10$ a ton of carbon ? The Stern-Nordhaus Controversy: Methodological and Ethical Issues

10$ la tonne de carbone ? La controverse Stern-Nordhaus: enjeux méthodologiques et éthiques

Mathieu Guigourez ()
Additional contact information
Mathieu Guigourez: CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: The Stern-Nordhaus controversy has been emblematic of the economic and ethical debate around the formulation of a discount rate and a carbon price. The aim of this article is to study this controversy in order to shed light on the epistemological and ethical postulates implicitly accepted by the two economists in their work, and more broadly in the integrated models concluding to a social cost of carbon. These implicitly accepted postulates are 1) the comprehension of economic rationality solely as the maximization of expected utility, and 2) a consequentialist point of view. The latter compartmentalize the scope of the ethical debate into cleavages over the formulation of an optimal discount rate. This article aims to broaden the ethical debate around these integrated models by questioning the implicit normativity of how economic rationality is at play in these models and proposes a new way of conceiving individual responsibility in regard to climate change.

Keywords: Integrated Assessment Models; Economic Rationality; Discount Rate; Social Cost of Carbon; Individual Responsibility; Philosophy of Economics; Expected utility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-05
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04161930
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04161930/document (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:hal:wpaper:hal-04161930

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().