Climate policy decisions require policy-based lifecycle analysis.

Lifecycle analysis (LCA) metrics of greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly being used to select technologies supported by climate policy. However, LCAs typically evaluate the emissions associated with a technology or product, not the impacts of policies. Here, we show that policies supporting the same technology can lead to dramatically different emissions impacts per unit of technology added, due to multimarket responses to the policy. Using a policy-based consequential LCA, we find that the lifecycle emissions impacts of four US biofuel policies range from a reduction of 16.1 gCO2e to an increase of 24.0 gCO2e per MJ corn ethanol added by the policy. The differences between these results and representative technology-based LCA measures, which do not account for the policy instrument driving the expansion in the technology, illustrate the need for policy-based LCA measures when informing policy decision making.

Disease-economy trade-offs under alternative epidemic control strategies.

Public policy and academic debates regarding pandemic control strategies note disease-economy trade-offs, often prioritizing one outcome over the other. Using a calibrated, coupled epi-economic model of individual behavior embedded within the broader economy during a novel epidemic, we show that targeted isolation strategies can avert up to 91% of economic losses relative to voluntary isolation strategies. Unlike widely-used blanket lockdowns, economic savings of targeted isolation do not impose additional disease burdens, avoiding disease-economy trade-offs. Targeted isolation achieves this by addressing the fundamental coordination failure between infectious and susceptible individuals that drives the recession. Importantly, we show testing and compliance frictions can erode some of the gains from targeted isolation, but improving test quality unlocks the majority of the benefits of targeted isolation.