The agnostic's response to climate deniers: price carbon!

Working paper

With the election of President Trump, climate deniers moved from the fringes to the centre of global policy making and need to be addressed in policy-making. An agnostic approach to policy, based on Pascal's wager, gives a key role to subjective prior probability beliefs about whether climate deniers are right. Policy makers that assign a 10% chance of climate deniers being correct set the global price on carbon to $19.1 per ton of emitted CO2 in 2020. Given that a non-denialist scientist mak...

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Authors: Van der Ploeg, R; Rezai, A

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: University of Oxford Publisher's website
• Series: OxCarre Papers
• Publication date: 2017-11-29
• Paper number: 202
• Keywords: DICE integrated assessment model; climate scepticism; robust climate policies; max-min; climate model uncertainty; min-max regret; ambiguity aversion