock that reduces stocks, the harvesting amount will exceed the growth amount and so in the next period the stock will fall again unless the harvest is dramatically reduced.
What factors should we consider in harvest choices?
- What is the intrinsic growth rate? (high for fish, medium for trees)
- How big/common are the shocks and how good/costly is the monitoring?
- Is it economic to use the resources? (High cost low demand)
- Is it economic to save the resource? (low harvest cost, current value high low growth rate)
- Cyclical management: We may want to over harvest some years and under harvest other years
Why did we deplete the Grand Banks to zero?
- Tragedy of the commons: Over-grazing by countries of a shared resource
- Property-Rights Assignment issues
- Open access problem: hard to control is preventing access and policing is difficult/impossible
- Information problems: Didn’t know the size of the resource
- Transfer-Seeking: Spanish were stealing, and Canadians lobbied for greater fishing quotas
What is the tragedy of the commons?
Lack of property rights leads to an over-use of a common resource
Open access problem
With resources that are common goods (rival and non-excludable) there is a over-harvesting
Stocks are hard to measure, harvests hard to control. Keep H____ G(bar) and S___ M
below stocks above
With renewables, sustaining the resource is possible, but requires _________
Careful management
What is a non-renewable resource?
A resource that doesn’t renew themselves in human time frames, thus it is impossible to exploit them in a way that sustains the stock for future generations.
What is Hartwick’s rule?
Sustainable standard of living: Requires investments in productive assets to make up for resource depletion. Invest all the surplus profits generated by resource extraction into various forms of capital. Such as Alberta’s heritage Savings Trust Fund
Population grows ________
Geometrically
Food production increases _________
Arithmetically
What are the equations from Malthus?
Pop: P,t = 2(P,t-1)
Food: Ft = F,t-1 + 2
What is the Malthusian Trap? How have we escaped it?
Malthusian trap is where population grows until it cannot feed itself anymore, war, pestilence & famine act as constraints.
Birthrates have lowered due to improved healthcare, nutrition & educated parents.
Technological improvements to food production
Better institutions to prevent war
Medical developments to reduce disease
How many pounds of minerals, metals and fuels to average person need?
3.7 mill or 1650 tons
What is the carrying capacity of humans on our planet?
4b-16b, & with resource depletion 1-4b. We are likely already exceeding the carrying capacity.
What are the solutions to over-capacity?
Prophets: William Vogt “Apocalyptic environmentalism”
Wizards: Norman Borlaug “Techno optimism”
What is the modern environmental movement?
Only reducing consumption and limiting population.
Affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem
Unless we change, the unavoidable result will be environmental destruction
“cut back, cut back”
The Green Revolution
Science & technology, properly applied will save us
Green movement of 1960s: High yielding crop varieties and agronomic techniques increased grain harvest averting tens of millions of deaths.
Only getting richer and more knowledgeable will resolve our environmental crises
“Innovate, innovate”
Radioactive waste generated by nuclear fission is potentially
deadly to human beings and nuclear waste lasts a long
time. Which concept is applies well to nuclear waste?
Nuclear wast disposal creates NotInMyBackYard problems. NIMBY
What does NIMBY mean?
Not in my back yard
Where are location of bads usually stored? And what problems come from it?
The NIMBY problem is that there is a relatively small number who live near to a toxic waste dump bear high costs.
Those who bear the costs should be compensated
The political struggle over where to place bads can yield outcomes that are inefficient, unfair or both
What are some examples of NIMBY problems
safe injection sites, garbage incinerators, prisons & wind turbines
When can policy solve problems?
When it’s possible to assign property-rights, levy taxes, impose standards/quotas, internalize externalities or provide public-good (removal of public-bad)
What are some issues that arise from environmental international problems?
There is no international law
Trade treaties are used in environmental policy bargaining, which often leads to transfer-seeking, particularly because monitoring is difficult.
Exploiting non-renewable resources ____ be done
sustainably.
Cannot
Some of the wealth from non- renewable resources can be ______ in other types of _____. This is an example of?
reinvested, capital
Hartwick’s Rule
The world’s growing population will likely be ______ by depleted natural resources.
restrained
There are two school’s of thought on how to address our
environmental crises: The \_\_\_\_\_\_' and the
________’.
wizards prophets
The ______ problem is a barrier to achieving efficient
outcomes and can also have fairness issues.
NIMBY
International problems require __________ from _____ governments. The story of _____ and the ________ demonstrates that it is possible to address global problems.
collective agreements from national governments.
CFC’s and Ozone layer
How helpful is geo-engineering?
It’s not helpful at this point in time
How much has our planet warmed already, on average since the beginning of industrialization?
1.0 Celsius
Compared to 1850 how much more carbon dioxide is in our atmosphere?
40%
What is considered “safe” levels of GHG concentrations in our atmosphere?
350ppm