Arbeitspapier

Climate policy under fat-tailed risk: An application of dice

Uncertainty plays a significant role in evaluating climate policy, and fattailed uncertainty may dominate policy advice. Should we make our utmost effort to prevent the arbitrarily large impacts of climate change under deep uncertainty? In order to answer to this question we propose an new way of investigating the impact of (fat-tailed) uncertainty on optimal climate policy: the curvature of carbon tax against the uncertainty. We find that the optimal carbon tax increases as the uncertainty about climate sensitivity increases, but it does not accelerate as implied by Weitzman's Dismal Theorem. We find the same result in a wide variety of sensitivity analyses. These results emphasize the importance of balancing of the costs and the benefits of climate policy, also under deep uncertainty.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: ESRI Working Paper ; No. 403

Classification
Wirtschaft
Subject
climate change
decision making under uncertainty
fat-tailed risk
integrated assessment
Klimawandel
Umweltpolitik
Entscheidung bei Unsicherheit
Treibhausgas-Emissionen
Ökosteuer
Kosten-Nutzen-Analyse
Theorie

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Hwang, In Chang
Reynès, Frédéric
Tol, Richard S. J.
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)
(where)
Dublin
(when)
2011

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Hwang, In Chang
  • Reynès, Frédéric
  • Tol, Richard S. J.
  • The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)

Time of origin

  • 2011

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