The Social Cost of Carbon
Slides [link]Lecture 1
The Social Cost of Carbon
Required
- Watch this short video by UC Berkeley’s Max Auffhammer.
- Read this Social Cost of Carbon 101 from Resources for the future.
- Optional: You can watch a video of RFF’s 2022 release of their updated estiamte of the SCC here.
Response questions
- What is the social cost of carbon?
- What are the key steps involved in calculating it? What part of that process seems most difficult? (one paragraph)
Additional material:
- Greenstone, Kopits, Wolverton (REEP 2013)
- Pindyck (REEP 2011) on the importance of uncertainty.
- Nordhaus PNAS (2017) on updating the SCC.
- “The most important number you’ve never heard of” from the BBC.
Key Points
- An efficient carbon tax would be set equal to the marginal external damages.
- Computing this number involves simultaneously modeling carbon emissions, the climate impacts, the physical and biological response and the economics impacts, over the course of centuries...
- In 2009 the US IAWG undertook an important first step in calculating the SCC