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The social cost of carbon: what does it actually depend on?

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  • Chris W. Hope

Abstract

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is the value of the climate change impacts from 1 tonne of carbon emitted today as CO 2 , aggregated over time and discounted back to the present day. We used PAGE2002, the same probabilistic integrated assessment model as used by the Stern Review (Stern et al., 2006), to calculate the SCC and to examine how it varies with discount rate; and find that it is not sensitive to the path of emissions on which the tonne of carbon is superimposed. The mean value of the SCC is $43 per tonne under both a business-as-usual scenario, and under a scenario aimed at stabilizing CO 2 concentrations at 550 ppm. This counter-intuitive result is caused by the interplay between the logarithmic relationship between forcing and concentration, the nonlinear relationship of damage to temperature, and discounting. However, the SCC is sensitive to a number of scientific and economic inputs to the model. Two recent distributions for the sensitivity of climate to a doubling of atmospheric CO 2 (Murphy et al., 2004; Stainforth et al., 2005) increase the mean value of the SCC from $43 to $68 and $90 per tonne. Using a pure rate of time preference of 0.1% per year, as in the Stern Review, gives a mean SCC of $365 per tonne.

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  • Chris W. Hope, 2006. "The social cost of carbon: what does it actually depend on?," Climate Policy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(5), pages 565-572, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:tcpoxx:v:6:y:2006:i:5:p:565-572
    DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2006.9685621
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    1. William D. Nordhaus, 2006. "The "Stern Review" on the Economics of Climate Change," NBER Working Papers 12741, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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    Cited by:

    1. Foley, Duncan K. & Rezai, Armon & Taylor, Lance, 2013. "The social cost of carbon emissions: Seven propositions," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 121(1), pages 90-97.
    2. Dietz, Simon, 2011. "High impact, low probability?: an empirical analysis of risk in the economics of climate change," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 38586, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Richard S.J. Tol, 2021. "Estimates of the social cost of carbon have not changed over time," Working Paper Series 0821, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    4. Duncan Foley & Lance Taylor, 2013. "The Social Cost of Carbon Emissions," SCEPA policy note series. 2013-2, Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), The New School.
    5. Richard S. J. Tol, 2021. "Estimates of the social cost of carbon have increased over time," Papers 2105.03656, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2022.

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