Policy cost and carbon tax revenue in GCAM

[emilywen2001]

Hello everyone, I have adopted regional and global CO2 emission constraints in policy scenarios, and calculated the carbon prices, respectively. I have the following two problems:

1. I noticed that the model can calculate the policy cost. How can this policy cost be calculated?
2. I want to calculate carbon pricing income in different scenarios. Is there a specific method in the GCAM model?
   I would appreciate it if anyone could offer help!

[pkyle]

For the policy cost (area under the marginal abatement cost curve), that can be activated in the configuration file by activating the Bool:

		<Value name="createCostCurve">1</Value>

You'll need to allow the model to run through 2100 (can't use stop-year or stop-period), and by default the numPointsForCO2CostCurve is 5, so the model will run 5 times if all works as planned. Only the results from the full constrained run are saved to the database; the other 4 are used to estimate the relationship between CO2 or GHG prices and observed abatement. When that process is completed, you'll be able to query the policy costs (available in the standard queries) both by year and as cumulative totals, discounted and undiscounted.

[pkyle]

Re: carbon tax revenue, that would just be the quantity of emissions (CO2 or all GHG, with each weighted by its GWP) multiplied by the emissions price, being careful about units. If it's an all-GHG policy, then the reported emissions times GWP will return Mt of CO2-equivalent, whereas the reported CO2 price will be 1990$ per tonne C, not per tonne CO2.

[emilywen2001]

Re: carbon tax revenue, that would just be the quantity of emissions (CO2 or all GHG, with each weighted by its GWP) multiplied by the emissions price, being careful about units. If it's an all-GHG policy, then the reported emissions times GWP will return Mt of CO2-equivalent, whereas the reported CO2 price will be 1990$ per tonne C, not per tonne CO2.

Thanks for your help! I will complete my simulation with your advice