The Climate Colossus

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Geoff Mann talks to James Butler about the economic models developed by William Nordhaus and others, widely used by governments around the world as a tool to tackle climate change. They discuss the moral and practical limitations of Nordhaus’s methods, the danger of relying on their predictions, and whether the use of such models is even an appropriate way of confronting environmental crisis. Read Geoff Mann's piece here: https://lrb.me/mannpod Read two pieces from the next issue early: Laleh Khalili on Stanley McChrystal's business guide: https://lrb.me/khalilipod Paul Theroux on V.S. Naipaul: https://lrb.me/therouxpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm James Butler, a contributing editor at the LRB standing in this week for Tom.
0:19.3	My guest today is Jeff Mann, who teaches at Simon Fraser
0:23.0	University in British Columbia, and has written a piece in the latest issue about the way some
0:28.0	mainstream economists think about climate change and the power their models have to shape
0:33.1	politicians' choices. It's a review of a new book by William Nordhaus called The Spirit of
0:38.6	Green, The Economics of Collisions and Contagents in a Crowded World. Jeff, thanks very much for
0:45.0	joining me. Thanks for having me. I think probably the best place for us to start is just with
0:50.0	Nordhaus himself. And maybe you can tell us a little bit about why he's a significant figure and perhaps
0:55.6	given his influence what it is about his method that's so controversial. Sure. So William Nordhaus,
1:02.9	who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2019, which gives you a little bit of a sense of how
1:07.8	prominent he is in the profession as a whole is, I think it's fair to say,
1:12.1	by far and away, the most prominent climate economist. And there's a very good reason for that.
1:17.2	He basically took on the problem as early as some would say the 1970s, and definitely since the
1:23.8	1980s, he's been working on this problem that, you know, at that point a lot of people, both inside and outside of economics, would have told him, you know, it was not as big a deal
1:31.7	as he was saying it was. But he very early on saw the economic risks associated with global
1:38.7	warming. And over the years, especially over the last, say, 25 years, he has been working often with a large team, and he's always very careful to credit the whole team, to develop a model that will allow us to understand the economic impacts on the global economy, mostly.
1:56.3	There's also regional variations, but the costs associated with climate change and the effect on long-run
2:02.7	growth.
2:03.8	And that model, it's dice, the dynamic integrated climate economy model, and the regional
2:09.7	one is rice, as you can imagine.
2:11.5	And that model is a very large and complex set of equations that tries to take account of
2:17.0	the effects of largely temperature
	...

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