Cumulative carbon emissions and economic policy: in search of general principles

Simon Dietz and Frank Venmans

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We exploit recent advances in climate science to develop a physically consistent, yet surprisingly simple, model of climate policy. It seems that key economic models have greatly overestimated the delay between carbon emissions and warming, and ignored the saturation of carbon sinks that takes place when the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide rises. This has important implications for climate policy. If carbon emissions are abated, damages are avoided almost immediately. Therefore it is optimal to reduce emissions significantly in the near term and bring about a slow transition to optimal peak warming, even if optimal steady-state/peak warming is high. The optimal carbon price should start relatively high and grow relatively fast.

JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2019-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (107)

Published in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 1, July, 2019, 96, pp. 108-129. ISSN: 0095-0696

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100733/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cumulative carbon emissions and economic policy: In search of general principles (2019)
Working Paper: Cumulative carbon emissions and economic policy: in search of general principles (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:100733

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().