我国燃油税改革效应模拟分析

经历了十几年的讨论,燃油税改革方案终于在2009年出台并实施,改革后燃油税究竟会对我国宏观经济及各部门产生怎样的影响,倍受关注.基于此背景,采用环境CGE模型对改革前后的两种不同燃油税税率进行了量化分析,总体研究得出：从长期发展来看,燃油税改革有利于我国经济结构调整,减少能源消耗和降低碳排放;短期内会增加企业生产成本,抑制宏观经济增长,其中交通运输业和石油加工业受到的冲击最大,应引起有关部门重视.     

How robust is public support for unilateral climate policy?

Most governments emphasize the need for reciprocal (“give and take”) international commitments in global climate policy. Nonetheless, existing public opinion polls indicate strong support by individual citizens for unilateral climate policies as well. This raises the question of whether governments could, without risking electoral punishment, afford to pursue more ambitious unilateral climate policies, or whether surveys may have overestimated support for unilateralism due to measurement problems. Based on conjoint and framing experiments embedded in representative surveys in the world's two largest democracies, India and the United States, we engage in a critical re-assessment of earlier survey results. We find robust public support for unilateral climate policy in both countries. Such support declines with increasing costs and increases with growing co-benefits and problem solving effectiveness. We also find, however, that policy conditionality and possible institutional design mechanisms against free-riding by other states (which make the policy “less unilateral” by providing for reciprocation) play no significant role when citizens form their preferences with respect to climate policy. Neither is public support affected by whether policies focus on adaptation (which limits benefits to the investing country) or mitigation (which benefits all countries globally). Overall, these findings suggest that, in view of very slow progress in global climate policy, governments of rich and poor countries could politically afford to push ahead with more ambitious unilateral climate policies.     

Environmental Damage,Abandoned Treaties,and Fossil-Fuel Dependence: The Coming Costs of Oil-and-Gas Exploration in the “1002 Area” of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Contrary to claims from American politicians, lobbyists, and oil and gas executives, allowing energy development in the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) will harm the environment, compromise international law, erode the social significance of wilderness protection, and ultimately fail to␣increase the energy security of the United States. After exploring a brief history of the ANWR controversy, this piece argues that the operation of oil and gas refineries in ANWR will release discharged solids, drilling waste, and dirty diesel fuel into the ecosystem’s food-chain, as they have from oil operations in Prudhoe Bay. Less obvious but equally important, oil and gas exploration in ANWR will violate a number of international treaties on biodiversity protection. In the end, development in ANWR will threaten the concept of wilderness protection, and will do little to end US dependence on foreign sources of energy. About the Author: Benjamin K. Sovacool is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He works as a research analyst for the Consortium on Energy Restructuring and is a Senior Research Fellow for the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research. He also just completed a Graduate Fellowship in Energy Policy at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Readers should send their comments on this paper to: BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

Overcoming Contradictions Between Growth and Sustainability:Institutional Innovation in the BRICS

The recent accelerated growth rates or efforts to emulate countries that have achieved a rapid pace of economic growth are widely acclaimed as means to uplift millions from poverty. In so doing, however, this rapid economic growth is most likely to coincide with unsustainable levels of consumption, place excessive pressure on life support systems and terrestrial sinks and foreshorten options for the future. Rather than pursuing the "Environmental Kuznets Curve" (EKC) hypothesis that higher income will bring with it the means to reduce the impacts of greater consumption, ecological economists assert that buying our way out of future scarcity with fast growth is indeed contradictory with sustainability. To better understand these contradictions and explore potential institutional innovations that may enable developing nations to better confront them (in effect, "tunneling under" the EKC), this article refers to recent experience in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Beginning with a brief comparative summary of major development and environmental indicators, pressures on resources and society in each of the BRICS are discussed, followed by identification of institutional and policy frameworks each country has evolved to confront the challenges of growth and sustainability. The article closes with general conclusions for further research and information sharing among developing nations.     

我国强制性清洁生产审核法律政策形成过程的研究与分析

在资源短缺和环境容量不足的双重约束下。清洁生产成为我国工业可持续发展的必然选择，而清洁生产制度的制定和完善一是促进我国清洁生产向纵深发展的关键。本文回顾了我国清洁生产领域相关政策法规的制定和实施情况，对存在的问题进行了总结分析。并对2005年12月13日国家环保总局出台的《重点企业清洁生产审核程序的规定》做了重点说明,提出了目前面临的主要任务。     

Modelling individual preferences for environmental policy drivers: Empirical evidence of Italian lifestyle changes using a latent class approach

Degraded air quality severely affects the health of citizens worldwide. The design of effective policies requires exploring public preferences for environmental and air quality policy instruments. Within the EC-FP7 SEFIRA project, using a choice experiment that stresses the trade-offs between attributes, this study investigates public preferences for environmental policy drivers in Italy. The main objective is to investigate the role played by selected policy drivers in determining policy preferences, complemented by elasticity and willingness to pay estimations. Preference heterogeneity and the role of socio-economic and attitudinal variables are explored with a latent class model over 2400 respondents sampled across Italy. The results allow identifying the different role played by the policy drivers across the classes. It emerged that most of the respondents (43%) are particularly sensitive to the cost components (cost sensitive respondents). The remaining respondents instead show an important sensitivity towards personal engagement in term of changes in the mobility and eating habits (lifestyle-change sensitive respondents). However, while 29% of them perceive these habits’ changes as negatively impacting on the personal utility, the other 28% of respondents translate the potential changes in the habitual behaviour of driving and eating as environmental and health benefits. Based on the modelling results, potential policies are simulated reporting respondents’ reaction to selected scenarios. It shows the crucial role played by reduction of premature deaths due to atmospheric pollution and measure cost.     

中国城镇化态势分析和可持续城镇化政策建议

在阐述今后15年中国城镇化面临的就业和收入差距、资源和环境、区域发展、政府管治等四大挑战之后，分析了到2020年中国城镇化水平年均增长0．6、0.8、1．0和1．2个百分点的4种态势。如按1978—2002年城镇年均提供636万人就业考虑，到2020年中国城镇化水平年均增长不宜超过0．7个百分点；如果考虑到2005年上半年城镇安排595万人就业，则城镇化水平年均增长1．2个百分点也是可行的。但是，对于所有4种态势，土地短缺都是一个棘手的问题。最后就可持续城镇化提出的政策建议包括：①引导农村富余劳动力向城镇有序转移；②贯彻落实大中小城市和小城镇协调发展的方针；③高效利用和节约资源，保护生态环境；④统筹城乡规划，加强对经济区发展的引导；⑤贯彻落实工业反哺农业，城市支持农村的方针；⑥建立多元化的城镇基础设施投资体制，大力吸引民间和国际资本；⑦全面推进城镇管理体制创新，制定公众参与政策；⑧坚持按城镇化的客观规律办事，控制地方政府的城镇化热情。     

China''''s CDM Policies and Their Development Implications:Major Concerns for CDM Implementation

Most CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) opportunities exist in some large industrializing developing countries. For instance, China is estimated to take 48% of the world potential for CDM project activities. In reality, however, the share by China over the CDM projects registered and CDM projects in the pipeline is less than 10% as of Auguest 2005. This paper will examine the reasons behind, as reflected in China's CDM policies. Further investigation will be made into the use of these policies to boost the country's sustainable development, the sustainable development implications and effects of these policies. In addition, it is noted that incompatibility of some other Chinese laws and policies can be responsible for the low level and slow pace of CDM implementation in China and some suggestions are offered for promoting CDM project activities in China. There also exist barriers at the international level that impedes implementation of CDM project activities. A conclusion is drawn that CDM policies in a developing country like China aim mainly at promotion of sustainable development and to a lesser extent the generation of CERs.     

Water Resource Management in Botswana: Balancing Sustainability and Economic Development*

Botswana is a rapidly developing country in southern Africa. Over the last three decades, diamond mining and tourism have provided double-digit rates of economic growth. Yet most of Botswana’s land is in the Kalahari desert where the climate is subject to sustained periods of severe drought. In this environment, water resources are the most crucial of all environmental resources. Water use directly affects economic development because water utilization impacts all the major national economic sectors. A sustainable water use resource management plan must stretch several decades into the future to assure the availability of adequate supplies of water to future generations while not compromising the ability of the current generation to reasonable rates of economic development. Yet thinking about sustainability is present in Botswana water policy mostly only in rhetoric. A series of cultural traditions and political constraints, coupled with bureaucratic managerial weaknesses, serve to maintain a system of water allocation that is unsustainable in the long run and inefficient in the short-term. Unless sustainable water use patterns are adopted, the results for the short-term, as well as the long-term, will be devastating. Drawing on data obtained through a series of interviews with government officials, leaders of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and water resource researchers, this paper explores water policy in Botswana within the larger context of sustainable natural resource management practice and the pressures of economic development. This research was partially funded under U.S. Department of State, College and University Affiliations Grant # ASCS-1095.