Energy and Environmental Policy Modeling

The primary objective of Energy and Environmental Policy Modeling is to introduce a variety of recent energy-environmental modeling concepts, and to provide an overview of these modeling concepts. Another major objective of the book is the application of management science techniques to energy and environment policy issues which have expanded dramatically over the last twenty-five years: the results from these applications have become increasingly relied upon by those making energy and environmental decisions. Thus, an overview of some of the most interesting work in this field on some of the biggest contemporary policy issues is a worthy objective. In this respect, policy issues are discussed in the following conceptual modeling frameworks: end-use modeling, integrating supply and demand, aggregate energy-economy interactions, and multi-sector energy-economy interactions. Hence the book begins with policy studies. First there is a chapter on oil resource depletion and technological change by John Rowse. Two articles on electric sector restructuring follow, by William Hogan and Hung-po Chao/Stephen Peck. The first section is followed by four chapters motivated by the debate over appropriate climate change policies: one by Richard Richels, Jae Edmonds, Howard Gruenspecht, and Tom Wigley on the implications of different carbon emission trajectories; one by Stephen Peck and Thomas Telsberg on appropriate emissions trajectories under uncertainty; one by Susan Swinehart on the potential of tree planting as a climate policy response; and one by Gunter Stephan on inter-generational discounting. Finally, the book ends with a chapter by Tom Rutherford on the sequence of linear complimentarity problem technique for solving general equilibrium problems, and one on the International Energy Network by Leo Schrattenholzer, an institution managed jointly by Schrattenholzer and Alan Manne. The work of Professor Alan Manne is heavily referenced in every chapter of this book.