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Social cost of carbon estimates have increased over time

Abstract

Estimates of the social cost of carbon are the yardstick for climate policy targets. However, there is great uncertainty and we do not know how estimates have evolved over time. Here I present a meta-analysis of published estimates showing that the social cost of carbon has increased as knowledge about climate change accumulates. Correcting for inflation and emission year and controlling for the discount rate, kernel density decomposition reveals a non-stationary distribution. In the past 10 years, estimates of the social cost of carbon have increased from US$9 per tCO2 to US$40 per tCO2 for a high discount rate and from US$122 per tCO2 to US$525 per tCO2 for a low discount rate. This trend is statistically significant if sensitivity analyses are discounted and paper quality weighted. Actual carbon prices are below its estimated value almost everywhere and should therefore go up.

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Fig. 1: Average social cost of carbon by publication year.
Fig. 2: Histogram of the social cost of carbon.

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All data can be found in GitHub.Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

P. Dolton, E. Lavoie and J. Stock provided constructive comments on earlier versions that made this paper much better. A number of authors gracefully shared their estimates of the social cost of carbon. No external funding supported this research.

Author information

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This is a single-authored paper. There are no ghostwriters and no research assistants.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Richard S. J. Tol.

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Nature Climate Change thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Year of emission and year of nominal dollar by year of publication.

Estimates are weighted such that every published paper counts equally.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 2 Composite kernel density of the growth rate of the social cost of carbon and its composition by discount rate.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 3 Empirical median and interquartile range of the social cost of carbon for six subperiods and the whole sample, and for four alternative weights.

Sample sizes and further statistics are in Supplementary Tables S1 and S2.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 4 The pure rate of time preference used to estimate the social cost of carbon by publication period.

Estimates are weighted such that every published paper counts equally.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 5 Year fixed effects from a regression of the social cost of carbon on the pure rate of time preference, using quality weights.

The base year is 1982; dots denoted the estimated coefficients; error bars denote the 67% confidence interval.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 6 Composite kernel density of the social cost of carbon and its composition by the pure rate of time preference.

Source data

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Full list of references, Supplementary Tables 1–18, Supplementary Figs. 1–16 and a description of the assumptions and methods behind these tables and figures.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Raw data, tables and figures; at https://github.com/rtol/metascc.

Source Data Fig. 2

Raw data, tables and figures (top); bespoke statistical software (bottom); at https://github.com/rtol/metascc.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 1

Raw data, tables and figures.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 2

Bespoke statistical software, at https://github.com/rtol/metascc.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 3

Raw data, tables and figures.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 4

Raw data, tables and figures.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 5

Regression results from socialcostcarbon.do and socialcostcarbon.dta; at https://github.com/rtol/metascc.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 6

Bespoke statistical software, at https://github.com/rtol/metascc.

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Tol, R.S.J. Social cost of carbon estimates have increased over time. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 532–536 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01680-x

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