Katheline Schubert, professeur d'économie à l'Université Paris 1 Panthéon‐Sorbonne et titulaire d'une chaire à Paris School of Economics, présentera son article co-écrit avec Aude Pommeret and Francesco Ricci.

 

Voici le résumé de l'article :

Confronted with political opposition to the implementation of efficient carbon pricing, climate policy relies on alternative policy interventions, at a cost in terms of welfare and public finance, i.e. the cost of acceptability.  In order to evaluate this cost, the paper studies, in the context of the energy transition,  second best climate policies constrained to keeping a constant level of the carbon tax and combining it with subsidies to carbon-free electricity generation. These subsidies can take the form of a feed-in premium paid to electricity produced from carbon-free sources, or of subsidies to investment in decarbonized capacity. Within a stylized dynamic model where energy may be produced with fossil or carbon-free sources and climate policy aims at satisfying a carbon budget, we define and characterize the carbon pricing gap. We show that if the constant carbon tax is small and therefore the carbon pricing gap large, the subsidy to carbon-free sources is so large that it implies large investment costs, huge financial burden on the public budget, and a large welfare loss. It may even be necessary to maintain the subsidy permanently to prevent the come-back of fossil fuels after the energy transition is completed. We calibrate the model to the European energy market to obtain orders of magnitude of the effects and show that the cost of acceptability is significant.