Priority for the Worse Off and the Social Cost of Carbon
| dc.creator | Adler, Matthew | |
| dc.creator | Anthoff, David | |
| dc.creator | Bosetti, Valentina | |
| dc.creator | Garner, Greg | |
| dc.creator | Keller, Klaus | |
| dc.creator | Treich, Nicolas | |
| dc.date | 2017-04-01T20:07:13Z | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-09T10:47:09Z | |
| dc.description | The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using a discounted-utilitarian social welfare function (SWF)—one that simply adds up the well-being numbers (utilities) of individuals, as discounted by a weighting factor that decreases with time. The discounted-utilitarian SWF has been criticized both for ignoring the distribution of well-being, and for including an arbitrary preference for earlier generations. Here, we use a prioritarian SWF, with no time-discount factor, to calculate the SCC in the integrated assessment model RICE. Prioritarianism is a well-developed concept in ethics and theoretical welfare economics, but has been, thus far, little used in climate scholarship. The core idea is to give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse off individuals. We find substantial differences between the discounted-utilitarian and non-discounted prioritarian SCC. | |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.22004/ag.econ.244334 | |
| dc.identifier | https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/244334/files/NDL2016-055.pdf | |
| dc.identifier | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/244334 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/621980 | |
| dc.language | eng | |
| dc.publisher | ||
| dc.source | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/244334 | |
| dc.title | Priority for the Worse Off and the Social Cost of Carbon | |
| dc.type | Text |