Steering the Climate System: Using Inertia to Lower the Cost of Policy
研究发现，传统观点认为碳税应指数增长是低效的；利用气候系统的惯性，最优碳税路径呈倒U形，能降低减排成本并允许更多累积排放。
Common views hold that the efficient way to limit warming to a chosen level is to price carbon emissions at a rate that increases exponentially. We show that this Hotelling tax on carbon emissions is actually inefficient. The least-cost policy path takes advantage of the climate system's inertia to delay reducing emissions and allow greater cumulative emissions. The efficient carbon tax follows an inverse-U-shaped path and grows more slowly than the Hotelling tax. Economic models that assume exponentially increasing carbon taxes are overestimating the cost of limiting warming, overestimating the efficient near-term carbon tax, and overvaluing technologies that mature sooner.