In this research seminar, CGS Postdoctoral Research Associate Mel George will discuss integrated assessment modeling in the context of climate pathway modeling.
Abstract: Integrated assessment models are more normatively consequential than routinely acknowledged. This talk draws on a body of recent and ongoing work to argue that many apparent constraints in climate policy, the energy trilemma, regressive mitigation burdens, unstable burden-sharing agreements, are significantly shaped by pathway design rather than inherent features of decarbonization. Beginning with the structural impossibility of framework-neutral policy evaluation, I show how choices embedded in baselines, optimization criteria, market architecture, and coalition design shape distributional outcomes from the global to the household scale. This expanded design space means better outcomes are available than defaults suggest, but also that opaque choices carry larger normative weight than commonly understood. If 1.5C pathways are to prove durable, the normative choices they embed deserve the same rigor the field brings to technical design.