Underestimating the Social Cost of Carbon

Authors

  • Aravna Lucsama Thompson Rivers University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29173/bcelnfe764

Keywords:

social cost of carbon, climate economics, discount rates, climate damage modeling, climate tipping points, intergenerational equity, climate policy

Author Biography

Aravna Lucsama, Thompson Rivers University

Aravna Lucsama is a second-year Bachelor of Natural Resource Science Co-op student at Thompson Rivers University whose interests center on climate change, environmental policy, and renewable energy. She writes about the social cost of carbon and discounting not as abstract concepts, but as levers that can expand or shrink the value placed on future lives, ecosystems, and infrastructure. In her commentary on underestimating the social cost of carbon, Aravna examines what gets erased when climate damages are treated as distant, uncertain, or easy to discount, and why that mindset can make delayed action look rational on paper. Through research and student leadership, she is committed to connecting technical frameworks to real-world consequences, with particular attention to fairness across communities and generations. She is working toward a future in conservation and climate policy where the numbers reflect the full story, not just the convenient part.

References

Ackerman, F., Stanton, E. A. (2010). The social cost of carbon. Stockholm Environment Institute;. https://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue53/AckermanStanton53.pdf

Buis, A. (2019).The atmosphere: getting a handle on carbon dioxide. Washington (DC): NASA; [accessed 2025 Oct 31]. https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/greenhouse-gases/the-atmosphere-getting-a-handle-on-carbon-dioxide/

Government of Canada. (2023). Social cost of greenhouse gas emissions: estimates and applications. Environment and Climate Change Canada; [accessed 2025 Oct 31]. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/climate-change/science-research-data/social-cost-ghg.html

Guo, J., Hepburn, C. J., Tol, R. S. J., Anthoff, D. (2006). Discounting and the social cost of carbon: a closer look at uncertainty. Environmental Science & Policy, 9(3), 205–216.

IPCC. (2022). Summary for policymakers. In: Climate change 2022: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Cambridge University Press.

Moore, F. C., Drupp, M. A., Rising, J., Dietz, S., Rudik, I., Wagner, G. (2024). Synthesis of evidence yields high social cost of carbon due to structural model variation and uncertainties. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [accessed 2025 Dec 04]. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2410733121

Nordhaus, W. D. (2017). Revisiting the social cost of carbon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114,1518–1523. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1609244114

Pindyck, R. S. (2019). The social cost of carbon revisited. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 94, 140–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2019.02.003

Rennert, K., Errickson, F., Prest, B., Rennels, L., Newell, R., Pizer, W., Kingdon, C., Wingenroth, J., Cooke, R., Parthum, B., Smith, D., Cromar, K., Diaz, D., Moore, F., Müller, U., Plevin, R., Raftery, A., Ševčíková, H., Sheets, H., Stock, J., Tan, T., Watson, M., Wong, T., & Anthoff, D. (2022). Comprehensive evidence implies a higher social cost of CO2. Nature, 610, 687–692. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05224-9

Ricke, K., Drouet, L., Caldeira, K., Tavoni, M. (2018). Country-level social cost of carbon. Nature Climate Change, 8, 895–900. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0282-y

Tol, R. S. J. (2023). Social cost of carbon estimates have increased over time. Nature Climate Change,13, 532–536. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01680-x

Tol, R. (2024). Trends and biases in the social cost of carbon. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1548, 248–259. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.15340

Wang, P., Deng, X., Zhou, H., Yu, S. (2019). Estimates of the social cost of carbon: A review based on meta-analysis. Journal of Cleaner Production, 234, 1235–1248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.11.058

Cover image with title: Perspectives on the economics of Climate Change. Special Issue, March 2026, Online ISSN: 2819-7046. Background image taken by Peter Tsigaris of the University of Auckland campus.

Downloads

Published

2026-03-17

How to Cite

Lucsama, A. (2026). Underestimating the Social Cost of Carbon. Future Earth: A Student Journal on Sustainability and Environment. https://doi.org/10.29173/bcelnfe764

Issue

2026: Special Issue: Perspectives on the Economics of Climate Change

Section

Commentaries and Opinions

Categories

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Future Earth: A Student Journal on Sustainability and Environment

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication, with the work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) License. This license allows others to share and adapt the work, provided proper attribution is given to the original author and the work's initial publication in this journal, and that it is used for non-commercial purposes under the same terms. Authors may also enter into separate, additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., posting it to an institutional repository or including it in a book), with proper acknowledgement of its original publication in this journal.
Authors are encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their personal websites) both prior to and during the submission process, as this can foster productive exchanges and increase the visibility and citation of their work (See The Effect of Open Access).