Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Lifecycle Analysis (LCA) has become an important tool for guiding regional or national policy actions to address global environmental problems such as climate change. LCA-based indicators of greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity of di�erent fuels are being used to design long-term policies supporting renewable and alternative energy technologies. However, some of these technologies risk proving counter-productive to policy goals. An example is the debate about the environmental bene�ts of biofuels. Using biofuels as an illustrative example, we identify the structural reasons for the di�erences between two strands of literature on environmental bene�ts of alternative energy, namely, lifecycle analysis and economic market-equilibrium analysis. We explain why a policy planner cannot assume the potential environmental gains as revealed by a comparison between two LCAs as given while selecting policies to capture those gains. In other words lifecycle indicators are endogenous variables in the policy-selection problem. A capacity to compute lifecycle indicators as a function of economic variables and policy parameters can help policy planners better compare the implications of di�erent policy actions.
Author: Deepak Rajagopal
Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Language: English
Subfield: Environmental Engineering
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Energy Biosciences Institute
OpenAlex ID: W86977457