Assessment of Acceptable Swiss post-2012 Climate Policies

André Sceia,Marc Vielle,Juan-Carlos Altamirano-Cabrera,Nicolas Weidmann

doi:10.1007/bf03399370

Abstract

Summary In the framework of the revision of the Swiss CO2-Law and in the preparation of the international negotiations that place at the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Swiss Government has proposed a set of instruments and two levels of abatement to define the Swiss climate policy for the post-2012 period. By 2030, Switzerland would recuce its GHG emission by 30% or 45%, depending on whether or not the rest of the world world would commit to strong emissions reductions. The proposed policies are the result of consultation procedures take into account the views of major stakeholders and lobbies and allow for differienciated carbon prices in different sectors of the Swiss economy. Linking a Cumputable General Equilibrium (CGE) and two sectoral energy models, we evaluate the policies for the two scenarios. We find important disparities in the prices of carbon faced by the different economic sectors and higher welfare costs than those that would be triggered by a uniform carbon tax.

Highlights

Switzerland represents a small share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but is strongly engaged in meeting its abatement objectives and has proved to be at the forefront of international climate negotiations1
We use an aggregated version of GEMINI-E34, a dynamic-recursive Cumputable General Equilibrium (CGE) model with a highly detailed representation of indirect taxation, that represents the world economy in 6 regions and 18 sectors based on the year 2001
For Switzerland, we extend the number of sectors to 29 in order to more precisely present the transportation sector using the social accounting matrix (SAM) disaggregation performed in Infras (2006)

Summary

Introduction

Switzerland represents a small share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but is strongly engaged in meeting its abatement objectives and has proved to be at the forefront of international climate negotiations. With 7.6 million inhabitants, GHG emissions amounted 51.3 million tons of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2eq) in 2007, slightly down from the 1990 level (52.7 MtCO2eq). Since electricity is largely produced from hydro (56%) and nuclear (39%), transportation and housing are responsible for the major part of GHG emissions (see Figure 1). On July 9, a This work has been undertaken with the support of NSF-NCCR climate and Federal Office for the Environment grants. We are very grateful to Martin Peter, Carten Nathani and the Federal Office of Statistics for providing us with disaggregated input-output tables.

Methods

Results

Conclusion