New results on the economic costs of climate change


I promised you I would be tracking this issue, and so here is a major development.  From the QJE by Adrien Bilal and Diego R Känzig::

This paper estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are an order of magnitude larger than previously thought. Exploiting natural global temperature variability, we find that 1C warming reduces world GDP by over 20% in the long run. Global temperature correlates strongly with extreme climatic events, unlike country-level temperature used in previous work, explaining our larger estimate. We use this evidence to estimate damage functions in a neoclassical growth model. Business-as-usual warming implies a present welfare loss of more than 30%, and a Social Cost of Carbon in excess of $1,200 per ton. These impacts suggest that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.

Here is an open access version.  You may recall that earlier estimates of climate change costs were more like a five to ten percent welfare loss to the world.  I do not however find the main results here plausible.  The estimation is extremely complicated, and based on the premise that a higher global temperature does more harm to a region than a higher local temperature.  And are extreme events a “productivity shock,” or a one-time resource loss that occasions some Solow catch-up?  Is the basic modeling consistent with the fact that, while the number of extreme storms may be rising, the number of deaths from those same storms is falling over time?  Lives lost are not the same as economic costs, but still the capacity for adjustment seems considerably underrated.   What about the effects to date?  The authors themselves write: “According to our counterfactual, world GDP per capita would be more than 20% higher today had no warming occurred between 1960 and 2019.”  I absolutely do not believe that claim.

In any case, here is your update.  To be clear, I do absolutely favor the development of alternative, less polluting energy sources.




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