Three essays on the economics of carbon sequestration,timber production and land use.
详细信息
文摘
My dissertation develops a wide range of quantitative tools to examine the carbon policies for wood biomass production,explore the potential policy instruments to create incentives for carbon sequestration and investigate the implications of increasing industrial plantations for timber markets. The first chapter examines the greenhouse gas GHG) effects of wood biofuel policies and the implications of potential carbon policies with biomass production. Previous literature suggests that an increase in wood biomass demand will cause more carbon emissions,and they suggest emissions from wood based biomass should be taxed. These studies,however,are static,and they ignore forest growth and sequestration. This paper develops a forward looking dynamic general equilibrium model with a dynamic forestry sector. By taking into account the dynamic land use adjustment in the forest sector,we show that the optimal strategy is to subsidize carbon growth in forests and to tax carbon emissions. Proposed strategies that would only tax carbon emissions from the forest sector including biomass energy production without compensating forest sequestration actually causes more net carbon emissions than if forest based bioenergy is simply treated as carbon neutral and ignored. This study makes two major contributions to the economics literature. It is the first study that develops a dynamic general equilibrium model with a dynamic forest sector. Second,the study illustrates a critical problem with several prominent studies that address biofuel policy. The economic potential of carbon sequestration in forests is widely acknowledged but there is no consensus on the policy instrument that should be adopted to promote it. The second chapter focuses on the comparison of efficiency of different forest carbon policies recommended by past studies. We employ an optimal control model of timber management to examine the effects of different policies numerically,taking into account market effects and intertemporal adjustments. We find that the optimal policies are the ones which pay by explicitly tracking carbon in and out of forests. A &apos；per hectare&apos； land subsidy could be 5 to more than 10 times more costly than a &apos；per ton&apos； carbon Tax &； Subsidy or carbon subsidy policy depending on the carbon prices. A carbon tax on forest emissions without compensating the sequestration leads to net carbon emissions and is thus the least efficient policy choice. The third chapter examines the implications of wood production in the emerging regions on timber output in the United States,and specifically in the Southern U.S. A key component of the work involves updating GTM with new information on yields from emerging region plantations and more detailed representation of the Southern US. The preliminary results show that technological change in timber plantations could have very important influences on timber markets,nationally and globally.