Open access Poster's note : this economic rationalism methodology tends to overlook emotive and behavioral issues, and possibly overstates 'moral hazard' type arguments as a consequence. Behavioural research shows geoengineering is feared, and thus less preferred than a simple rational agent analysis would suggest. However, a minimax approach may shed some additional light.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publication/why-is-geoengineering-so-tempting/ Why is geoengineering so tempting? 15 October Working Paper 170 Geoengineering can be defined as the technologies that aim to deliberately alter geophysical mechanisms in order to alleviate the impacts of climate change. It has received increasing attention by economists and the public but remains deeply controversial. This paper studies the potential benefits from geoengineering in a standard one-sector growth model augmented with a carbon cycle and a climate system. These benefits can be interpreted as a lower bound for the direct and indirect costs which would make geoengineering less preferable to abatement. In the planner’s solution to the model, exogenous geoengineering in the future increases investment in physical capital and reduces abatement, both today and in the future. The central result of the paper is that the direct and indirect costs of geoengineering must be large for geoengineering not to be tempting. Nevertheless, substantial abatement is optimal even when geoengineering does not entail any costs. A sensitivity analysis establishes how the results change in a world with a lower initial capital stock; an earlier availability of geoengineering; and under different parameter values for the discount rate and the curvature of the damage function. Together these results show how the temptation to use geoengineering can be different for developing and advanced countries. Author Baran Doda -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
