To support the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), Resources for the Future was asked to provide a critical review of methodologies for accounting for the true costs of electric power across the available generation technologies.

Proposals for greenhouse-gas reductions have been met with widespread skepticism in the developing world, in part because such countries find their conventional air-pollution problems more pressing. The goal of this article is to examine whether reductions in carbon emissions that are ancillary to conventional pollutant reductions from a policy to phase out small boilers in downtown Taiyuan, China are large enough to make such policies attractive carbon reducing investments to developed countries.