Climate economics

To counter the argument that doing anything about climate change is prohibitively expensive, SEI-US in collaboration with the Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE) seek to reframe the debate.

A growing sense of urgency surrounds the problem of global warming, as the scientific evidence becomes steadily more ominous and compelling. Indeed, as the climate skeptics sink into obscurity, conventional economic analysis is fast replacing them as the leading argument against vigorous, near-term climate policy initiatives.

A handful of widely cited economic models and analyses are often taken as having “proved” that climate change mitigation would be impossibly expensive. Cynicism about the cost of government initiatives in general feeds into the new economic arguments for inaction. Moreover, many people may informally suspect that a little warming might not be so bad – an argument that is reinforced by several leading economic studies that identify near-term benefits from climate change.

SEI contacts: researchers Frank Ackerman, Elizabeth A. Stanton, Ramón Bueno

Selected publications
The Economics of 350: The Benefits and Costs of Climate Stabilization
Report commissioned by the E3 Network, 2009

Climate and Development Economics: Balancing Science, Politics, and Equity
June 19, 2009 Working Paper

Greenhouse Gases and Human Well-Being: China in a Global Perspective
March 31, 2009 Working Paper

Carbon Embedded in China’s Trade
June 16, 2009 Working Paper

Negishi Welfare Weights: The Mathematics of Global Inequality
May 2009 Working Paper

Greenhouse Gases and the American Lifestyle: Understanding Interstate Differences in Emissions
May 2009

Did the Stern Review underestimate US and global climate damages?
by Frank Ackerman, Elizabeth A. Stanton, Chris Hope, Stephane Alberth, Energy Policy 37 (2009) 2717–2721. An earlier version of this article appeared as SEI Working Paper 08-02, October 2008.

Nature Reports: Climate Change
April 9, 2009

Fat Tails, Exponents, and Extreme Uncertainty: Simulating Catastrophe in DICE
February 10, 2009; updated May 11, 2009 Working Paper

Can We Afford the Future? The Economics of a Warming World
January 2009

Inside the Integrated Assessment Models: Four Issues in Climate Economics
2008 Working Paper

Climate Economics in Four Easy Pieces
Development, 2008, 51, (325–331)

Out of the Shadows: What’s Behind DEFRA’s New Approach to the Price of Carbon July 2008

Generated User Benefits and the Heathrow Expansion: Understanding Consumer Surplus
July 2008

The Caribbean and Climate Change: The Costs of Inaction
May 2008

The Cost of Climate Change: What We’ll Pay if Global Warming Continues Unchecked
May 2008

Florida and Climate Change: The Costs of Inaction
November 2007

Hot, It’s Not: Reflections on Cool It!, by Bjorn Lomborg
Climatic Change, volume 89, numbers 3-4, August 2008.

Debating Climate Economics: The Stern Review vs. Its Critics
July 2007

Law and Economics for a Warming World
Harvard Law and Policy Review volume 1, no. 2, pp.331-362.

The Carbon Content of Japan-US Trade
Energy Policy, volume 35 no. 9, September 2007, pp.4455-4462.

The Economics of Inaction on Climate Change: A Sensitivity Analysis
Climate Policy, volume 6 no. 5 (2006), pp.509-526. An earlier version of this article appeared as GDAE Working Paper 06-07. October, 2006.

Climate Change - The Costs of Inaction
Report released with Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland, October 2006.

Can Climate Change Save Lives? A comment on ‘Economy-wide estimates of the implications of climate change: Human health'
Ecological Economics, volume 66 (2008), pp. 8-13. An earlier version of this article appeared as GDAE Working Paper 06-05. September, 2006.

Greenhouse Emissions from Waste Management. A survey of data reported to UNFCCC by Annex I countries
May 20, 2003.