Assessing the CO2 Mitigation Effect of Environmental Innovation

• Main Authors: Fu-Wei Tsao, 曹富威
• Other Authors: 陸怡蕙
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/cbkcc8

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 農業經濟學研究所 === 106 === Electricity sector’s CO2 emission has been the main cause for climate change. Although each country has addressed a number of policies to mitigate the emission, including announce its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution by 2030 and 2050, launch a coal alliance to phase out coal using, set renewable energy target to meet, their CO2 reduction is still insufficient compared to fulfill Paris Agreement. Thus, how to accelerate CO2 reduction within alarming time frame is the challenge for every country. In this study, we focus on 14 OECD members’ electricity sector in 1990-2015 and access if their environmental innovation could mitigate CO2 emission. Moreover, we investigate environmental innovation’s external and internal spillover effect on CO2 emission. For environmental innovation (EI), we disaggregate it into six fields and measure them with renewable energy patents. We also separate our estimation with two-stage model to avoid endogeneity problem while directly estimating EI’s effect on CO2 emission. The result showed that external spillover is positively decreasing related with EI. Also, we found that non-regulatory policies, total RD&D, and electricity consumption significantly affect EI. For CO2 emission reduction, we provide evidence that technology followers’ marginal reduction effect on CO2 emission are greater than the leaders’. Contrary to EI’s policy result, our result indicated that financial incentives policies and market-based approaches negatively impact CO2 emission. Among the renewable energies, we reported that wind is the only energy that could simultaneously reduce CO2 emission with internal innovation, internal spillover and external spillover effect.