Weston Roundtable Series: Ethics and the Social Cost of Carbon

Speaker: Paul Kelleher, Associate Professor, Departments of Philosophy & Bioethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus has called the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) “the most important single concept in the economics of climate change.” This talk will explicate the SCC concept, in part by distinguishing between two very different types of SCC. It will then explore the complicated role of ethics in the construction of SCC values and in the way those values are used by policymakers.