Global climate change mitigation is often framed in public discussions as a tradeoff between environmental protection and harm to the economy. However, climate-economy models have consistently calculated that the immediate implementation of greenhouse gas emissions restriction (via e.g. a global carbon price) would be in humanity’s best interest on purely economic grounds. Despite this, the implementation of global climate policy has been notoriously difficult to achieve. This evokes an apparent paradox: if the implementation of a global carbon price is not only beneficial to the environment, but is also ‘economically optimal’, why has it been so difficult to enact? One potential reason for this difficulty is that economically optimal greenhouse gas emissions restrictions are not economically beneficial for the generation of people that launch them. The purpose of this article is to explore this issue by introducing the concept of the break-even year, which we define as t...

中文翻译：

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收支平衡年：了解减缓气候变化政策中代际权衡的概念

减轻全球气候变化的影响常常在公众讨论中被视为在环境保护和对经济的损害之间进行权衡。但是，气候经济模型一直计算得出，从纯粹的经济角度出发，立即实施温室气体排放限制（例如通过全球碳价）将符合人类的最大利益。尽管如此，众所周知，实施全球气候政策仍然困难重重。这引起了一个明显的悖论：如果实施全球碳价不仅对环境有利，而且在“经济上最优化”，为什么制定如此困难？造成这一困难的一个潜在原因是，经济上最佳的温室气体排放限制对发射限制排放的一代没有经济利益。本文的目的是通过介绍盈亏平衡年的概念来探讨这一问题，我们将其定义为...