scholarly journals UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL COST OF CARBON: A MODEL DIAGNOSTIC AND INTER-COMPARISON STUDY

2017 ◽  
Vol 08 (02) ◽  
pp. 1750009 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEVEN K. ROSE ◽  
DELAVANE B. DIAZ ◽  
GEOFFREY J. BLANFORD
Keyword(s):  
Social Cost ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Social Cost Of Carbon ◽  
Component Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Intermediate Variables ◽  
Climate Change Damages

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary estimate of global climate change damages to society from an additional unit of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. SCCs are used to estimate the benefits of CO2 reductions from policies. However, little is known about the modeling underlying the values or the implied societal risks, making SCC estimates difficult to interpret and assess. This study performs the first in-depth examination of SCC modeling using controlled diagnostic experiments that yield detailed intermediate results, allow for direct comparison of individual components of the models, and facilitate evaluation of the individual model SCCs. Specifically, we analyze DICE, FUND, and PAGE and the multimodel approach used by the US Government. Through our component assessments, we trace SCC differences back to intermediate variables and specific features. We find significant variation in component-level behavior between models driven by model-specific structural and implementation elements, some resulting in artificial differences in results. These elements combine to produce model-specific tendencies in climate and damage responses that contribute to differences observed in SCC outcomes — producing PAGE SCC distributions with longer and fatter right tails and higher averages, followed by DICE with more compact distributions and lower averages, and FUND with distributions that include net benefits and the lowest averages. Overall, our analyses reveal fundamental model behavior relevant to many disciplines of climate research, and identify issues with the models, as well as the overall multimodel approach, that need further consideration. With the growing prominence of SCCs in decision-making, ranging from the local-level to international, improved transparency and technical understanding is essential for informed decisions.

scholarly journals Agreeing to disagree on climate policy

2014 ◽  
Vol 111 (10) ◽  
pp. 3695-3698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey M. Heal ◽  
Antony Millner
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Policy ◽  
Discount Rate ◽  
Social Cost ◽  
Time Dependent ◽  
Social Cost Of Carbon ◽  
Agreeing To Disagree ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government

Disagreements about the value of the utility discount rate—the rate at which our concern for the welfare of future people declines with their distance from us in time—are at the heart of the debate about the appropriate intensity of climate policy. Seemingly small differences in the discount rate yield very different policy prescriptions, and no consensus “correct” value has been identified. We argue that the choice of discount rate is an ethical primitive: there are many different legitimate opinions as to its value, and none should receive a privileged place in economic analysis of climate policy. Rather, we advocate a social choice-based approach in which a diverse set of individual discount rates is aggregated into a “representative” rate. We show that performing this aggregation efficiently leads to a time-dependent discount rate that declines monotonically to the lowest rate in the population. We apply this discounting scheme to calculations of the social cost of carbon recently performed by the US government and show that it provides an attractive compromise between competing ethical positions, and thus provides a possible resolution to the ethical impasse in climate change economics.

The social cost of carbon in a non-cooperative world

2021 ◽  
pp. 103490
Author(s):  
Christoph Hambel ◽  
Holger Kraft ◽  
Eduardo Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Social Cost ◽  
Social Cost Of Carbon ◽  
The Social

scholarly journals Climate Impacts on Economic Growth as Drivers of Uncertainty in the Social Cost of Carbon

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth J. Moyer ◽  
Mark D. Woolley ◽  
Michael Glotter ◽  
David A. Weisbach
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Social Cost ◽  
Climate Impacts ◽  
Social Cost Of Carbon ◽  
The Social

scholarly journals The Social Cost of Carbon, Greenhouse Gas Policies, and Politicized Benefit/Cost Analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Benjamin Zycher
Keyword(s):  
Cost Analysis ◽  
Social Cost ◽  
Climate Impacts ◽  
Cost Calculation ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Social Cost Of Carbon ◽  
Benefit Cost Analysis ◽  
Climate Policies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Benefit Cost

Benefit/cost analysis can be a powerful tool for examination of proposed (or alternative) public policies, but, unsurprisingly, decisionmakers’ policy preferences can drive the analysis, rather than the reverse. That is the reality with respect to the Obama Administration computation of the social cost of carbon, a crucial parameter underlying the quantitative analysis of its proposed climate policies, now being reversed in substantial part by the Trump Administration. The Obama analysis of the social cost of carbon suffered from four central problems: the use of global benefits in the benefit/cost calculation, the failure to apply a 7% discount rate as required by Office of Management and Budget guidelines, the conflation of climate and GDP effects of climate policies, and the inclusion of non-climate effects of climate policies as co-benefits, as a tool with which to overcome the trivial temperature and other climate impacts of those policies. Moreover, the Obama analysis included in its “market failure” analysis the fuel price parameter that market forces are likely to incorporate fully. This Article suggests that policymakers and other interested parties would be wise to concentrate on the analytic minutia underlying policy proposals because policy analysis cannot be separated from politics.

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