Moreno-Cruz

Juan Moreno-Cruz

Associate Professor of Environment, Enterprise and Development, University of Waterloo
Areas of Expertise:

Connect with Juan

(404) 385-1100

About Juan

Juan Moreno-Cruz’s focus is on climate change economics, where he deals with global  issues such as international environmental agreements and energy transitions, and also local issues such as the spatial distribution of economic activity. His research has been published in Science, Nature Geosciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Environmental Research Letters, Climatic Change, Energy Policy, Environmental and Resource Economics, and Resource and Energy Economics. 

Contributions | No Jargon Podcast | In the News | Publications

Contributions

Can Solar Geoengineering be Part of an Effective Global Strategy to Fight Climate Change?

  • Garth Heutel
  • Soheil Shayegh
Key Findings Brief,

In the News

"Reduce Ozone When and Where It Matters Most," Juan Moreno-Cruz (with Valerie Thomas, Paul Kerl, Athanasios Nenes, Matthew Realff, Armistead Russell, Joel Sokol, and Wenxiang Zang), Power Magazine, November 1, 2015.
"Economics of Climate Engineering," Juan Moreno-Cruz (with Katharine Ricke and Gernot Wagner), Geoengineering Our Climate, March 3, 2015.

Publications

"Policy Thresholds in Mitigation" (with Katharine L. Ricke, Jacob Schewe, Anders Levermann, and Ken Caldeira). Nature Geoscience 9, no. 1 (2016): 5-6.

Explains how some climate change impacts rise fast with little warming, and then taper off. Argues that to avoid diminishing incentives to reduce emissions and inadvertently slipping into a lower-welfare world, mitigation policy needs to be ambitious early on.

"Climate Engineering Economics" (with Garth Heutel and Katherine Ricke). Annual Review of Resource Economics 8, no. 1 (2015): 1-38.

Summarizes the state of the literature on economic analysis of geoengineering and climate policy.

"New Approach for Optimal Electricity Planning and Dispatching with Hourly Time-Scale Air Quality and Health Considerations" (with Paul Y Kerl, Wenxian Zhang, Thanos Nenes, Matthew J Realff, Armistead G Russell, Joel Sokol, and Valerie M. Thomas). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 35 (2015): 10884-10889.

Uses a method to evaluate fluctuating pollutant formation from source emissions, which is integrated within an electricity production model. Shows how to reduce air pollutants and health impacts by shifting production among plants during a select number of hourly periods. 

"Mitigation and the Geoengineering Threat" Resource and Energy Economics 41 (2015): 248-263.

Examines the economic issues introduced when geoengineering becomes available in a standard model where strategic interaction leads to suboptimal mitigation. Finds that specific strategic effects create greater incentives for free-riding on mitigation, but with asymmetric countries, the prospect of geoengineering can induce inefficiently high levels of mitigation.

"Strategic Incentives for Climate Geoengineering Coalitions to Exclude Broad Participation" (with Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira). Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 1 (2013).

Shows that regional differences in climate outcomes create strategic incentives to form coalitions that are as small as possible, while still powerful enough to deploy solar geoengineering.

"A Simple Model to Account for Regional Inequalities in the Effectiveness of Solar Radiation Management" (with Katharine Ricke and David Keith). Climatic Change 110, no. 3 (2012): 649-668.

Presents a simple model to account for the potential effectiveness of solar radiation management (SRM) in compensating for anthropogenic climate change. Provides a parsimonious way to account for regional inequality in the assessment of SRM effectiveness and allows policy and decision makers to examine the linear climate response to different SRM configurations.