Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
How Fast to Move: A Physicist
'
s
Look at the Economists
u
Former US President Harry Truman once said that he
wished the government had more one-handed economists
because his economists were always telling him on the one
hand this, on the other hand that. Today, we do have
many one-handed economists writing on the economics
of taking action now to limit climate change. Unfortu-
nately they seem to fall into camps with different hands.
I will call the two camps after the two people who best
represent them. One I call the Nordhaus camp after
Professor William Nordhaus, the Sterling Professor of
Economics at Yale University, and the creator of the
Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy
(DICE model) that is used by many to estimate the eco-
nomic effects of climate change. The other I call the Stern
camp after Sir Nicholas Stern, former Head of the UK
Government Economics Service, who led the effort to
produce the in
British analysis of climate
change impacts called the Stern Report (he is now Lord
Stern of Brentford and is at the London School of
Economics).
The issue is how much the world should be spending
now to reduce the emissions that will cause large climate
changes in the future. If we could assign a monetary
value to future harm, and we used some reasonable
uential
