Berlin 2015 – scientific programme
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AKE: Arbeitskreis Energie
AKE 14: Physics of Sustainability and Human-Nature Interactions I (joint with DY, jDPG, BP, AKE) - session accompanying the sympoisum SYPS
AKE 14.6: Talk
Wednesday, March 18, 2015, 18:15–18:30, MA 001
Sustainabilty for a Warming Planet — •Humberto Llavador1,2, John Roemer3, and Joaquim Silvestre4 — 1Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) — 2Barcelona GSE — 3Yale University — 4University of California, Davis
A clean biosphere is a resource in jeopardy due to man-made GHG emissions. What is the fair way to share this scarce global resource across present and future generations, and across regions of the world? This study proposes that the guiding ethics should be sustainability and egalitarianism. Sustainability is interpreted as a pattern of economic activity over time that sustains a given rate of growth of human welfare indefinitely; in doing so, the atmospheric concentration of carbon must be capped at some level not much higher than exists today.
Human welfare depends not only upon consumption, but also upon education, knowledge, and a clean biosphere. The analysis shows that we should be investing more in education and substantially more in knowledge creation than is currently the case.
International cooperation is vital in capping global greenhouse gas emissions at a sufficiently low level. We propose that solving the bargaining problem between developing and developed nations requires recognizing the relationship between economic growth and the climate problem. We propose that the dates at which developing countries converge in living standards to those of developed countries should not be altered by the agreement. This principle, along with sustainability, suffices to determine how emissions should be allocated across regions and time.