van Wijnbergen, S. and Willems, T. (2015). Optimal learning on climate change: why climate skeptics should reduce emissions Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 70:17--33.
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Affiliated authorSweder van Wijnbergen
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Publication year2015
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JournalJournal of Environmental Economics and Management
Climate skeptics typically argue that the possibility that global warming is exogenous, implies that we should not take additional action towards reducing emissions until we know what drives warming. This paper however shows that even climate skeptics have an incentive to reduce emissions: such a directional change generates information on the causes of global warming. Since the optimal policy depends upon these causes, they are valuable to know. Although increasing emissions would also generate information, that option is inferior due its irreversibility. We show that optimality can even imply that climate skeptics should actually argue for lower emissions than believers.