ClimaTea Lecture: "Drivers of peak warming in a utility-maximising world"

This week Dr. Myles Allen from the University of Oxford will discuss how economists would determine peak warming:

"We consider the implications of the linear relationship between cumulative carbon emissions and global temperatures for peak warming in an idealized integrated assessment framework. Under conventional assumptions about climate change, economic growth, mitigation decisions and discounting, peak warming is determined by only two quantities that are directly affected by near-term mitigation policy: the cost of a ‘backstop’ mitigation technology that reduces net carbon dioxide emissions to zero and the growth of productivity of carbon, or the ratio between average rate of economic growth and average emissions between now and the time of peak warming. This highlights the importance of maintaining economic growth in a carbon-constrained world and investing in backstop technologies, such as large-scale carbon dioxide removal, in any utility-maximizing strategy to limit peak warming" (paper attached.)