Clearer Skies Over China: Reconciling Air Quality, Climate, and Economic Goals.

• Author: Yu, Songmin
• Position: Book review

Clearer Skies Over China: Reconciling Air Quality, Climate, and Economic Goals by CHRIS P. N IELSE and MUN S. HO (The MIT Press, October 18, 2013) 444 pages. ISBN 978-0262019880.

Ever since energy economics was developed as a specialized branch of economics in the 1970s, the relationship between economic growth and energy consumption has been a core issue. Then, different key words showed different aspects of this issue including energy supply and security, intensity and efficiency, substitution and elasticity, price shocks and pricing mechanisms, and so on.

In the 1980s, the scope of energy economics expanded again and environmental concerns arising from energy use and consumption became an increasingly important topic. By the 1990s, the topic of climate change and GHG (Green House Gas) emissions surfaced. Research considered policies or mechanisms for reducing pollutants and carbon dioxide emission with topics such as direct emission-control mandates, carbon taxes, emission permit trading mechanisms, and green/white certificate trading mechanisms. However, such policies gave rise to another question: How to post-evaluate or pre-simulate the impact of a specific policy or mechanism? This is just the question that this book is trying to systematically answer.

Policies for promoting emission reduction of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide were prominent in China's 11th Five Year Plan (FYP) from 2006 to 2010. With this plan as a backdrop, this book provides an integrated framework to systematically analyze relevant policies from a costbenefit perspective.

Five modules including models and data bases are included in this framework as follows:

Economy model (Computable general equilibrium (CGE)), which can simulate the development of China's economy and energy use in response to emission control policies or mechanisms.

Power sector inventory (Plant-level detail), which contains plant-by-plant representations of key emitting sectors, such as coal-fired electric power and cement making firms.

Emissions inventories (Bottom-up), with estimates of all major air pollutants and C[O.sub.2], based on the data from independent scientific research, instead of official statistics.

Atmosphere model (GEOS-Chem), which can simulate regional concentrations of pollutants resulting from emissions, including critical pollutants that are formed chemically in the air.

Health and crop impacts (Integrated benefit model), which can estimate the avoided negative impacts...