At the University of California Energy Institute, Christopher R. Knittel (an associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Economics) has issued a revealing 13-page paper on The Implied Cost of Carbon Dioxide Under the Cash for Clunkers Program. In a nutshell, the analysis suggests that costs per ton of carbon removal exceed $200 – and may even approach $500. Even the minimum figure is more than 10 times the current cost of carbon credits in Europe, indicating that Cash for Clunkers is a grotesquely expensive way to achieve greenhouse gas removal. For a brief discussion of the paper see this article in Science Daily.
Cash Clunker
The URI to TrackBack this entry is: http://haysvillelibrary.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/cash-clunker/trackback/
[...] for Clunkers Update A little over a week ago, in Cash Clunker, we discussed UC Davis Professor Christopher R. Knittel’s assessment of “The Implied Cost [...]