This paper examines a widespread public belief on designing a global climate policy, that is, climate change is a moral issue and should be approached with an ethical standpoint. In this paper, I pose a question of whether a global public goods such as the control of greenhouse gases can be provided efficiently with the adoption of an ethical standard. This paper finds that a global climate policy cannot rely on ethics. The main reasons are existing knowledge gaps in climate change science and economics, heterogeneous economic agents and asymmetric information among them, and the economic reality of winners and losers from the implementation of a climate policy. For a policy to work individuals should be forced to pay an optimal carbon tax regardless of one being ethical or selfish. I relate the discussions to the examples of ‘faith based initiative’, ‘voluntary approach’, and ‘zero discounting’ analysis.
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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number
9018.
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