Sometimes you have to smack us over the head, but eventually we cover important research here at EnvEcon. From Richard Carson at UC San Diego:
John/Tim:
The only place that has not covered our forecasting China's CO2 paper is
www.env-econ.net and you guys are one we care the most about.We have been on over 100 internet news sites including AOL, MSNBC, Yahoo on over 90 blogs, TV stations, NPR's Talk of the Nation, lots of papers around the world including the International Herald Tribune and the South China Morning Post, Business Week, Forbes and even National Geographic and weather.com
Richard: We're flattered, but geez, what do you expect? It's NCAA tourney time. I guess now you can consider the list complete.
Read on...
From the abstract*:
Our results suggest that the anticipated path of China’s carbon dioxide emissions has dramatically increased over the last five years. The magnitude of the projected increase in Chinese emissions out to 2010 is several times larger than reductions embodied in the Kyoto Protocol.
That China' CO2 emissions are growing isn't too surprising. But the magnitude is surprising. And the authors aren't afraid to take on the methods used in the most frequently cited research on CO2 emissions:
The prediction of a dramatic recent increase in the predicted path of China’s CO2 emissions over the short to medium term horizon is shown to be robust to a wide range of alternative specifications. We show, however, that it is possible to strongly reject both the standard engineering specifications that appear in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the recent as well as the popular environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) specification.
*For those into the nitty gritty details, here's a link to the full paper. It's scheduled to be published in May in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.