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Will the Paris Accord Accelerate Climate Change?
[journal article]
Abstract The 2015 Paris climate accord (Paris Agreement) is meant to control our planet’s rising temperature to limit climate change. But it may be doing the opposite in permitting a slow phase-in of CO2
emission mitigation. The accord asks its 195 national signatories to specify their emission reductions a... view more
The 2015 Paris climate accord (Paris Agreement) is meant to control our planet’s rising temperature to limit climate change. But it may be doing the opposite in permitting a slow phase-in of CO2
emission mitigation. The accord asks its 195 national signatories to specify their emission reductions and to raise those contributions over time. However, there is no mechanism to enforce these
pledges. This said, the accord puts dirty energy producers on notice that their days are numbered.
Unfortunately, this “use it or lose it” message may accelerate the extraction and sale of fossil fuels
and, thereby, permanently worsen climate change. Our paper uses a simple OLG model to illustrate
this long-noted, highly troubling Green Paradox. Its framework properly treats climate damage as
a negative externality imposed by today’s generations on tomorrow’s—an externality that is, in part,
irreversible and, if large enough, can tip the climate to a permanently bad state. Our paper shows
that delaying abatement can be worse than doing nothing. Indeed, it can make all generations worse
off. In contrast, immediate policy action can make all generations better off. Finally, we question the
standard use of infinitely lived, single-agent models to determine optimal abatement policy. Intergenerational altruism underlies such models. But its assumption lacks empirical support. Moreover,
were such altruism widespread, effective limits on CO2 emissions would, presumably, already be in
place. Unfortunately, optimal abatement prescriptions derived from such models can differ, potentially dramatically, from those actually needed to correct the negative climate externality that today’s
generations are imposing on tomorrow’s... view less
Keywords
emission; international agreement; taxation; climate policy; climate change
Classification
Special areas of Departmental Policy
Free Keywords
Paris Accord; CO2 emissions; overlapping generations; CO2 taxes; green paradox
Document language
English
Publication Year
2021
Page/Pages
p. 8-37
Journal
Ekonomicheskaya Politika / Economic Policy, 16 (2021) 1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18288/1994-5124-2021-1-8-37
ISSN
2411-2658
Status
Published Version; reviewed
Licence
Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0