Richard Tol of the ESRI will be giving a seminar here on Friday the 22nd at 11am "On International Equity Weights and National Decision Making on Climate Change".
Abstract
Estimates of the marginal damage costs of carbon dioxide emissions require the aggregation of monetised impacts of climate change over people with different incomes and in different jurisdictions. Implicitly or explicitly, such estimates assume a social welfare function and hence a particular attitude towards equity and justice. We show that previous approaches to equity weighing are inappropriate from a national decision maker's point of view, because domestic impacts are not valued at domestic values. We propose four alternatives (sovereignty, altruism, good neighbour, and compensation) with different views on concern for and liability towards foreigners. The four alternatives imply radically estimates of the social cost of carbon and hence the optimal intensity of climate policy.
Speaker Biography
Dr. Richard S.J. Tol joined the ESRI on August 1, 2006 as Senior Research Officer. He specialises in climate, energy and environmental economics. He holds a Doctorate in Economics and a Masters of Science in Econometrics from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Before joining ESRI, he was the Michael Otto Professor of Sustainability and Global Change in the Department of GeoSciences and the Department of Economic Sciences of Hamburg University, Germany; a Principal Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He has been a consultant to the Netherlands Ministry of the Environment, the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs, the German Parliament, the US Office of Technology Assessment, the US Department of Energy, the EC-DG Environment, and the UK House of Lords; and an author (from contributing to convening) for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Richard is the co-editor-in-chief of Energy Economics.
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