Instructor - Prof. David Anthoff

Meets - 2nd 7 week session on TTh 4 - 5:30pm

2024 Dana

Overview and course summary
This course is a self-contained introduction to the economics of climate change. Climate change is caused by a large variety of economic activities and many of its impacts will have economic consequences. Economists have studied climate change for more than two decades and economic arguments are often powerful in policy decisions. The course will familiarize students with these arguments and equip them with the tools to participate in discussions of climate change policy through an economic lens.
The course will start with a brief review of the science of climate change, discuss scenarios of economic growth and the greenhouse gas emissions caused by economic activities and investigate various emission reduction opportunities and their economic costs. A significant amount of time will be spent on studying the impacts of climate change, their economic evaluation and how adaptation can lower the costs of climate damages. We will then study various theoretical frameworks economists have developed that answer the question how estimates about the costs and benefits of climate policy can be combined to find “good” climate policies. We then study three more specialized topics that turn out to be of great importance when analyzing climate change policy: first, how do we compare costs and benefits of generations that live many centuries apart? Second, how do we design climate policy when our projections of both the costs and the benefits of climate policy are highly uncertain? And third, how can equity considerations be accounted for in an economic assessment of climate change policy. The course will close with a look at international cooperation on climate policy and why it has been so difficult to agree on effective treatise that implement climate change policy.

Prerequisites: The course does not require any previous knowledge of economics or climate science. Students should have solid algebra skills and be familiar with Excel.