The social cost of atmospheric release

By D. Shindell. Climatic Change, 2015

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I present 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 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 co-emitted products of incomplete combustion (PIC), followed by sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and then CO2, ammonia and methane. With a low discount rate, benefits are greatest for PIC, with CO2 and SO2 next, followed by NOx and methane. These results suggest that efforts to mitigate atmosphere-related environmental damages should target a broad set of emissions including CO2, methane and aerosol/ozone precursors. Illustrative calculations indicate environmental damages are $330-970 billion yr−1 for current US electricity generation (~14–34¢ per kWh for coal, ~4–18¢ for gas) and $3.80 (−1.80/+2.10) per gallon of gasoline ($4.80 (−3.10/+3.50) per gallon for diesel). These results suggest that total atmosphere-related environmental damages plus generation costs are much greater for coal-fired power than other types of electricity generation, and that damages associated with gasoline vehicles substantially exceed those for electric vehicles.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1cb01abb5cb370ebdbe35ec704438d962f27592

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Citations in the corpus

A retrospective analysis of benefits and impacts of U.S. renewable portfolio standards (2016, methodology): “regulatory agencies (GAO 2014) and academic researchers (Buonocore et al. 2015; Callaway et al. 2015; Cullen 2013; Graff Zivin et al. 2014; Johnson et al. 2013; Kaffine et al. 2013; McCubbin and Sovacool 2013; Novan 2014; Siler-Evans et al. 2013; Shindell 2015).”
Flexibility mechanisms and pathways to a highly renewable US electricity future (2016, background): “A similar cost savings of 190 billion 2006USD/year is found between the same 20% and 80% RPS targets if CO2 plus a broader set of pollutants are considered, assuming the median US-based coal and natural gas generator SCAR (Social Cost of Atmospheric Release) values with a 3% discount rate [65].”
Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries (2017, unknown): “The annual average population weighted PM exposure is ~38% from black and organic carbon and ~11% from ammonia (Shindell 2015), indicating that emissions related to agricultural burning contributes about 3% and those related to fertilizer production and usage about 11% of global PM, though…”