The Kyoto Protocol: A Cost-Effective Strategy for Meeting Environmental Objectives?

Abstract
This is an invited discussion on the Manne and Richels’ paper “The Kyoto Protocol: A Cost-Effective Strategy for Meeting Environmental Objective”. It focuses on four issues or questions: distributional realities of the international climate change negotiations, correspondence between geopolitical regional aggregates in MERGE and Annex B countries, implications of the autonomous energy efficiency improvement rates assumed in MERGE on the income elasticity of energy consumption, and market power in an international greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme.