Climate Treaties and Approaching Catastrophes
By Scott Barrett. Social Science Research Network, 2013
170 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract If the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty, and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs, treaties can easily coordinate countries' behavior so as to avoid the threshold. Where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower, treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe, sustaining only modest cuts in emissions. These results are unaffected by uncertainty about the impact of catastrophe. By contrast, uncertainty about the catastrophic threshold normally causes coordination to collapse. Whether the probability density function has “thin” or “fat” tails makes little difference.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d1de44b6ded4f83f21b440fd31f189f1a179c14
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In Economics and Econometrics
In Global and Planetary Change
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- DIRECTORATE GENERAL FOR INTERNAL POLICIES POLICY DEPARTMENT A: ECONOMIC AND SCIENTIFIC POLICY (2012, background): “In a study on “climate treaties and approaching catastrophes” (Barrett 2013), it was pointed out that if a threshold for a catastrophe is known with certainty and the loss from catastrophe vastly exceeds the cost of avoiding it, the problem of collective action undergoes a change: Rather than cooper”