On a World Climate Assembly and the Social Cost of Carbon

Martin Weitzman

No 22813, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper postulates the conceptually useful allegory of a futuristic “World Climate Assembly” (WCA) that votes for a single worldwide price on carbon emissions via the basic democratic principle of one-person one-vote majority rule. If this WCA framework can be accepted in the first place, then voting on a single internationally- binding minimum carbon price (the proceeds from which are domestically retained) tends to counter self-interest by incentivizing countries or agents to internalize the externality. I attempt to sketch out the sense in which each WCA-agent's extra cost from a higher emissions price is counter-balanced by that agent's extra benefit from inducing all other WCA-agents to simultaneously lower their emissions in response to the higher price. The first proposition of this paper derives a relatively simple formula relating each emitter's single-peaked most-preferred world price of carbon emissions to the world “Social Cost of Carbon” (SCC). The second and third propositions relate the WCA-voted world price of carbon to the world SCC. I argue that the WCA-voted price and the SCC are unlikely to differ sharply. Some implications are discussed. The overall methodology of the paper is a mixture of mostly classical with some behavioral economics.

JEL-codes: F51 H41 K23 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-res
Note: EEE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Martin L. Weitzman, 2017. "On a World Climate Assembly and the Social Cost of Carbon," Economica, vol 84(336), pages 559-586.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22813.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: On a World Climate Assembly and the Social Cost of Carbon (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:nbr:nberwo:22813

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22813

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().