Paul Krugman has a review of The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World by William D. Nordhaus over at the New York Review of Books. I will admit up front I have not read the book, but Krugman's review makes it sound like a worthwhile, even essential, read.
Krugman goes way back with Nordhaus, working as a research assistant for him decades ago. He spent many hours in the Geology Library at Yale gathering material Nordhaus would use in a pioneering fusion of economic theories, resource allocation, engineering and best guesses at future technologies in order to model the long term economics of exhaustible resources like coal and oil.
Forty years later, the predictions in the book have run up against the reality of where we are now, with some guesses proving to be too optimistic, others the reverse - and of course, technological developments that weren't anticipated, like wind and solar energy. As Krugman acknowledges, the future is uncertain after all:
...Yet decisions must be made taking the future—and sometimes the very long-term future—into account. This is true when it comes to exhaustible resources, where every barrel of oil we burn today is a barrel that won’t be available for future generations. It is all the more true for global warming, where every ton of carbon dioxide we emit today will remain in the atmosphere, changing the world’s climate, for generations to come. And as Nordhaus emphasizes, although perhaps not as strongly as some would like, when it comes to climate change uncertainty strengthens, not weakens, the case for action now.
Krugman notes Nordhaus has at times been at odds with those concerned with Climate Change, debunking claims he doesn't think are justified, being more optimistic than some over our ability to deal with consequences of changing climate, and so on. That being said:
...it’s important to realize that The Climate Casino is in no sense the work of someone skeptical about either the reality of global warming or the need to act now. He more or less ridicules claims that climate change isn’t happening or that it isn’t the result of human activity. And he calls for strong action: his best estimate of what we should be doing involves placing a substantial immediate tax on carbon, one that would sharply increase the current price of coal, and gradually raising that tax, more than doubling it by 2030. Some might consider even this policy inadequate, but it’s far beyond anything currently on the political agenda, so as a practical matter Nordhaus and the most hawkish of climate activists are entirely on the same side.
Lest I recapitulate the whole review, I'll hit some of the high points and suggest
reading the whole thing - and getting a copy of book as well if it catches your interest.
Nordhaus examines how the changing climate will impact the economy (and the world), and discusses strategies for trying to limit it. He makes a case that there is no free market solution to climate change - government intervention in some form is necessary. But how? Emission taxes? Cap & Trade? Tariffs? Regulation? Carbon pricing? Nordhaus suggests we need to take action on every front possible, including geoengineering as a last resort. One conclusion is that just sharply reducing emissions from coal-fired electricity generation could accomplish the bulk of what we need to do to limit temperature increases.
All in all, the review suggests the book is a well-considered look at the overall problem of climate change. Krugman's take is:
I enjoyed The Climate Casino, and felt that I learned a lot from it. Yet as I read it, I couldn’t help wondering whom, exactly, the book was written for. It is, after all, a calm, reasoned tract, marshaling the best available scientific and economic evidence on behalf of a pragmatic policy approach. And here’s the thing: just about everyone responsive to that kind of argument already favors strong climate action. It’s the other guys who constitute the problem.
Krugman supplies the political context that Nordhaus doesn't, for whatever reason. Quite frankly, there's a highly profit-motivated contingent in our current politics with a strong incentive to prevent or delay action on climate change for as long as possible, the kind of opposition not amenable to mere facts and reason.
Throughout this book, Nordhaus’s tone is slightly cynical but basically calm and optimistic: this is ultimately a problem we should be able to solve. I only wish I could share his apparent conviction that this upbeat possibility will translate into reality. Instead, I keep being haunted by a figure he presents early in the book, showing that we have been living in an age of unusual climate stability—that “the last 7,000 years have been the most stable climatic period in more than 100,000 years.” As Nordhaus notes, this era of stability coincides pretty much exactly with the rise of civilization, and that probably isn’t an accident.
Go
read the whole thing, and just maybe get a copy of
the book. At the present time, it appears no one in Washington is even thinking about Climate Change - but it's not as though we can ignore it to death.
The more we find out, the higher the stakes we seem to betting.
The Climate Casino looks like the right book at the right time.
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