(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-04-06)
Qu, Jingwen
We study timing effects of carbon mitigation and solar radiation management (SRM) policies for correlated pollutants, CO₂ and SO₂. We show that national levels of carbon and sulfur emissions quotas and SRM implementation are positively correlated with each other. First-mover advantages exist when deciding both carbon quotas and SRM levels. Moreover, we use an example to illustrate that if international equity is considered, governments would be willing to choose SRM levels before carbon quotas since it yields higher payoffs and less acid rain and droughts damages. This timing was neglected by all previous theoretical economic models on geoengineering.