The belief that stringent climate policies are very costly is widespread among political decision-makers and the public. The cost argument is often used by governments as a motivation for sluggish policy making. However, such judgements ignore the economic benefits of policy changes and implicitly build on a misguided decomposition of environmental impact into separate population, income, and technology effects. The paper shows that this method predicts policy-induced income losses that are systematically and significantly biased. I extend the decomposition analysis by introducing input substitution, which drastically lowers policy costs. By additionally incorporating a production approach, causal relationships between the drivers of resource use, and a framework for endogenous technology development I develop a new structural equation to assess climate policy effects. For a given decarbonization path, I calculate the projected income development at the global and country level. The use of the structural approach instead of agnostic decomposition suggests that the costs of a stringent climate policy are much lower than normally expected, which supports deep decarbonization.

政治决策者和公众普遍认为严格的气候政策代价高昂。成本论点经常被政府用作政策制定缓慢的动机。然而，这样的判断忽略了政策变化的经济利益，并隐含地建立在将环境影响分解为单独的人口、收入和技术影响的误导性分解之上。该论文表明，该方法可以预测具有系统性和显着偏差的政策性收入损失。我通过引入投入替代来扩展分解分析，这大大降低了政策成本。通过另外结合生产方法，资源使用驱动因素之间的因果关系，和内生技术发展的框架 我开发了一个新的结构方程来评估气候政策的影响。对于给定的脱碳路径，我计​​算了全球和国家层面的预计收入发展。使用结构性方法而不是不可知分解表明严格气候政策的成本远低于通常预期的成本，这支持深度脱碳。