The social cost of atmospheric release

Drew T. Shindell

No 2013-56, Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: The author presents a multi-impact economic valuation framework called the Social Cost of Atmospheric Release (SCAR) that extends the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) used previously for carbon dioxide (CO2) to a broader range of pollutants and impacts. Values consistently incorporate health and agricultural impacts of air quality along with climate damages. The latter include damages associated with aerosol-induced hydrologic cycle changes that lead to net climate benefits when reducing cooling aerosols. Evaluating a 1% reduction in current global emissions, benefits with a high discount rate are greatest for reductions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), followed by co-emitted products of incomplete combustion (PIC) and then CO2 and methane. With a low discount rate, benefits are greatest for CO2 reductions, and are nearly equal to the total from SO2, PIC and methane. These results suggest that efforts to mitigate atmosphere-related environmental damages should target a broad set of emissions including CO2, methane and aerosols. Illustrative calculations indicate environmental damages are $150-510 billion per year for current US electricity generation (~6-20¢ per kWh for coal, ~2-11¢ for gas) and $0.73±0.34 per gallon of gasoline ($1.20±0.70 per gallon for diesel). These results suggest that total atmosphere-related environmental damages plus generation costs are greater for coal-fired power than other sources, and damages associated with gasoline vehicles exceed those for electric vehicles.

Keywords: environmental economics; valuation; air pollution; climate; government policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q51 Q53 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-tre
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/discussionpapers/2013-56
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/85245/1/77049417X.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:ifwedp:201356

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().