Abstract Reducing greenhouse gas emissions not only lowers expected damages from climate change but also reduces the risk of catastrophic impacts. However, estimates of the social cost of carbon, which measures the marginal value of carbon dioxide abatement, often do not capture this risk...

The Ramsey rule for the consumption rate of discount assumes a transfer of money of a (representative) agent at one point in time to the same agent at another point in time. Climate policy (implicitly) transfers money not just over time but also between agents. I propose three alternative...

This paper derives the social cost of carbon (SCC) and its rate of change. It does so in a deterministic Ramsey model of optimal economic growth with carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. It is shown that the determinants of the rate of change of the SCC are substantially almost identical...

Drawing upon climate change damage specifications previously proposed in the literature that the authors have calibrated to a common level of damages at 2.5 C, the authors examine the effect upon the social cost of carbon (SCC) of varying damage specifications in a DICE-like integrated...

In 2010, the U.S. government adopted its first consistent estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC) for government-wide use in regulatory cost-benefit analysis. Here, the authors examine a number of limitations of the estimates identified in the U.S. government report and elsewhere and review...

This note considers the treatment of risk and uncertainty in the recently established social cost of carbon (SCC) for analysis of federal regulations in the United States. It argues that the analysis of the US Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon did not go far enough into the tail...

This report elucidates one aspect of economic IAMs: the damage function. Damage functions map environmental changes (primarily mean temperature increases) to economic impacts. This crucial step in the determination of SCC appears in very different form in the leading economic IAMs. Through...

This survey examines the history and current practice in integrated assessment models (IAMs) of the economics of climate change. It begins with a review of the emerging problem of climate change. The next section provides a brief sketch of the rise of IAMs in the 1970s and beyond. The subsequent...

211 estimates of the social cost of carbon are included in a meta-analysis. The results confirm that a lower discount rate implies a higher estimate; and that higher estimates are found in the gray literature. It is also found that there is a downward trend in the economic impact estimates of the...

It is well-known that the discount rate is crucially important for estimating the social cost of carbon, a standard indicator for the seriousness of climate change and desirable level of climate policy. The Ramsey equation for the discount rate has three components: the pure rate of time...