The social cost of carbon is the damage done by emitting an additional unit of carbon dioxide. It is typically expressed in US dollar per metric tonne of carbon. It is an estimate of the Pigou tax that should be put on greenhouse gas emissions.

A large number of estimates of the social cost of carbon have been published, and I wrote a sequence of reviews and meta-analyses.

Tol, R.S.J. (2008), The Economic Impact of Climate Change, Working Paper 255, Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin. Data (12.4 MB).

Tol, R.S.J. (2008), 'The Social Cost of Carbon: Trends, Outliers, and Catastrophes', Economics -- the Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, 2 (25), 1-24.

Tol, R.S.J. (2008), 'Why Worry about Climate Change? A Research Agenda', Environmental Values, 17 (4), 437-470.

Tol, R.S.J. (2005), ‘The Marginal Damage Costs of Carbon Dioxide Emissions: An Assessment of the Uncertainties’, Energy Policy, 33 (16),2064-2074.