Sustainability for a Warming Planet

335 Pages·2015·8.179 MB·English

by  Humberto Llavador, John E. Roemer, Joaquim Silvestre

Sustainability for a Warming Planet

SUSTAINABILITY
WARMING PLANET
for a
Humberto Llavador
John E. Roemer
Joaquim Silvestre
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, Eng land
2015
Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Many of the designations used by manufactures and sellers to distinguish their prod-
ucts are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and
Harvard University Press was aware of a trademark claim, then the designations
have been printed in initial capital letters.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-P ublication Data
Llavador, Humberto.
Sustainability for a warming planet / Humberto Llavador, John E. Roemer, and
Joaquim Silvestre.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-74409-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Climate change mitigation.
2. Greenh ouse gas mitigation. 3. Carbon sequestration. I. Roemer, John E.
II. Silvestre, Joaquim. III. Title.
QC903.L53 2015
363.738'747— dc23 2014041195
for Pau
for Sara and Andrea
for Jordi
and their generation

Contents
Preface • ix
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. Sustainability and Discounted Utilitarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
chapter 1 appendix: The Ramsey Problem • 63
2. An Introductory Model with Education and Skilled Labor . . . . . . .72
chapter 2 appendix: Proofs • 89
3. Sustainability for a Warming World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
chapter 3 appendix: Proofs • 164
4. The “Climate-Change Economics” Literature:
Nordhaus and Stern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
5. Sustainability in a Warming, Two- Region World . . . . . . . . . . . . . .208
chapter 5 appendix: Formal Details • 232
6. Modeling Catastrophes: Two Extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
chapter 6 appendix: Proofs and Calibration • 257
viii Contents
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .264
Appendix A: Calibration • 271
Appendix B: Mathematica Code • 289
References • 301
Index • 311
Preface
We began work on the questions we address in this book when all three
authors w ere at the University of California, Davis, before the year 2000.
Thus, the gestation period for this work has been a long one. Indeed,
when we began working on these issues, we did not conceive of the nega-
tive environmental externality produced by economic activity as global
warming but as other kinds of environmental degradation. This is some-
what embarrassing to report, but it also indicates how the consciousness
of climate change has grown in the economics profession over the past
fi fteen years. Indeed, it was Gus Speth, then dean of the School of Forestry
at Yale University, who encouraged us to change our focus to climate
change. Although we probably would have caught on eventually, we are
grateful to Gus for his intervention.
This brief biography also shows how prescient William Nordhaus was,
to begin working on climate change over three de cades ago. It was not
until 1988 that James Hansen published the critical paper (Hansen et al.
1988) establishing that global warming, not cooling, was the important
trend, yet Nordhaus (1976) wrote a paper on carbon dioxide and climate
change a de cade earlier. We recount this fact because, as the reader will see,
we have disagreements with Nordhaus’s analysis. We wish, however, to put
these into perspective. Our disagreements with him are of the second order:
of the fi rst order, we are deep appreciators of his work, which has done