scholarly journals Climate Change Policy: What Do the Models Tell Us?

2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 860-872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S Pindyck

Very little. A plethora of integrated assessment models (IAMs) have been constructed and used to estimate the social cost of carbon (SCC) and evaluate alternative abatement policies. These models have crucial flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis: certain inputs (e.g., the discount rate) are arbitrary, but have huge effects on the SCC estimates the models produce; the models' descriptions of the impact of climate change are completely ad hoc, with no theoretical or empirical foundation; and the models can tell us nothing about the most important driver of the SCC, the possibility of a catastrophic climate outcome. IAM-based analyses of climate policy create a perception of knowledge and precision, but that perception is illusory and misleading. (JEL C51, Q54, Q58)

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 651-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Cambardella ◽  
Brian D. Fath ◽  
Andrea Werdenigg ◽  
Christian Gulas ◽  
Harald Katzmair

AbstractCultural theory (CT) provides a framework for understanding how social dimensions shape cultural bias and social relations of individuals, including values, view of the natural world, policy preferences, and risk perceptions. The five resulting cultural solidarities are each associated with a “myth of nature”—a concept of nature that aligns with the worldview of each solidarity. When applied to the problem of climate protection policy making, the relationships and beliefs outlined by CT can shed light on how members of the different cultural solidarities perceive their relationship to climate change and associated risk. This can be used to deduce what climate change management policies may be preferred or opposed by each group. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of how CT has been used in surveys of the social aspects of climate change policy making, to assess the construct validity of these studies, and to identify ways for climate change protection policies to leverage the views of each of the cultural solidarities to develop clumsy solutions: policies that incorporate strengths from each of the cultural solidarities’ perspectives. Surveys that include measures of at least fatalism, hierarchism, individualism, and egalitarianism and their associated myths of nature as well as measures of climate change risk perceptions and policy preferences have the highest translation and predictive validity. These studies will be useful in helping environmental managers find clumsy solutions and develop resilient policy according to C.S. Holling’s adaptive cycle.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Tol

Abstract Some claim that as knowledge about climate change accumulates, the social cost of carbon increases. A meta-analysis of published estimates shows that this is not the case. Correcting for inflation and emission year and controlling for the discount rate, kernel density decomposition reveals a stationary distribution. Actual carbon prices are almost everywhere below the estimated social cost of carbon.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (02) ◽  
pp. 349-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue Zhao ◽  
Shuang Lyu ◽  
Zhu Wang

AbstractWhile legal scholarship seeks mainly to assess the impact of climate change litigation (CCL) on the regulatory state and on climate change policy in common law countries, the potential influence of government climate policy on the judicial practices of jurisdictions with different legal traditions attracts much less attention. This article fills the gaps by exploring how courts in China, an authoritarian country with a civil law tradition, react to government climate policies and how this judicial response might affect relevant legal rules and eventually contribute to climate regulation. An empirical analysis of 177 Chinese judicial cases reveals that CCL in China consists mostly of contract-based civil actions steered by the government's low-carbon policies. Moreover, although the prospects of CCL against public authorities in China remain very bleak, there is scope for the emergence of tort-based CCL, backed by government policies. In this respect, recent tort-based public interest litigation on air pollution in China may serve as a substitute or, more promisingly, a gateway to the emergence of a tort-based branch of Chinese CCL.


2014 ◽  
Vol 104 (5) ◽  
pp. 544-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin L. Weitzman

At high enough greenhouse gas concentrations, climate change might conceivably cause catastrophic damages with small but non-negligible probabilities. If the bad tail of climate damages is sufficiently fat, and if the coefficient of relative risk aversion is greater than one, the catastrophe-reducing insurance aspect of mitigation investments could in theory have a strong influence on raising the social cost of carbon. In this paper I exposit the influence of fat tails on climate change economics in a simple stark formulation focused on the social cost of carbon. I then attempt to place the basic underlying issues within a balanced perspective.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 064039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiang Gao ◽  
C Adam Schlosser ◽  
Charles Fant ◽  
Kenneth Strzepek

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