C-ROADS look at Waxman-Markey

With the release of the discussion draft of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 colleagues have been asking an obvious question. If it were implemented, how much difference would it make?

(1) What will this bill accomplish for US emissions reductions? Does it represent strong action?

(2) What will this bill accomplish for global emissions and the long-term future?

If you have a solid intuition about the climate system (and if you’ve been following the theme of other posts on this blog!) you’ll know that these are two different questions, with potentially very different answers.

Here are the C-ROADS results (assuming the US meets these targets and the rest of the world follows a Business As Usual path):

And a little more detail on how I calculated them.

C-ROADS — The Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator

 

For information, background materials, and other info on C-ROADS, visit our project website on the simulator.

Our team from Sustainability Institute, Ventana Systems, and MIT in the U.S. has developed “C-ROADS”, (formerly called “Pangaea”) a decision-maker-oriented international climate simulator and is engaging partners to use it to supporting climate policy design at the national and international scale.

C-ROADS stands for “Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator.”