The U.S. administration has recently unveiled new climate targets. This paper “Modeling the U.S. Climate Agenda: Macro-Climate Trade-offs and Considerations” by Philip Barrett, Katharina Bergant, Jean Chateau, and Rui Mano elaborates on the administration’s plans and uses two models developed at the IMF to illustrate key macro-climate trade-offs.
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Carbon credits are created in projects where actors implement activities resulting in lower or negative emissions. These credits can be sold by the actor who implemented the carbon reduction and can be traded and purchased by other actors, e.g. companies, to ‘compensate’ for their emissions. The motivations of the actors purchasing these offsets might be to comply with emission standards or regulations, to voluntarily improve their carbon footprint, or to support decarbonization projects.
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Rather than taking a backseat, state leadership must now continue alongside a more supportive federal government, allowing the US to achieve deeper emissions reductions through a new climate federalism framework that leverages comparative strengths at different levels of governance. Here are seven high-impact policies to watch in 2021, as well as federal programs and policies that can encourage and reinforce state-level climate action plans.
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Already, a number of concrete steps have been proposed to leverage sub- and non-state action in the next administration. For example, the Biden-Harris administration could call on U.S. states, cities, businesses, tribes, faith groups, universities, and others to set their own ambitious targets, and then harvest this new ambition as the U.S. develops and implements its climate strategy.
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