The social rate of discount is a crucial driver of the social cost of carbon (SCC), i.e. the expected present discounted value of marginal damages resulting from emitting one ton of carbon today. Policy makers should set carbon prices to the SCC using a carbon tax or a competitive permits...

Global warming can be curbed by pricing carbon emissions and thus substituting fossil fuel with renewable energy consumption. Breakthrough technologies (e.g., fusion energy) can reduce the cost of such policies. However, the chance of such a technology coming to market depends on investment. We...

We study the evolution of voter support for climate policies aimed at containing the effect of climate risk, as weather conditions worsens at a time of rising economic inequality. Households differ in age, beliefs and income, and the scale of intervention to preserve habitable land reflects the...

We study the evolution of voter support for climate policies aimed at containing the effect of climate risk, as weather conditions worsens at a time of rising economic inequality. Households differ in age, beliefs and income, and the scale of intervention to preserve habitable land reflects the...

Lemoine and Rudik (2017) argue that it is efficient to delay reducing carbon emissions, because there is substantial inertia in the climate system. However, this conclusion rests upon misunderstanding the relevant climate physics: there is no substantial lag between CO2 emissions and warming,...

We show that several of the most important economic models of climate change produce climate dynamics inconsistent with the current crop of models in climate science. First, most economic models exhibit far too long a delay between an impulse of CO2 emissions and warming. Second, few economic...

Optimal climate policy is studied in a Ramsey growth model with exhaustible oil reserves, an infinitelyelastic supply of renewables, stock-dependent oil extraction costs and convex climate damages. Weconcentrate on economies with an initial capital stock below that of the steady state of the...

The optimal social cost of carbon is in general equilibrium proportional to GDP if utility is logarithmic, production is Cobb-Douglas, depreciation in 100% every period, climate damages as fraction of production decline exponentially with the stock of atmospheric carbon, and fossil fuel...

We analyse optimal abatement and carbon pricing strategies under a variety of economic, temperature and damage risks. Economic growth, convex damages and temperature-dependent risks of climatic tipping points lead to higher growth rates, but gradual resolution of uncertainty lowers them. For...