Climate science indicates that climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare index, called quality of life (QuoL), emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We construct and calibrate a multigenerational model with...

Mankind must cooperate to reduce GHG emissions to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperature. How can the necessary costs of reducing GHG emissions be allocated across regions of the world, within the next few generations, and simultaneously address growth expectations and economic...

Climate science indicates that climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare?

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have caused atmospheric concentrations with no precedents in the last half a million years, inducing serious uncertainties about future climates and their effects on human welfare. Recent climate science supports the view that the climate...

Climate science indicates that climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare or utility index emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We construct and calibrate a multigenerational model with intertemporal links...

The discounted-utilitarian social welfare function (DU) is used by the great majority of researchers studying intergenerational resource allocation in the presence of climate change (e.g., W. Nordhaus, M. Weitzman, N. Stern, and P. Dasgupta). I present three justifications for using DU: (1) the...

Climate science indicates that climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare index, called quality of life (QuoL), emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We construct and calibrate a multigenerational model with...

Carbon budgets are a useful way to frame the climate mitigation challenge and much easier to agree upon than the allocation of emissions. We propose a mechanism with countries agreeing on the global carbon budget, while the decision to emit is decentralized at the country level. The revenue is...