Research into the social cost of carbon emissions ? the marginal social damage from a tonne of emitted carbon ? has tended to focus on "best guess" scenarios. Such scenarios generally ignore the potential for low-probability, high-damage events, which are critically important to determining...

David Pearce's Blueprint for a Green Economy, based on a report for the then Conservative UK government, encouraged a major change of government view to the effect that market-based policies "offer the prospect of a more efficient and flexible response to environmental issues". The policies he...