Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
his analysis, though it may be there and I just haven
'
t
found it. Stern
s crisis analysis asks us to do the max-
imum possible mitigation now, so there is no more that
can be done for an instability risk.
'
Nordhaus does not seem to factor into his analysis how
long it takes to
fix the climate-change problem once
things get bad. The removal time of the greenhouse
gases is a few hundred to a thousand years. Stern calcu-
lates the total damage of inaction over a long period of
time to justify the large savings coming from a large
mitigation effort. Nordhaus criticizes Stern for calcu-
lating damage over a long period, but to me any eco-
nomic analysis should look at consequences of inaction
over the time it takes to
fix the problem once it occurs.
The most important thing that the economists are
trying to tell us is that many things that have long been
thought of as free are not free. We have dumped green-
house gases into the atmosphere and failed to understand
that the atmosphere cannot digest it all without changing
the economy as well as the ecology of the world. It is only
in the past
years that we have begun to understand the
economic as well as environmental damage that these
emissions are beginning to cause and that the damage will
grow over time. The economists urge that we make the
costs of emissions part of the price of the good that
produces them so that there will be a strong motivation
to
nd better and cheaper ways to produce the product
without the emissions. In economist
s terms, an external-
ity is a cost borne by the society for something done by
the producer of a product. Dumping greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere at no charge is such an externality.
'
