Climate

Climate scientists have long emphasized the importance of climate tipping points like thawing permafrost, ice sheet disintegration, and changes in atmospheric circulation. Yet, save for a few fragmented studies, climate economics has either ignored them or represented them in highly stylized ways. We provide unified estimates of the economic impacts of all eight climate tipping points covered in the economic literature so far using a meta-analytic integrated assessment model (IAM) with a modular structure.

A climate economist overhauls his leaky, 200-year-old co-op.

This paper aims to unpack the pro-social motivations of green innovators. In a field experiment inviting SBIR grantees to learn more about and apply to MIT Solve, we provide scientifically valid scenarios varying the time-frame and scale of human cost of climate change. Innovators' response in clicks and applications increases with both scale and immediacy treatments. Our structural model estimates a welfare discount rate of 0.76%, providing a measure of innovators' value of future generations, and an elasticity to lives lost of 0.23, implying diminishing marginal concern to human loss.

In late 2007, less than 10 years into the company’s existence, Google came out swinging on the clean energy front. To a fanfare of plaudits up and down Silicon Valley and well beyond, it declared “RE<C” as its goal: make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The company invested tens of millions of dollars into R&D efforts from concentrated solar power to hydrothermal drilling. Four years later, those efforts had been scrapped.

With its fixation on equilibrium thinking and an exclusive focus on market factors that can be precisely measured, the neoclassical orthodoxy in economics is fundamentally unequipped to deal with today's biggest problems. Change within the discipline is underway, but it cannot come fast enough.

The green transition comes with costs; but they are well worth it, and they pale in comparison to the costs of inaction. The ever-falling costs of renewables have not eliminated the politics of climate change. But they certainly have made our choices much easier.

The authors propose that purchasing luxury can be a unique means to engage in sustainable consumption because high-end products are particularly durable. Six studies examine the sustainability of high-end products, investigate consumer decision making when considering high-end versus ordinary goods, and identify effective marketing strategies to emphasize product durability, an important and valued dimension of sustainable consumption.

Mere mention of the term ‘social cost of carbon’ (SCC) invites both superlatives as to its importance as the ‘holy grail’ of climate economics and strong counteractions, including calls to have it scrapped altogether. In some sense, the SCC is simply an attempt to answer the question of how bad climate change truly is, typically in US dollars. To some, meanwhile, the SCC is a lagging indicator of the severity of climate change, perennially behind the latest science.

Advice to the Biden administration as it seeks to account for mounting losses from storms, wildfires and other climate impacts.

One of the first executive orders US President Joe Biden signed in January began a process to revise the social cost of carbon (SCC). This metric is used in cost–benefit analyses to inform climate policy. It puts a monetary value on the harms of climate change, by tallying all future damages incurred globally from the emission of one tonne of carbon dioxide now.

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