Climate Change and Global Equity

Frank Ackerman, Elizabeth A. Stanton

Description

This collection of essays incisively warns that inaction on climate change will have far-reaching economic and environmental consequences.

Ambitious measures to reduce carbon emissions are all too rare in reality, impeded by economic and political concerns rather than technological advances. In this collection of essays, Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton show that the impact of inaction on climate change will be far worse than the cost of ambitious climate policies.

After setting out the basic principles which must shape contemporary climate economics, Ackerman and Stanton consider common flaws in climate change policy – from mistaken assumptions that dismiss the welfare of future generations and anticipate little or no growth in low-income countries, to unrealistic projections of climate damages that dismiss catastrophic risks – and offer their own insightful remedies. They question the usefulness of conventional integrated assessment models (IAMs) that model the long-term interaction between economic growth and climate change, and propose an alternative in their Climate and Regional Economics and Development (CRED) model.

In this incisive work, Stanton and Ackerman offer a timely and original contribution to the fields of climate economics and global equity.

Introduction; Publication History; PART I: PERSPECTIVES ON CLIMATE AND EQUITY; Chapter 1. Climate Economics in Four Easy Pieces; Chapter 2. Carbon Markets Are Not Enough; Chapter 3. Modelling Pessimism: Does Climate Stabilization Require a Failure of Development?; Chapter 4. The Tragedy of Maldistribution: Climate, Sustainability, and Equity; PART II: ANALYSES OF CLIMATE DAMAGES; Chapter 5. Climate Impacts on Agriculture: A Challenge to Complacency?; Chapter 6. Did the Stern Review Underestimate U.S. and Global Climate Change?; Chapter 7. Can Climate Change Save Lives? A Comment on “Economy-Wide Estimates of the Implications of Climate Change: Human Health”; PART III: THEORY AND METHODS OF INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT; Chapter 8. Inside the Integrated Assessment Models: Four Issues in Climate Economics; Chapter 9. Limitations of Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change; Chapter 10. Negishi Welfare Weights in Integrated Assessment Models: The Mathematics of Global Inequality; PART IV: APPLICATIONS OF INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT MODELS; Chapter 11. Climate Risks and Carbon Prices: Revising the Social Cost of Carbon; Chapter 12. Epstein-Zin utility in DICE: Is Risk Aversion Irrelevant to Climate Policy?; Chapter 13. Fat Tails, Exponents, Extreme Uncertainty: Simulating Catastrophe in DICE; Chapter 14. Climate Damages in the FUND Model: A Disaggregated Analysis; Chapter 15. Climate Policy and Development: An Economic Analysis; Appendix: Supplementary Data for Chapter 3; Notes; References

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783080243
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Climate Change and Global Equity

ANTHEM ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY

General Editor Lawrence Susskind – Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT), USA

Our newAnthem Environment and Sustainabilitybook publishing programme seeks to push the frontiers of scholarship while simultaneously offering prescriptive and programmatic advice to policymakers and practitioners around the world. In this programme, we publish research monographs, professional and major reference works, upperlevel textbooks and general interest titles.

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ANTHEM FRONTIERS OF GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Series Editors Kevin Gallagher – Boston University, USA Jayati Ghosh – Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Editorial Board Stephanie Blankenburg – School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), UK HaJoon Chang – University of Cambridge, UK WanWen Chu – RCHSS, Academia Sinica, Taiwan Léonce Ndikumana – University of MassachusettsAmherst, USA Alica Puyana Mutis – Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLASCOMéxico), Mexico Matías Vernengo – Banco Central de la República Argentina, Argentina Robert Wade – London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK Yu Yongding – Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), China

TheGlobal Political EconomyAnthem Frontiers of series seeks to trigger and attract new thinking in global political economy, with particular reference to the prospects of emerging markets and developing countries. Written by renowned scholars from different parts of the world, books in this series provide historical, analytical and empirical perspectives on national economic strategies and processes, the implications of global and regional economic integration, the changing nature of the development project, and the diverse globaltolocal forces that drive change. Scholars featured in the series extend earlier economic insights to provide fresh interpretations that allow new understandings of contemporary economic processes.

Climate Change and Global Equity

Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2014 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © 2014 Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library CataloguinginPublication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Ackerman, Frank, author. Climate change and global equity / Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton. pages cm. – (Anthem environment and sustainability) (Anthem frontiers of global political economy) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 9781783080205 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 1783080205 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Climatic changes–Economic aspects. 2. Climatic changes–Political aspects. I. Stanton, Elizabeth A., author. II. Title. QC903.A144 2014 363.738’74–dc23 2014011576

ISBN13: 978 1 78308 020 5 (Hbk) ISBN10: 1 78308 020 5 (Hbk)

Cover photo: “Houses and Factories” c. 1941, courtesy of the US Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection

This title is also available as an ebook.

Introduction

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Publication History

Part I: Perspectives on Climate and Equity Chapter 1. Climate Economics in Four Easy Pieces Chapter 2. Carbon Markets Are Not Enough Chapter 3. Modeling Pessimism: Does Climate Stabilization Require a Failure of Development? Chapter 4. The Tragedy of Maldistribution: Climate, Sustainability and Equity

Part II: Analyses of Climate Damages Chapter 5. Climate Impacts on Agriculture: A Challenge to Complacency? Chapter 6. Did the Stern Review Underestimate US and Global Climate Change? Chapter 7. Can Climate Change Save Lives? A Comment on “EconomyWide Estimates of the Implications of Climate Change: Human Health”

Part III: Theory and Methods of Integrated Assessment Chapter 8. Inside the Integrated Assessment Models: Four Issues in Climate Economics Chapter 9. Limitations of Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change

vii xi

3 13

21

37

57

67

79

93

115

vi

Chapter 10.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL EQUITY

Negishi Welfare Weights in Integrated Assessment Models: The Mathematics of Global Inequality

133

Part IV: Applications of Integrated Assessment Models Chapter 11. Climate Risks and Carbon Prices: Revising the Social Cost of Carbon 151 Chapter 12. Epstein–Zin Utility in DICE: Is Risk Aversion Irrelevant to Climate Policy? 169

Chapter 13.

Chapter 14.

Chapter 15.

Appendix. Notes References

Fat Tails, Exponents, Extreme Uncertainty: Simulating Catastrophe in DICE

Climate Damages in the FUND Model: A Disaggregated Analysis

Climate Policy and Development: An Economic Analysis

Supplementary Data for Chapter 3

183

203 217

231 235 249

INTRODUCTION

Technical solutions to the threat of climate change are not difficult to imagine. Existing technologies could eliminate most or all greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation, transportation, and other carbonintensive activities. Progress in this direction would undoubtedly spur the development of even better and cheaper techniques for reducing emissions in the future. Yet ambitious measures to reduce carbon emissions are all too rare in reality. The obstacles to climate protection are primarily economic and political, rather than technological. Powerful interests strongly prefer the status quo to massive investment in emission reductions. Debates over equitable sharing of the costs of climate protection, both internationally and intranationally, have stymied many efforts to move forward on this urgent issue. This book presents our research related to these themes, addressing the joint problems of climate and global equity. The articles included here, almost all from peerreviewed journals, argue that the impacts of inaction on climate change will be far worse than the costs of ambitious climate policies, and that progress toward global equity is indispensable to the attempt to stabilize the climate. The book is divided into four sections. The first presents our general economic perspectives on climate and equity. “Climate Economics in Four Easy Pieces” is a short summary of a framework for analysis, incorporating four fundamental principles that should shape the field: the importance of future generations, the central role of the risks of catastrophic outcomes, the impossibility of monetization of all important impacts (and hence the impossibility of traditional cost–benefit analysis), and the reasons why damage costs are worse than protection costs. “Carbon Markets Are Not Enough” argues that, especially for developing countries, carbon prices must be combined with extensive nonprice policies in order to create equitable, developmentoriented climate policies. “Modeling Pessimism” suggests that many climate scenarios assume slow growth for lowincome countries, a cynical assumption which has the effect of reducing projected global emissions. It outlines the policy adjustments that would be needed for emission reduction

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in an equitable world, where many developing countries achieve high rates of growth. “The Tragedy of Maldistribution” proposes a new approach to the question of equity, treating it as a public good that is an important component of sustainability. In our recent review of the state of climate economics (Ackerman and Stanton 2012a), we identified the measurement of climate damages as one of the greatest weaknesses in current economic analyses of climate change. The second section of this book includes three articles addressing questions regarding climate damages. “Climate Impacts on Agriculture” examines an area where recent research challenges more complacent earlier conclusions and implies that there will be greater and more abrupt decreases in crop yields as the world warms and precipitation patterns change. “Did the Stern Review Underestimate US and Global Climate Damages?” coauthored by Chris Hope, the economic modeler for the Stern Review, reexamines the model runs and assumptions used by Nicholas Stern in his pathbreaking analysis, finding good reasons to believe that climate damages will be even worse than implied by the Stern Review. “Can Climate Change Save Lives?” is a short critique of a published analysis by other economists, in which they suggest that the first stages of global warming could save vast numbers of lives; as we explain, that conclusion rests on a series of errors. The third and fourth sections of the book turn to integrated assessment models (IAMs), which have become central to climate economics. IAMs model the interacting processes of longrun economic growth and climate change, aiming to capture the complex feedbacks between these processes. The third section examines the framework and theory of IAMs. “Inside the Integrated Assessment Models” is a review article assessing key aspects of 30 different IAMs found in recent literature, identifying wide differences in assumptions and results. “Limitations of Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change” examines the economic theory underlying IAMs, finding that they rely on questionable approaches, minimize catastrophic risks and impacts on future generations, and do not provide reasonable policy guidance. “Negishi Welfare Weights in Integrated Assessment Models” highlights a technical procedure, used in solving many IAMs, that has the effect of freezing the current global distribution of income, ensuring that the models’ solutions do not include significant movements toward international equity. The fourth section of the book includes five articles on IAMs in practice, four based on wellknown IAMs and a final one on our own efforts to create a better IAM. While there are numerous IAMs in economics literature, policy debate has often focused more narrowly on a handful of the best known and simplest models. Both the periodic reviews of economic literature by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the US

INTRODUCTION

i

x

government’s calculation of a “social cost of carbon” (i.e., the value of the incremental damages caused by an additional unit of greenhouse gas emissions) for use in policy assessment have relied on IAMs that appear to have been chosen for familiarity or ease of use. In particular, the DICE model, developed and publicly released by William Nordhaus, has become a de facto openaccess standard for research purposes. Like many other researchers, we have experimented with modifications to DICE; the barebones simplicity of the model, representing the entire global processes of economic growth and climate change in a system of only 19 equations, essentially guarantees that important features have been omitted. “Climate Risks and Carbon Prices” develops sensitivity analyses of the US government’s 2010 estimate of the social cost of carbon – the marginal damage caused by an additional ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Their estimate was a precise and small numerical value of $21 per ton. Using the DICE model, we demonstrate that important uncertainties about future damages, the discount rate, and the expected pace of climate change make this estimate highly questionable, with risks of values more than an order of magnitude higher. (The 2013 update to the US estimate raised the value somewhat, but did not change the methodology of calculation, and did not approach the higher values discussed in our article.) “Epstein–Zin Utility in DICE” introduces an important theoretical innovation from finance literature, allowing separate treatment of time preference and risk aversion; conventional approaches in both climate economics and finance conflate these two distinct factors, with paradoxical results. With this innovation, DICE recommends much faster abatement of emissions, but remains all but unable to model the effects of risk aversion. “Fat Tails, Exponents, Extreme Uncertainty” is an attempt to provide an explicit treatment of catastrophic risks in DICE; modifications to both the climate sensitivity parameter (governing the pace of climate change) and the shape of the damage function are required to make DICE predict catastrophic outcomes. “Climate Damages in the FUND Model” addresses another one of the mostdiscussed IAMs. A complex model with many more “moving parts” than DICE, FUND often estimates lower climate damages and social cost of carbon values than other models. This article explores the calculation of damages in FUND, identifying serious problems of data and logic in its treatment of agriculture. Finally, “Climate Policy and Development” reports on our own IAM, the Climate and Regional Economics of Development (CRED) model. CRED was designed to model substantial transfers of resources between world regions, simultaneously pursuing the goals of global equity and climate protection; each scenario reports both climate and equity outcomes. Under some, but not

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all, scenarios, development policy (modeled as the generosity of interregional resource transfers) makes the difference between success and failure in long term climate stabilization. We wrote these articles while working together on climate economics at the Stockholm Environment Institute’s US Center, located at Tufts University. The third longterm member of our research team, Ramón Bueno, appears as a coauthor of several articles here, but his role was much bigger than that. A skilled software analyst and computer modeler whose knowledge and hard work made possible the more ambitious results in this book, Ramón is a wonderful colleague and friend, who we thoroughly enjoyed working with. Thanks are also due to the other coauthors of articles in this book, and to our hardworking research assistants. The Stockholm Environment Institute, the E3 Network (Economists for Equity and Environment), and other funders provided the support that allowed us to carry out this research agenda. Thanks to Anthem Press for its enthusiastic support of our work and to Becca Keane for smoothly turning this scattered collection of articles into a more booklike manuscript. We are now continuing work on related issues, with a more specific and applied focus on the US electricity system, at Synapse Energy Economics. Interested readers can follow our more recent work at http://www.synapse energy.com. Frank Ackerman’s publications are also available at http:// frankackerman.com.

Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton, July 2013.