Alan Fortuny Sicart

As stated before, climate change is the biggest negative externality of our century, and that means that the free market will inevitably fail on asigning the right allocation of prices, quantities and the overall scale of the economic activity. The cost of climate change is distributed across the world at difference levels, since some areas are going to be more damage than others, and across generations, since our generation will suffer much less than our grandchildren, and the next generations to come. It also fails to assign the cost to those who contribute the most, both historically and per capita, meaning that an equal effort per country is neither fair nor consistent with an appropiate taxing schema. While there is a great consensus among economist towards taxing carbon, there is little consensus on how this will be implemented per country and what is the fair load per country and generation. If we look at the current per capita contributions of each country, we can encont

In one of my previous posts [4], I showed why despite the scientific consensus of human induced global warming, the society does not see climate change as harmful nor urgent [1][2][3]. The mainstream opinion diverges clearly on the scientific robustness and the urgency of action. As I will motive next, climate change imposses great risk on human and environmental health. Given  the amount of potential damage , the insurance of staying on the 2 degrees scenario is an act of both responsability and justice. Despite the alarmining gap (97% on science versus 50% in some countries), we should not be in dispair, as the parallel story with tobacco and the ozone layer are encouraging [2]. The great difference with global warmining is that there is much more money at stake [2]. That generates a lot of pressure from companies (petrochemicals mainly) that would seen their margins erode, or the need to invest significantly in renewable energies [2]. Another  problem is that climate change i