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Climate Change, Climate Engineering R&D

Author(s): Bickel JE, Lane L

Published: May, 2012

Publisher: Copenhagen Consensus Center

Tags: Research, Economics

URL: http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Projects/CC12/Research/ClimateChange.aspx

Abstract: This paper seeks to answer a question that has been posed as part of the Copenhagen Consensus 2012 (CC12) exploration of global policy. That question is: “If the global community wants to spend up to, say, $75 billion over the next four years to do most good for the world, which solutions would yield the greatest net benefits?” To address this question, we agreed to update our Copenhagen Consensus 2009 (CC09) paper (Bickel and Lane 2010), hereafter BL10. That paper estimated the net benefit of a research and development (R&D) program to explore the safety and efficacy of climate engineering (CE). The current paper extends those estimates. BL10 considered two different CE approaches, solar radiation management (SRM) and air capture. In this paper, however, we restrict our attention to SRM. The paper is intended to be selfcontained. The interested reader will, however, find many supporting details and further discussion in BL10. We begin by first acknowledging that the potential benefit of SRM is so obvious that one hardly needs a formal economic assessment to prove that researching its merits could pay large dividends. The logic is simple: if global warming will cause large damages and require costly abatement measures, then having a relatively low cost SRM technique to offset warming, even partially, would pay large dividends. Furthermore, initial studies estimate the cost of an SRM R&D program as being on the order of a billion dollars. This sum is a small fraction of the CC12 budget. It is an even smaller fraction of what the United States alone is spending on climate‐change research each year. Thus, we believe that the case for including SRM R&D in a portfolio of responses to climate change is strong. Others, such as the Royal Society, agree (Royal Society 2009). Yet, the CC12 process requires numeric benefit‐cost ratio (BCR) estimates. A truly comprehensive benefit cost analysis of R&D into SRM would require quantifying many factors that are highly uncertain. Such an analysis might create the illusion of rigor, but its extreme complexity would be more likely to obscure the policy choices at hand than to clarify them. We have therefore not carried out the most technically detailed analysis that we could imagine. In fact, as discussed below, we decided not to perform a “value of information” or an “options analysis”. We made this choice precisely because we believe that given the current state of knowledge, such analysis would have offered very little in the way of additional insight. Thus, our SRM R&D BCR estimates are necessarily incomplete. We offer them in hopes that initial R&D will produce the new knowledge needed for more refined analysis.


An Analysis of Climate Engineering as a Response to Climate Change

Author(s): Bickel JE, Lane L

Published: September, 2009

Publisher: Copenhagen Consensus Center

Tags: Economics, Overview

URL: fixtheclimate.com/fileadmin/templates/page/scripts/downloadpdf.php?file=/uploads/tx_templavoila/AP_Climate_Engineering_Bickel_Lane_v.5.0.pdf

Abstract: This paper offers a preliminary and exploratory assessment of the potential benefits and costs of climate engineering (CE). We examine two families of CE technologies, solar radiation management (SRM) and air capture (AC), under three emissions control environments: no controls, optimal abatement, and limiting temperature change to 2°C. Our analysis suggests that SRM offers potentially large net benefits, but that many important uncertainties remain. The near-term net benefits of AC appear to be much lower than those of SRM. However, we argue that both deserve to be investigated further. In the case of SRM, we focus on two specific technologies: the injection of aerosols into the stratosphere and the increase of marine cloud albedo. We estimate direct benefit-cost (B/C) ratios of around 25 to 1 for aerosols and around 5000 to 1 for cloud albedo enhancement. Technological progress might ignificantly lower direct cost estimates of stratospheric aerosols and thus raise the expected benefits. Yet, large uncertainties remain about the science and engineering of actually deploying SRM. Only a substantial research program could resolve these uncertainties, but the very large potential net benefits of SRM offer strong prima facie evidence for including R&D on SRM as a part of any portfolio of climate policies during the next decade. Therefore, we suggest that the Copenhagen Consensus allocate an average of approximately 0.3% of its $250 billion annual climate-change budget ($750 million per year) to SRM and AC research over the next decade. SRM is the higher priority, owing to its larger and earlier net benefit potential. This research program should explicitly focus on identifying possible side effects, especially those which might imply non-trivial costs. We estimate that the benefit of a single watt per square meter of SRM results in almost a 35% decrease in climate damages and abatement costs (over $6 trillion) under an emissions control regime of optimal abatement. Furthermore, when considering only the impact on temperature, we show that a single watt per square meter of SRM has the same economic benefit as capturing and sequestering almost 65% of yearly CO2 emissions, which, in conjunction with AC’s significant costs, argues in favor of SRM in the near term. In addition to quantitative benefit and cost estimates, we stress the potential importance of transaction costs and “political market failures.” Some of these costs could be significant, but may be less so than with other strategies for coping with climate change.


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