Internalization Of Environmental Costs Research Articles

Internalisation of environmental costs of decentralised nitrogen fertilisers production

PurposeAmmonia (NH3) production is an energy-intensive process that is concentrated in a few countries at large-scale plants, mainly using the Haber–Bosch (HB) process. Local plants next to farmers can reduce environmental impacts, as well as reduce storage, shortage risks, and price volatility of fertilisers. Since local NH3 production is not cost-effective, we analyse how internalisation of environmental impacts into economic analyses could help to promote novel technologies for NH3 synthesis when supplied with renewable energy.MethodsMini-HB plants working at high pressure and temperature, as well as novel alternatives based on plasma reactors working at ambient conditions and using electricity from renewable sources, have been recently proposed for decentralised NH3 production. To evaluate the environmental performances of these alternative and traditional NH3 pathways, a life cycle assessment was performed to quantify the reduced emissions in each production process and the impacts of by-product utilisation, such as steam, oxygen, or carbon black. Different scales of storage and transportation, fuelled by traditional energy sources, were modelled to quantify the impacts of the simplified NH3 supply chains. A review of monetary valuation coefficients was performed to internalise the life cycle environmental impacts into the techno-economic analyses of NH3 production in Australia.Results and discussionMost of the estimated environmental costs were due to the carbon emissions of conventional plants and thermal plasma plants because of the use of fossil-based electricity. However, the high external costs associated with the photochemical oxidant formation and particulate matter affected the thermal plasma and non-thermal plasma (NTP) plants, costing in total 9,500 and 4,200 $/t NH3, respectively, due to the impacts of solar panels manufacturing. In contrast, electrolyser-HB plants obtained rates of 114 $/t NH3 because of the high energy efficiency and oxygen sales. In the future scenario for NTP-based plants, this alternative could also be competitive with rates of 222 $/t NH3. Additionally, the estimated total external costs for the conventional NH3 industry in Australia amounted to about US$5 billion per year.ConclusionsElectrolyser-HB plants could be cost-effective in the short term due to the energy efficiency of HB processes. However, the HB process has reached its efficiency limits, while the NTP process still has room for improvement, as well as its production costs are lower at smaller scales. In addition, if monetised environmental costs are analysed for a whole industry, public administrations could be prompted to invest the expected savings in the promotion of these novel technologies.

Decarbonization without borders: Evidence from China

Addressing global climate change requires countries to achieve economic decarbonization. However, there is currently no appropriate indicator to measure a country's economic decarbonization. In this study, we define a “decarbonization value-added (DEVA)” indicator of environmental cost internalization, construct a DEVA accounting framework that takes into account trade and investment activities, and provide a Chinese story of “decarbonization without borders”. The results show that pure domestic production activities involving production linkages between pure domestic-owned enterprises (DOEs) are the main source of DEVA in China, and therefore production linkages between DOEs should be strengthened. Although trade-related DEVA is higher than that of related to foreign direct investment (FDI) DEVA, the impact of FDI-related production activities on China's economic decarbonization is increasing. This impact is mainly reflected in high-tech manufacturing and trade and transportation industries. Further, we divided four FDI-related production modes. It is found that the upstream production mode of DOEs (i.e. “DOEs-DOEs” type, “DOEs-foreign-invested enterprises” type) leads to the main position of DEVA in China's FDI-related DEVA, and the overall trend is increasing. These findings help us better understand the impact of trade and investment activities on a country's economic and environmental sustainability, and thus provide an important reference for a country to formulate sustainable development policies centered on economic decarbonization.

Time to pay the piper: Fossil fuel companies’ reparations for climate damages

Time to pay the piper: Fossil fuel companies’ reparations for climate damages

The environment as a thermoeconomic diagram device for the systematic and automatic waste and environmental cost internalization in thermal systems

Energy conversion processes cause environmental concerns. Therefore, its complete analysis requires a methodology able to reveal the technical, economic and environmental impacts associated. Thermoeconomics originally combines the second law with economics, but environmental issues must be incorporated. Exergy is the most appropriate thermodynamic magnitude to associate with cost and the most adequate match with environmental impact. The waste cost allocation must be addressed appropriately to guarantee a rational inclusion of environmental costs. Despite there are several methods to solve this issue, still lacks a general methodology. To address this gap, this study presents the environment as a diagram device in a thermoeconomic approach for automatic and systematic waste and environmental cost internalization in thermal systems. This approach is applied and compared with different thermoeconomic models and diagrams for CO2 allocation in a complex cogeneration system. The novelty of this study is the use of the environment as a diagram device for waste and environmental charges assessment in a systematic and generalized way. It becomes clear when the plant studied has more than one burning source. It is the first study allocating CO2 emissions through the environment device in this kind of plant and using a comprehensive diagram. Results show that the use of the environment device for emission allocation combined with an exergy disaggregation method in a comprehensive diagram deals with waste heat and emission allocation systematically and automatically. It also reveals the pivotal role of this device concerning any environmental cost internalization, such as carbon pricing and abatement cost.

Environmental thermoeconomic performance analysis of gas turbine combined cycle under off‐design conditions

AbstractAlthough the gas turbine combined cycle (GTCC) system has better environmental performance, it still emits pollution gases such as CO2 and NOx. It is reasonable and necessary to add the environmental cost to the power production cost of the GTCC system. Based on the structure theory of thermoeconomics, through the reasonable pricing of pollutants (considering the environmental costs of CO2 and NOx emission), the system environmental thermoeconomic cost (ETC) model is developed in this study, which achieves absolute internalization of environmental costs. Taking GTCC with different gas turbine (GT) operation strategies as the research object, the influences of different operation strategies and environmental conditions on the GTCC system ETC are studied. The results of this study show that it is beneficial to maintain higher turbine inlet temperatures (T3) and turbine outlet temperatures (T4), thus ensuring better GTCC environmental thermoeconomic performance, and GTCC with the operation strategy (using inlet guide vane (IGV) control to maintain T3 at the design value and then to keep T4 at its maximum value (IGVT3‐650‐F) has the lowest ETC, which are 0.09429 $/kW·h at 75% gas turbine load rate (GTLR) and 0.10079 $/kW·h at 50% GTLR, respectively; reducing the emission of pollutants can reduce the unit ETC; for the combustion chamber, as the pollutant generation component of GTCC unit, it is most affected by the environmental damage cost; reducing the inlet air temperature can improve the system environmental thermoeconomic performance.

Economic and environmental feasibility of Northern Sea Route for container service: impact by ice besetting events

ABSTRACT Northern Sea Route (NSR) has attracted much attention from the academia. However, the relevant issues, namely, the seasonal variation of sea ice coverage, the possibility and delay of ice besetting events (IBEs), formulation of ice-breaker escort fee and rescue fee, and the internalization of environmental costs, are considered in past models, but not in a systematic manner. To break through the limitations of previous studies, this paper investigates the economic and environmental feasibility of the NSR for container service, and clarifies the said issues using the latest survey data on a business case. Specifically, a novel evaluation model was developed to estimate the required freight rate (RFR) comprehensively, from the perspective of economic and environmental costs. Based on the modeling results, the optimal scheme was designed for all-season commercial liner transportation via the NSR. Besides, the RFR-based logit competitiveness model was adopted to evaluate how the NSR as an alternative to the Suez Canal Route (SCR) is affected by multiple factors: the delay induced by the IBEs, carbon tax rate, loading factor of eastbound containerships, and fuel price. The research results provide reference for decision-makers to formulate operations plans for ice class, navigation speed, and ship type.

Impact of Environmental Costs on Export Trade

With the rapid growth of trade, the problem of environmental protection has become increasingly prominent. In the export trade, environmental costs are highly valued and become one of the enterprises important considerations for production and export in China. This paper analyzes the impact of environmental cost internalization and environmental regulation on export trade based on the related literature on environmental cost and export trade; using China’s one-time energy consumption data from 1997 to 2017 and 2001-2015 China’s major industrial pollution discharge data. It simply calculated the environmental costs based on energy consumption. The research results show that the impact of environmental costs on export trade is mainly reflected in the impact on trade advantages and export product structure. Whether it is internalization of environmental costs or reasonable environmental regulation, it has a positive effect on the protection of pollutants from export enterprises and the protection of environmental resources within a certain scope, but excessive environmental costs or environmental regulations will increase the production cost of export products, which is ultimately not conducive to the growth of export trade. The government needs to further strengthen the coordinated development of environment and export trade to build an environment-friendly trade power.

The Implementation of Polluter-Pays Principles on Marine Pollution Caused by Vessels in Indonesia (The Study of Oil Spill Cases)

Nowadays, there are some marine pollution cases caused by oil spill from vessels. These cases give a significant impact on marine environment and threatening human’s life. Therefore, law enforcement is needed.One of the principles that can be used in solving this problem is Polluter-Pays principles. This principle found in the 16th principle of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development on 2002. The requirement of the principle is cost of pollution should be borne by the person responsible for causing the pollution. National authorities should endeavor to promote the internalization of environmental costs and the use of economic instruments. This article aims to find out the implementation of polluter pays principles in Indonesia, especially in study of oil spill. Polluter pays principle can be used as one of solution in helping country overcome the loses oil spill cases within Indonesian waters. One of the challenges is Indonesia need a specific instrument used as a mechanism for calculating the loss or damage that should be paid by the polluters.

Drilling Like There’s No Tomorrow: Bankruptcy, Insurance, and Environmental Risk

This paper measures the effects of bankruptcy protection on industry structure and environmental outcomes in oil and gas extraction. Using administrative data from Texas, I exploit variation in an insurance requirement that reduced firms’ ability to avoid liability through bankruptcy. Among small firms, the policy substantially improved environmental outcomes and reduced production. Most production was reallocated to larger firms with better environmental records, but high-cost production where social cost may have exceeded social benefit decreased. These results suggest that incomplete internalization of environmental costs due to bankruptcy is an important determinant of industry structure and safety effort in hazardous industries. (JEL G22, G33, L25, L71, Q35, Q52)

Coal Power Environmental Stress Testing in China

The development of China’s coal power industry is accompanied by various environmental risks. In this paper, typical coal power enterprises are taken as examples to establish a tool for environmental cost internalization and environmental risk analysis under the risk constraints of energy efficiency standards, environmental protection tax, national carbon market, water resources tax, overcapacity and renewable energy substitution. The study considered the impact on the value of coal power companies under different stress scenarios and constructed a stress testing framework for environmental risks that affect financial costs. The results show that the impacts of overcapacity and carbon market on enterprise value for individual risks are the main risk drivers that most regions face in different scenarios. In the comprehensive risk stress test, the enterprise value of the 1000 MW ultra-supercritical units in each region was found to have a small difference from the corporate value of the reasonable return in the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios, while the 300 MW and 600 MW sub critical units were more likely to deviate from the reasonable return due to low energy efficiency and high operating costs. With continuous increase in the severity of environmental risks, the environmental stress test helps coal power companies and financial institutions understand the impact of environmental risks on the financial status of the company and thus influence investment decisions.

Kebijakan Pengelolaan Lingkungan Hidup Di Era Otonomi Daerah

Local governments must try to develop the potential of existing natural resources, to support the costs of sustainable development, and formally there are 5 (five) main principles of sustainable development, namely; the principle of intergenerational justice, the principle of justice in one generation, the principle of early prevention, principles of biodiversity protection and the principle of internalizing environmental costs. Related to the principle of internalizing environmental costs, the local government wants to impose on employers to seek internal funding from any expenditure that has an impact on the environment. Therefore the application of the principle of internalization of environmental costs can be interpreted as an effort to take into account the costs that must be borne by economic activity players due to the emergence of environmental losses. The principle of internalization of environmental costs underlies the content of sustainable development, and in essence aims to arouse legal awareness of economic actors to be more critical in calculating the impacts arising from their economic activities, and in the legal perspective, the principle of polluter pay must be normalized through clear arrangements, because this is a mandate of Article 42 jo. Article 43 of Law Number 32 of 2009 concerning Protection and Management of the Environment.

PENERAPAN PRINSIP BERKELANJUTAN SEBAGAI UPAYA PENCEGAHAN KERUSAKAN LINGKUNGAN HIDUP DIBIDANG PERTAMBANGAN DITINJAU DARI U-U NOMOR 4 TAHUN 2009

This literature study aims to determine the application of the principle of sustainable development as an effort to prevent environmental damage in the field of mining in terms of Law No. 4 of 2009. Data collection methods used in this literature study, as the material for analysising, using the following methods: (1 ) Research specifications. The type of legal research conducted in answering the problems is normative legal research with the consideration that the starting point of analysis research on the application of sustainable development principles to the laws and regulations of the field of mineral and coal mining. Normative legal research is a literature assessment, so the research used secondary data. (2) Research Data. Materials in this research are taken from secondary data consisting of: (a) Primary legal materials, namely binding legal materials and consist of: (i) the Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia Year 1945; (ii) Law No. 4 of 2009 on Mineral and Coal Additions and (iii) Law No. 32 of 2009 on Environmental Protection and Management. (b) Secondary legal substances, ie legal materials that provide explanations of primary legal materials, such as the Draft Law, the opinions of legal experts. (c) Tertiary legal substances, which provide guidance as well as explanations of the primary and secondary legal materials which include such as the Law Dictionary, Indonesian Dictionary, and English Dictionary. (3) Data collection techniques. Collecting data from the writing of this research is done through literature research, a series of efforts to obtain data and facts by way of reading, reviewing, clarifying, identifying and understanding about legal materials in the form of laws and regulations as well as books, literature books, articles, journals, and other sources of relevance to the research problem. The research results show that the company's responsibility in the management of natural resources and the environment is linked to the principle of sustainable development differentiated between social responsibility and absolute responsibility. Social responsibility includes corporate social responsibility programs (CSR). While the absolute responsibility emphasizes that the company should manage the natural resources properly and can be absolutely required accountability in case of damage to the environment. In such a management, coordination and partnership with related parties should be carried out in order to achieve integration and synchronization between economic, social, and environmental. Corporate social and environmental responsibilities should apply some principles of sustainable development, namely: Principles of intergenerational justice, principles of intragenerational justice, principles of early prevention, principles of biodiversity protection, Principles of internalization of environmental costs. Principle, sustainable development as an effort to prevent environmental damage in the field of mining in view of Law No. 4 of 2009 on Mineral and Coal Mining has been implied in several articles in this law. Sustainability in mining does not mean that the activity can be done continuously. In Article 2 and 3 of the Constitution Act of Minerba, it states that there are alignments to the national interest and the principles of sustainability and environmental insight (eco-vision).

Is Environmental Externality Management a Correction of Adam Smith’s Model to Make it Environmentally Friendly and Shift it Towards Green Markets or is it a Distortion on Top of Another Distortion?

When Adam Smith gave us the theory of the perfect market in 1776 he gave us a model with two embedded distortions, one social and one environmental, because he assumed that economic activity works under social and environmental externality neutrality or it had minimal social and environmental impacts making them external factors to the economic model. In 1987 the Bruntland Commission said in “Our Common Future” that evidence existed indicating that social and environmental impacts are relevant and needed to be incorporated or included in our development models. In essence, the Bruntland Commission called for the fixing of Adam Smith’s tradit ional market model. From 1987 to 2012 a process of testing different sustainable development models took place and in 2012 Rio +20 it was decided that development now was going green market, green growth and green economy through a win-win partnership environment and the economy to make the economy an environmentally friendly entity. To correct the environmental distortion embedded in Adam Smith’s model the only thing that needed to be done was to internalize the cost of being environmentally friendly in the pricing mechanism of traditional markets to shift them to green markets, green producers and green consumers, but instead they went the way of environmental externality management (e.g. carbon pricing) as they took the environmental distortion embedded in Adam Smith’s model as an environmental externality led market failure. Hence, instead of correcting Adam Smith’s model to eliminate the environmental distortion by reflecting environmental costs in the pricing mechanism and making that way environmental issues endogenous issues as they should have been from the beginning had Adam Smith proposed green markets instead of the traditional market they are treating an embedding distortion in Adam Smith’s model that before was irrelevant, but now it is relevant, as an environmental externality led market failure. And this raises the question: Is environmental externality management a correction of Adam Smith’s model to make it environmentally friendly and shift it to green markets or is it a distortion on top of another distortion? Among the goals of this paper are: a) to show analytically and graphically that the proper correction of Adam Smith’s model to eliminate the embedded environmental distortion in it and shift it to green markets is environmental cost internalization; and b) to point out analytically and graphically that environmental externality management is a distortion on top of an embedded environmental distortion in Adam Smith’s model; and therefore it is unconnected to perfect green market thinking.

Research on Application of Kendall W Coefficient in the Evaluation of Crop Environmental Cost Internalization

This study presents a method of evaluating the crop environmental cost of enterprise based on Kendall W coefficient. The Kendall W coefficient is used to analyze and evaluate the internal evaluation index of environmental cost. We selected some key enterprises of cleaner production auditing of Baoding city, Hebei province in 2014 as the research object and randomly selected nine enterprise cleaner production evaluation data, on the basis of using cleaner production evaluation method based on Kendall W coefficient on the state of enterprise cleaner production assessment analysis and exploration. The calculation results show that the introduction of Kendall W coefficient can improve the accuracy and scientific nature of enterprise’s level evaluation of comprehensive analysis. It is an effective method for the evaluation of environmental cost internalization and it can provide scientific basis for the government to provide financial subsidies to enterprises with better crop environmental cost.

Evaluating the Environmental Cost Internalization Based on the Fuzzy Neural Network

Internalization of environment cost assessment measures the level of an enterprise’s environmental cost internalization. It’s also the basis of carrying out recycling economic in an enterprise. First of all, we established an environmental cost analysis model, in line with which we build the internalization of environment cost index system. Then adopting comprehensive evaluation method basing on fuzzy neural network can help us assess the effect brought by the internalization of environment cost. Finally, we conducted an experiment which comparing fuzzy neural network with the fuzzy evaluation of environment cost objectively. So we can think it’s an effective method.

Implementation of the waste discharge charge system

The waste discharge charge system (WDCS) is being developed by the Department of Water Affairs to promote waste reduction and water conservation. It forms part of the Pricing Strategy, which is being established under the National Water Act (Act 36 of 1998). The WDCS is based on the polluter-pays principle and aims to:promote the sustainable development and efficient use of water resourcespromote the internalisation of environmental costs by impactorscreate financial incentives for dischargers to reduce waste and use water resources in a more optimal way. The WDCS is premised on resource quality objectives (RQOs) as the measure of acceptable risk, and seeks to achieve RQOs at lowest total cost to the catchment. Where RQOs are exceeded or are threatened, impact on the resource is unacceptable and the WDCS may be deployed to achieve RQOs. The system will be applied at a catchment scale where the catchment is defined as those areas that have a significant impact on water quality, or are impacted by the specific water quality problem such as salinity, nutrients, heavy metals and organics. This paper aims to provide a summary of the WDCS Strategy.

Nautical tourism, carrying capac ity and environmental externality in a protected Lagoon of Northern Adriatic Sea

Tourism and environmental preservation are often conflicting activities, mainly in coastal lagoons, where seaside mass-tourism comes into contact with a very sensitive ecological system. In this paper we deal with a classical problem of both environmental and tourism economics, the internalization of environmental costs of tourism, focusing on the nautical fruition of the Lagoon of Marano and Grado (North-Eastern Italy, Friuli Venezia Giulia Region). Using different instruments, both theoretical (Carrying Capacity framework, Polluter-Payer principle, Coase compensation) and empirical (Log-log regression, Forecasting model, CBA with defensive expenditures and actual market values), we ascertained the result that - given the current nautical berths endowment - a standard Coase equilibrium (unit external cost equal to unit private benefit) does not hold, and a higher number of vessels transiting in the Lagoon is more effective than a tempered fruition for nature conservation. Another interesting result is that the best available solution to internalize environmental externality is a mixed one, combining a command and control rule (a speed-limit prescription) with a Coasian compensation scheme. All the technical theoretical and empirical derivations are reported in Appendix A (Pressure Parameter Calculation), Appendix B (Benefit and Cost Calculation), and Appendix C (Data set and Econometric Tests).

Generators Bidding Equilibrium Optimization Models in Economic Dispatch with CO<sub>2</sub> Emission Constraints-Model Construction

Power exchange needs to design a mechanism, which can achieve the internalization of environmental costs of power generation enterprises, thus maximizing the social environmental benefits. Two-stage optimization models of energy-saving and emission-reducing for coal-fired power plant are established. In the first stage model, maximums of the social environmental benefits and energy-saving effect are taken as the objective functions with consideration of the unit output constraints, load constraints and emissions constraints, etc. In the second stage model, maximums of power generation enterprises profits are taken as the objective functions with the constraints of KKT conditions of the first stage model. The proposed marginal incentive pricing mechanism not only controlls CO2 emissions from the total amount, but also improves emissions treatment initiative of coal-fired power generation enterprises. A numerical example shows that the proposed model and algorithm can achieve the effect of saving energy, reducing emission and encouraging competition during the process of generation.

Nautical Tourism, Carrying Capacity and Environmental Externality in the Lagoon of Marano and Grado

Tourism and environmental preservation are often conflicting activities, mainly in areas such as coastal lagoons, where seaside mass-tourism comes into contact with a very sensitive ecological system. In this paper we deal with a classical problem of both environmental and tourism economics, the internalization of environmental costs of tourism, focusing on the nautical fruition of the Lagoon of Marano and Grado (North-Eastern Italy, Friuli Venezia Giulia Region). Using different instruments, both theoretical (Carrying Capacity framework, Polluter-Payer principle, Coase compensation) and empirical (Cluster analysis, Log-log regression, Forecasting model, cost and benefit calculation through actual market values), we get the result that a standard Coasian equilibrium (unit external cost equal to unit private benefit) doesn’t hold, and a higher coverage of the local berths endowment (i.e. a higher vessels transit in the Lagoon) is more effective for nature conservation than a tempered fruition. Another interesting result is that the best available solution to internalize environmental externality is a mixed one, comprehensive of a command and control rule (a speed-limit prescription), and a compensation scheme.

The aquarium trade as a potential source of fish introductions in southwestern Europe

The aquarium trade has been identified as an important vector of aquatic invasive species but this question has mostly been investigated in North America. We investigated the variation in diversity and species composition in different trade types in southwestern Europe (three major international wholesalers, different retail store types, and local internet forums), mostly in Spain and Portugal. As in previous studies, the diversity of fishes in the aquarium trade was vast, with a total of 20 orders, 79 families, and 1,133 fish species detected in the trade types analyzed. 248 species were observed in a single metropolitan area (Barcelona), with estimates of about 294 species being present. International wholesalers had higher species richness and evenness, with a single one having over 700 species. General pet stores had much lower evenness but due to high turnover had a total richness of over 200 species. Internet forums had the lowest evenness but similar richness. The different commerce types varied significantly in relative species abundance with about a dozen of popular fish species (e.g., goldfish, Siamese fighting fish, common carp, guppy, swordtails) dominating the retail stores, particularly the general pet stores. Our results imply that frequency in the trade varies strongly among species and commerce types and although general pet stores have usually low diversity, this is compensated with a higher species turnover. Many of the most popular species are well known invasive species and some of the species available are temperate species that might establish in Europe, reinforcing the need for more careful implementation of education programs, regulation and monitoring of trade, and internalization of environmental costs by the industry.