@booklet {weitzman_world_2016, title = {On a World Climate Assembly and the Social Cost of Carbon}, number = {16-72}, year = {2016}, note = {Weitzman{\textquoteright}s research builds on his previous paper released by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, "Voting on Prices vs. Voting on Quantities in a World Climate Assembly" (June 2015).}, publisher = {Harvard Environmental Economics Program}, type = {Discussion Paper}, address = {Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA}, abstract = {This paper postulates the conceptually useful allegory of a futuristic "World Climate Assembly" (WCA) that votes for a single worldwide price on carbon emissions via the basic democratic principle of one-person one-vote majority rule. If this WCA framework can be accepted in the first place, then voting on a single internationally-binding minimum carbon price (the proceeds from which are domestically retained) tends to counter self-interest by incentivizing countries or agents to internalize the externality. I attempt to sketch out the sense in which each WCA-agent{\textquoteright}s extra cost from a higher emissions price is counter-balanced by that agent{\textquoteright}s extra benefit from inducing all other WCA-agents to simultaneously lower their emissions in response to the higher price. The first proposition of this paper derives a relatively simple formula relating each emitter{\textquoteright}s single-peaked most-preferred world price of carbon emissions to the world "Social Cost of Carbon" (SCC). The second and third propositions relate the WCA-voted world price of carbon to the world SCC. I argue that the WCA-voted price and the SCC are unlikely to differ sharply. Some implications are discussed. The overall methodology of the paper is a mixture of mostly classical with some behavioral economics.}, author = {Weitzman, Martin L.} }