IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/vic/vicddp/2011.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Adoption Of Cleaner Household Technologies: When Is Backfire Welfare-Improving?

Author

Abstract

I examine a setting in which households with “green preferences” choose between two available technologies on the basis of their costs, and on the basis of their associated emissions. The green preferences give rise to a reciprocal externality among the households, the correction of which requires policy intervention. In the absence of corrective policy, the adoption of a cleaner technology can be welfare-improving even when it induces an increase in emissions (backfire). A reduction in emissions is neither necessary nor sufficient for the equilibrium adoption of a cleaner technology to be welfare-improving. Mandated adoption of a cleaner technology – when households have otherwise chosen not to adopt it – is never welfare-improving if it induces backfire.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Kennedy, 2022. "The Adoption Of Cleaner Household Technologies: When Is Backfire Welfare-Improving?," Department Discussion Papers 2011, Department of Economics, University of Victoria.
    • Handle: RePEc:vic:vicddp:2011
    Note: ISSN 1914-2838 JEL Classifications: Q52, Q55, Q58
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/_assets/docs/other/ddp_2011.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    backfire; clean technology; energy-efficiency; greenhouse gases; rebound;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:vic:vicddp:2011. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kali Moon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/devicca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.