186. William Nordhaus on the Economics of Global Warming, Pandemics, and Corporate Malfeasance

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2021

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this conversation, based on the book The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World, Nobel Prize-winning pioneer in environmental economics Dr. Nordhaus explains how and why “green thinking” could cure many of the world’s most serious problems — from global warming to pandemics. Solving the world’s biggest problems requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us. For carbon emissions and other environmental damage, this means ensuring that those responsible pay their full costs rather than continuing to pass them along to others, including future generations. Nordhaus describes a new way of green thinking that would help us overcome our biggest challenges without sacrificing economic prosperity, in large part by accounting for the spillover costs of economic collisions. In a discussion that ranges from the history of the environmental movement to the Green New Deal, Nordhaus explains how rethinking economic efficiency, sustainability, politics, profits, taxes, individual ethics, corporate social responsibility, finance, and more would improve the effectiveness and equity of our society.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to The Michael Sherman Show.
0:07.0	I'm your host Michael Sherman.
0:10.0	My guest today is William Nordhaus, and his new book is The Spirit of Green,
0:15.5	the economics of collisions and contagions in a crowded world.
0:20.7	Bill is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics.
0:26.0	He's the Sterling Professor of Economics and Professor in the School of Environment
0:30.0	at Yale University.
0:32.0	As many books include The Climate Casino, Risk, Uncertainty
0:36.6	and Economics for a Warming World, and a question of balance weighing the options on
0:41.5	global warming policies.
0:43.3	He lives in New Haven.
0:44.9	Connecticut, this is the man.
0:46.7	He, of course, won the Nobel Prize for good reason
0:48.7	because of his work in environmental economics.
0:51.8	It is nudging people to do things
0:54.6	that are good for the environment, for clean air, water,
0:57.1	and so forth.
0:58.9	When it's in their own best interests to do so economically, we already do this in many, many areas of life.
1:05.8	So we cover all these different examples of how this works in different areas and then at the end I ask him to make the case for why
1:16.8	conservatives Republicans and so forth should be on board with this and he I think
1:21.4	he I think he nails it really economically this is
1:24.4	really the right thing to do selfishly greedily not to mention of course as a
	...

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