The annual Carbon Pricing Leadership Report complements the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition’s advocacy and networking activities by elevating thought leadership in the mitigation arena and sharing how partners across all sectors are putting a price on carbon and engaging in carbon markets to reduce their emissions. Jackson Ewing, director of energy and climate policy at the Nicholas Institute, contributed to the report with an opinion piece titled "Stakes Increase as Voluntary Carbon Markets and Climate Finance Converge." 

This report reflects extensive modeling, policy and economic analysis, and stakeholder engagement in regard to the North Carolina Clean Energy Plan. It does not make specific recommendations but evaluates different policies and offers options for decarbonizing the grid.

China launched seven emissions trading scheme (ETS) pilots in 2011, and a national ETS, at the end of 2017 in an attempt to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and drive its extensive energy transition in a cost-effective way. The Hubei province pilot ETS has operated since 2014, and an analysis of its effectiveness can provide lessons for the nascent national system.

As states advance their climate policies with ambitious clean energy targets, wholesale market operators are grappling with questions about if and how electricity markets should evolve as a response. Several ISO/RTOs are looking to change their market rules to include carbon pricing, but there is a diversity in approaches.

This article examines the intricacies of environmental credit generation from concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) farm systems. This article describes the stacking problem and explores possible solu­tions, such as temporal constraints on credit issuance and discounting credits to account for additionality problems.

Nicholas Institute Executive Director Tim Profeta testifies before the Subcommittee on Environment & Climate Change of the U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce to suggest the best means by which to achieve economy-wide solutions to climate change. The central point of his testimony is that Congress should strongly consider a model that has been successfully proven through our nation’s history: the federal/state partnership.

This policy brief proposes that there may be another way to solve the failure of federal solutions to fight climate change. Instead of attempting to settle all concerns about a program’s costs and impacts at the federal level, simply let Congress determine the level of ambition needed to achieve our climate goals. And then use the state governments, which are more in touch with the equitable tradeoffs of their populations and directly accountable to their communities, to execute plans to reach those goals. 

Public attention focuses on a policy once a governor makes a formal announcement and sets the debate in motion. However, much of the work happens before that moment, in conversations among state officials and their staff, and with key stakeholders. This memo is intended to support the work of “getting to yes” on a policy—in this case, a declining cap (and trade) program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions—once internal leadership has decided it is worth exploration.

The U.S. Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization, released in November 2016, calls for the United States to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. A significant portion of those reductions are to come from the forestry and agricultural sectors. Those reductions will be more difficult and more expensive to achieve if the current U.S. forest sink is not maintained and the greenhouse gas impacts of agriculture are not addressed. This working paper seeks to address those two tasks, first, by presenting a cost distribution of various climate-smart agricultural and forestry practices and an analysis of the geographic distribution of such activities in the United States, and second, by offering policy recommendations to achieve deep greenhouse gas reductions.

The expansion of carbon markets in China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea have laid the foundation for discussions on potential carbon market cooperation within Northeast Asia, and the role of the private sector is vital for achieving success in this space, according to a new Asia Society Policy Institute and KPMG Samjong report. The authors present how carbon market linkage within China, Japan, and Korea could take place in unison with industry preferences.