Adler, Matthew, Anthoff, David, Bosetti, Valentina, Garner, Greg, Keller, Klaus and Treich, Nicolas (2017) Priority for the worse-off and the social cost of carbon. Nature Climate Change, 7. 443–449. ISSN 1758-678X
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a key tool in climate policy. The SCC expresses in monetary terms the social impact of the emission of a ton of CO2 in a given year. The SCC is calculated using a ‘social welfare function’ (SWF): a method for assessing social welfare. The dominant SWF in climate policy is the discounted-utilitarian SWF. Individuals’ well-being numbers (utilities) are summed, and the values for later generations are reduced (‘discounted’). This SWF has been criticized for ignoring the distribution of well-being and including an arbitrary time preference. Here, we use a ‘prioritarian’ SWF, with no time discount, to calculate the SCC. This SWF gives extra weight (‘priority’) to worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism is a well-developed concept in ethics and welfare economics, but has been rarely used in climate scholarship. We find substantial differences between the discounted-utilitarian and non-discounted prioritarian SCCs.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. |
| Divisions: | CPNSS |
| Subjects: | G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Aug 2019 12:03 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Dec 2024 01:50 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/101325 |
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