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Review of Environmental Economics and Policy Advance Access published online on April 23, 2008
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, doi:10.1093/reep/rem022
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

A Critique of the Stern Review's Mitigation Cost Analyses and Integrated Assessment

John P. Weyant*

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   Introduction
 
Early in 2006, former US Vice President Al Gore released the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, about the potential perils of global climate change. It was immensely popular. Its premiere attracted a "who's who" from the entertainment industry and beyond, and it even won an Academy Award. Then in late 2006, in advance of (perhaps strategically) the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007a, b, and c), the government of the United Kingdom released with great fanfare (Blair 2006) a comprehensive new study, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Stern 2006) (hereafter, the Review). The release of these two publications and the scientific research upon which they allegedly drew has attracted political, media, and public attention to climate change that has not been seen before. Since these two major works did not emerge through the normal scientific . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Literature on Mitigation Costs
 
Uncertainty of Projections
Assumptions About Government Policies
Bounds on the Estimates
General Principles for Decreasing Mitigation Costs
A Simple Illustration

   The Review's Approach to Mitigation Costs
 
Bottom-Up Cost Projections
Top-Down Cost Projections
Critique of Top-Down Mitigation Cost Projections

   Putting the Review's Mitigation Cost Estimates in Perspective
 
Treatment of Technology
Why the Cost Projections in the Review are Lower Than in the Literature
A More Useful Perspective on Mitigation Costs?

   The Review's Integration of the Costs and Benefits of Climate Policies
 
Critique of the Review's Integration of Costs and Benefits
Critique of the Review's Approach to Discounting

   Conclusions
 

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