A month or two ago I came across a paper which calculated the social cost of carbon taking into account that less well off countries would be disproportionately affected by climate change, leading to low or even negative economic growth. A negative g in the Ramsey equation r=d+ng may mean a negative social discount rate, which really increases the social cost of carbon. This gave a SCC in the \$2000 to \$5000 range. I think that the paper was probably published in the last 5 years. I think that it had similar images to the paper Future of the human climate niche, but I may be getting confused. I've spent several hours trying to think of suitable searches on Google, and checking my browser history, but to no avail. Can anybody help me find the paper again.
2 Answers
Perhaps it is "Country-level social cost of carbon" by Ricke et al. (2018)?
Abstract:
The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a commonly employed metric of the expected economic damages from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Although useful in an optimal policy context, a world-level approach obscures the heterogeneous geography of climate damage and vast differences in country-level contributions to the global SCC, as well as climate and socio-economic uncertainties, which are larger at the regional level. Here we estimate country-level contributions to the SCC using recent climate model projections, empirical climate-driven economic damage estimations and socio-economic projections. Central specifications show high global SCC values (median, US\$417 per tonne of CO2 (tCO2); 66% confidence intervals, US\$177–805 per tCO2) and a country-level SCC that is unequally distributed. However, the relative ranking of countries is robust to different specifications: countries that incur large fractions of the global cost consistently include India, China, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
If not, have you tried searching specifically on Google Scholar?
I'm fairly sure that the paper I was thinking of was The social cost of carbon dioxide under climate-economy feedbacks and temperature variability, by Kikstra et. al. which has SCC02 values in the thousands of dollars. One thing I particularly remember is that the values were precise numbers such as $3372 rather than being rounded. I'm rather surprised that I didn't find it from Google Scholar searches, instead it was via an search of browser history back to last October when I looked at it. I would have looked at Future of the human climate niche and Country-level social cost of carbon at the same time, so maybe my memory had bits of those mixed in. (In particular the Kikstra paper doesn't explicitly mention the Ramsey equation)