Document Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
2016
Abstract
The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using a discounted-utilitarian social welfare function (SWF)—one that simply adds up the well-being numbers (utilities) of individuals, as discounted by a weighting factor that decreases with time. The discounted-utilitarian SWF has been criticized both for ignoring the distribution of well-being, and for including an arbitrary preference for earlier generations. Here, we use a prioritarian SWF, with no time-discount factor, to calculate the SCC in the integrated assessment model RICE. Prioritarianism is a well-developed concept in ethics and theoretical welfare economics, but has been, thus far, little used in climate scholarship. The core idea is to give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse off individuals. We find substantial differences between the discounted-utilitarian and non-discounted prioritarian SCC.
Citation
Matthew Adler et al., Priority for the Worse Off and the Social Cost of Carbon (CSIFO, Working Paper No. 6032, August 2016)
Library of Congress Subject Headings
Welfare economics, Well-being, Climatic changes--Government policy, Carbon dioxide mitigation
Included in
Behavioral Economics Commons, Environmental Policy Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Social Policy Commons
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/3645
