We estimate the potential ultimate cost of fossil-fuel carbon to a long-lived human population over a one million–year time scale. We assume that this hypothetical population is technologically stationary and agriculturally based, and estimate climate impacts as fractional decreases in economic activity, potentially amplified by a human population response to a diminished human carrying capacity. Monetary costs are converted to units of present-day dollars by multiplying the future damage fractions by the present-day global world production, and integrated through time with no loss due from time-preference discounting. Ultimate costs of C range from $10k to $750k per ton for various assumptions about the magnitude and longevity of economic impacts, with a best-estimate value of about $100k per ton of C. Most of the uncertainty arises from the economic parameters of the model and, among the geophysical parameters, from the climate sensitivity. We argue that the ultimate cost of carbon is a first approximation of our potential culpability to future generations for our fossil energy use, expressed in units that are relevant to us.

中文翻译：

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碳的最终成本

我们估算了一百万年时间尺度内化石燃料碳对长寿人口的潜在最终成本。我们假设这个假设人口在技术上是固定的并且以农业为基础，并将气候影响估计为经济活动的部分减少，人口对人类承载能力下降的反应可能会放大。货币成本通过将未来损失分数乘以当前全球世界产量而转换为当前美元单位，并随着时间的推移进行整合，不会因时间偏好贴现而造成损失。C 的最终成本从每吨 1 万美元到 75 万美元不等，根据对经济影响的大小和持续时间的各种假设，每吨 C 的最佳估计价值约为 10 万美元。大多数不确定性来自模型的经济参数，在地球物理参数中，来自气候敏感性。我们认为，碳的最终成本是我们对我们的化石能源使用对后代的潜在责任的第一个近似值，以与我们相关的单位表示。