Estimates of the social cost of carbon: A review based on meta-analysis

By Peixue Wang, Xiangzheng Deng, Huimin Zhou, Shangkun Yu. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019

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Abstract There is a great deal of evidence that climate change affects socioeconomic systems. The social cost of carbon (SCC) is calculated by scientists to monetarize the incremental unit of carbon emission and is used to assess climate policies. This study begins with a review of current research on the SCC, followed by a discussion of the choice of models for the SCC. We give a list of advantages of disadvantages of each model and finally use a meta-analysis to evaluate the SCC from published research. The main findings were as follows. (i) Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are often employed to assess the SCC, research on IAMs was started booming in the 1990s and slightly decreased after 2012. (ii) The estimated SCC ranges from −50 to 8752$/tC (−13.36–2386.91$/tCO2), with a mean value of 200.57$/tC (54.70$/tCO2) and it equals to 112.86$/tC (30.78$/tCO2) with a PRTP at 3% in peer-reviewed studies. (iii) The estimated SCC is higher in newer publication year and in peer-reviewed studies, the same trend happens with a higher climatic sensitivity and employing DICE/RICE and PAGE. (iv) The pure rate of time preference (PRTP) is tightly associated with the estimated SCC, and a higher PRTP has a lower estimated SCC. (v) The outliers often appear without realistic scenario setting and in studies have not peer-reviewed.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/152da4f9814a01c1355374adf4719bc985ecd74a

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