"Economists have workable policy ideas for addressing climate change. But what if they’re politically impossible?"
"On a Saturday afternoon in early December, inside a soaring auditorium on the campus of Stockholm University, William Nordhaus gave the crowning lecture of his half-century career as an economist. The occasion was his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in economics, which Nordhaus, a trim, soft-spoken Yale professor, had been jointly awarded. The title of the lecture was “Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics.”
As a young professor on a sabbatical in Vienna in the mid-1970s, Nordhaus happened to share an office with an environmental researcher, who helped spark his interest in the emerging issue. While there, Nordhaus came up with the target, now famous, of holding global warming to two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. He chose the target, as he recently explained to me, because he believed that the earth has experienced similar fluctuations before and that humans had tolerated them."
David Leonhardt reports for the New York Times Magazine April 9, 2019, as part of its Climate Issue.
SEE ALSO:
"Climate Chaos Is Coming — and the Pinkertons Are Ready" (Times Magazine)
"What Survival Looks Like After the Oceans Rise" (Times Magazine)
"The Next Reckoning: Capitalism and Climate Change" (Times Magazine)
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