本文是一篇经济学Essay代写范文,题目为:Climate Change, Regulations and Economic Development,本文简要介绍了气候变化、相关法规以及法规与各国经济发展的关系。
1.Introduction引言
In the recent years, climate change has increasingly become the common issue among developed and developing countries. The climate change not only is an environmental issue but also highly related to the economic development of different countries. This essay intends to provide a brief introduction about climate change, related regulations and the relationship between regulations and economic development of countries. The first part will introduce the definition and indicators of climate change. The causes will be also discussed from the perspective of internal and external forcing mechanism in this part. The human influence would be demonstrated in details. In the next part, the regulation in response to climate change and its influences will be fully discussed. In this part, regulations as institutional guarantee for low-carbon economy will be analyzed and its role in forming industry structure could be demonstrated as well. In addition, in order to discuss the relationship between regulations and economic development, the different status of both developed and developing countries in the international division of labor would be analyzed as well.
近年来,气候变化日益成为发达国家和发展中国家的共同问题。气候变化不仅是一个环境问题,而且与各国的经济发展密切相关。本文简要介绍了气候变化、相关法规以及法规与各国经济发展的关系。第一部分将介绍气候变化的定义和指标。这一部分还将从内部和外部强迫机制的角度探讨其原因。人类的影响将被详细展示。下一部分将全面讨论应对气候变化的法规及其影响。本部分将分析作为低碳经济制度保障的法规,并论证其在产业结构形成中的作用。此外,为了讨论法规与经济发展之间的关系,还将分析发达国家和发展中国家在国际分工中的不同地位。
2.Causes and Impacts
2.1 Definition of Climate Change
The climate change always refers to the changes of weather pattern that would last for an extended period of time from the statistical perspective of climate mean state. In the recent few years, people around the world have increasingly noticed different kinds of signals and scientific evidences have shown that the climate of Earth is changing. These signals and evidences could be classified as different kinds, such as global surface temperature, global sea level, global upper ocean heat content, North Hemisphere snow cover glacier volume and etc.
First of all, as one of most important indicators of climate change, globe average temperature has show an increase of approximately 1.4°F since the early Twentieth Century. Based on the air temperature data over land and sea surface, the global surface temperature has been observed to experienced an long-term increasing trend, despite the fact that in the short term global average temperature is still subject to the year-to-year fluctuation. Secondly, evidences shows that the global mean sea level has been increasing an average rate of approximately 1.7mm/year over the past century and it has accelerated since 1993. Moreover, the melting land ice from places like Greenland or mountain glacier would contribute to the increase of sea level in the future. Thirdly, a strong trend of ocean heat content has been witnessed during the period of reliable measurement. This is consistent with the increase of global sea level, although ocean heat content varies significantly from place to place and from year to year. Next, Northern Hemisphere snow cover has decrease in recently few years, which is consistent with the rising global temperature. Finally, as a direct result of rising temperature, glaciers and ice sheets has kept melting and glacier volume is shrinking sharply. As a consequence, global sea level rises, and so do the water supplies in certain regions of Asia and South America.
2.2 Causes of Climate Change
As a controversial issue, the causes of climate change have been discussed for long. However, scientists have failed to reach an agreement by now and several possible causes have been demonstrated. Generally, these causes could be divided into two kinds, namely, internal and external forcing mechanism. The internal forcing mechanism includes the influences of ocean-atmosphere variability and life on the earth over the centuries. The external forcing mechanism includes the effects of orbital variation, solar output, volcanism and plate tectonics. Human influence has also been regarded as one of the possible factors that contribute to the global climate change and which would be discussed as follows. It is possible that all the causes could only partly explain the pheromone of climate change.
2.3 Human Influence of Climate Change
In the recent few years, several evidences have been regards as the primary driver of the climate change and evidences from hundreds of studies tend to support the argument, which could classified as different kinds as follow. The first kind of evidence is the understanding of the whole mechanism from the physical perspectives. As people increasingly understand the role of greenhouse gases in climate change, an increasing amount of evidences tend to support the argument. The second kind of evidence comes from indirect estimates of climate changes over the past centuries. This kind of estimates is often obtained from plants, animals and their remains. As indicators, details of plants, animals and their remains could support the climate variations over the centuries. These indicators show that the increase of temperature in the recent few years is apparently unusual, especially in the past 1000 years. The third kind of evidences comes from the comparison between actual climate and theoretical models based on the understanding of how climate is affected by human activities. For instance, according to the theoretical models, the increase of greenhouse would result in the increases of global surface temperature, ocean heat content, global sea level and the decrease of sea ice and snow cover. In reality, these expectations coming from the models are in agreement with people’s observations.
These global climate models show the influence of human activities on global temperatures. A close match between actual observed global average temperatures and model projections of the effects of human and natural forces combined has been witnessed. This means that the natural factors cannot serve as the main factor that contributed to the global climate change. It is human factors that primarily caused the global climate change instead.
Also, the last 800000-year record of carbon dioxide concentrations could be used to be demonstrated the influence of human activities. Evidences show that since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen sharply, which is nearly 35 percent. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by roughly 35 percent since the start of the industrial revolution. Globally, over the past decades, the burning of fossil fuels contributed to around 80 percent of CO2 emissions caused by human behaviors, while the rest 20 percent resulted from other causes, such as deforestation and associated agricultural practices. Without strong control measures, the concentration of CO2 has increased by approximately 2 to 3 times than that of last 800000 or more years.
In addition, although the solar energy received by the atmosphere has followed a cycle of small ups and downs, there was no net increase witnessed. However, global temperature has increased significantly during the same period. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that solar energy influence serves as the primary driver of global climate change over decades, resulting in an increasing possibilities of human activities as the main cause of global climate changes.
3.Regulations and its Influences
Since it is highly likely that the human activities have impacts on the global climate change, it is necessary for human beings to take actions to regulate themselves for environment protection. Although global climate change is an environmental issue, the regulation proposed to mitigate the effects of climate change would exert impacts on the economic development. Actions to formulate the regulation for climate change were taken in the beginning stage. It is a commonsense that developed countries would have significant influence on the development direction of regulations. The forming regulations not only affect the development of low-carbon economy but also will contribute to the reformation of global industry structure. Generally, the developed countries tend to benefit from these regulations.
3.1 Regulations: Institutional Guarantee for Low-carbon Economy
Developing clean energy or low-carbon economy has increasingly become the general consensus among developed countries. Low-carbon economy has been regarded as the next new industry that would largely contribute to the economic development of countries. Once the new regulations aimed at carbon emission reduction were made, the price of fossil energy would have little impacts on the development of clean energy. This is because countries or enterprises tend to purchase clean energy rather than fossil energy for the carbon emission reduction purpose. To some extent, new demand could be made for clean energy industry directly. Under the new regulation in response to global climate change, the demand for clean energy and carbon emission reduction would attract investment. This kind of investment concentrated on the low-carbon economy could exert significant impacts on the economic development.
3.2 Regulations: Reforming the Industry Structure
The regulation in response to global climate change not only would increase the energy purchasing cost, but also would change the price parity between fossil and clean energy.
First of all, the increase of energy purchasing cost could change the composition of production factors, resulting in the global industry distribution. The decrease of fossil energy purchasing and the increase of clean energy tend to increase the cost of energy purchasing. The increasing cost mainly depends on the scale of carbon emission reduction. According to the estimate of Committee of Climate Change, in order to achieve the goal of eighty percent of carbon emission reduction from 1990 to 2050, the power generation of Britain should be replaced by one third. Meanwhile, several companies, such as coal generation companies and nuclear power generation companies, would close down. As a consequence, the cost involved could vary from 90 billion to 200 billion pounds and the household expenditure would increase sixty percent (Alamy, 2009).
Secondly, the price parity between fossil and clean energy is likely to change the demand and supply of energy supply. Although the regulation could change the price parity between fossil and clean energy production cost, it indeed affects the price parity between fossil and clean energy purchasing cost. In this case, the clean energy, such as wind power, solar power, nuclear power would no longer come from the countries of fossil or coal production. This would exert significant influence on the existing demand and supply distribution of fossil energy.
Next, carbon emission reduction would have different impacts on the different industries as a result of different energy intensity and carbon intensity. Industries with high energy intensity, such as energy industry, manufacturing industry and etc., are much more subjective to the regulations, while industries with low energy intensity, including service industry, tend to enjoy more benefits.
Finally, the technological innovation aimed at carbon emission reduction is likely to be one of industrial technological progress. The new regulations not only provide power for technological innovation, but also impose pressure. In the future, the development of industries tends to depend on the carbon intensity, and whether firms make profits or not has increasingly relied on their capability of carbon emission reduction. In consequence, the industrial technological development tend to be highly related to carbon intensity.
3.3 Regulations: the Status of Countries of Different Kinds in the International Division of Labor
The same regulations could exert different impacts on different participants. Despite the fact that carbon emission reduction would increase the energy cost for economic development of all the countries, the costs involved of countries are not the same. Besides environment protection, the most influential effect is to create a new industry, which is clean power industry, and to form a new economic development mode, which is low-carbon economy. In reality, the profit distribution is not equal among countries of different kinds. This is the reason why countries have different positions in terms of this controversial issue.
From the perspective of cost, evidences show that the cost scale of carbon emission reduction is highly related to the regulation arrangement (OECD, 2009). If developed and developing countries start carbon emission reduction at the same time, developing countries tend to suffer more than developed countries.
From the perspective of profit and its distribution, carbon emission could be also regarded as assets as well. Whether it is debt or asset depends on the competitive positions of countries in the carbon emission market. Countries with competitive advantages treat carbon emission as assets, and vice versa. It could be argued that the developed countries are the beneficiaries of global carbon emission reduction. Several reasons would be demonstrated as follows.
Firstly, the industry structure of developed countries is different from that of developing counties. In fact, the energy and carbon intensities of developed countries are much lower than that of developing countries, which indicates a relatively advantageous states for developed countries. Secondly, developed countries tend to enjoy technological advantages in the perspective of low carbon. Thirdly, it is beneficial for developed countries to implement regulations to develop clean energy and low-carbon economy, since it could increase the bargaining ability of developed countries in the global energy market, and decrease the competitive power of energy export countries. Finally, the development of clean energy could contribute the development of related industries in developed countries.
Compared to developed countries, developing countries are in a dilemma between economic development and carbon emission reduction, a choice between short-term and long-term goal. On the one hand, developing countries suffer directly from global climate change. On the other hand, the pressure of carbon emission reduction has become an obstacle on their way of industrialization.
Conclusion结论
To summarize, global climate change not only serves as an environmental issue but also exert impacts on both developed and developing counties. Recently, different kinds of signals and scientific evidences have shown that the climate of Earth is changing. These signals and evidences could be classified as different kinds, such as global surface temperature, global sea level, global upper ocean heat content, North Hemisphere snow cover glacier volume and etc. As a controversial issue, the causes of climate change have been discussed for long but scientists have failed to reach an agreement by now. Generally, these causes could be divided into two kinds, namely, internal and external forcing mechanism. The human influence has been increasingly regarded as the primary driver of climate change and several actions are taken in response to the climate change. The forming regulations not only affect the development of low-carbon economy but also will contribute to the reformation of global industry structure. It is argued that developed countries tend to benefit from these regulations, while the developing countries get involved in a dilemma between short-term and long-term goals. As the regulations are still in the formation, the global economy is at the crossroad. Facing both challenges and opportunities, how to formulate a relatively fair regulation has become increasingly important for both developed and developing countries.
总之,全球气候变化不仅是一个环境问题,而且对发达国家和发展中国家都有影响。最近,各种各样的信号和科学证据表明,地球的气候正在发生变化。这些信号和证据可以分为不同的类别,如全球表面温度、全球海平面、全球上层海洋热含量、北半球积雪冰川体积等。气候变化的原因一直是一个有争议的问题,但科学家们至今未能达成一致。一般来说,这些原因可以分为两类,即内部和外部强迫机制。人类的影响越来越多地被视为气候变化的主要驱动力,并采取了多项措施应对气候变化。这些规则的形成不仅影响低碳经济的发展,也将有助于全球产业结构的改革。有人认为,发达国家往往从这些监管中受益,而发展中国家则陷入了短期目标和长期目标之间的两难境地。由于监管仍在形成中,全球经济正处于十字路口。面对挑战和机遇,如何制定相对公平的监管对发达国家和发展中国家都变得越来越重要。
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