Economists are notably absent in the mobilization to confront the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced

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from Richard Norgaard and current issue of RWER

Planet Earth is now experiencing more rapid environmental change and greater extremes, clear indicators that humanity faces a challenging if not grim future. Unfolding in real time before our eyes are the staid forebodings of five assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the urgent warnings of natural scientists (Hobbs and Cramer, 2008; Beach and Clark, 2015; Bradford et al., 2018; Vosen, 2020; Ripple et al., 2021).[1] In California, from where I write, the Sierra Nevada Mountains had a historically low snowpack in 2015 that was unprecedented in the last 500 years while 2010-2020 also included some of the largest snowpacks on record. Amidst rising temperatures, the summer of 2020 was unusually hot across California and included the highest temperature reliably recorded on earth: 130˚F (54˚C) in Death Valley in August. During 2020 California had five of its worst six fires in all of recorded history. This year, 2021, is another drought year, and the residents of the Berkeley hills received their first “Red Flag” prepare-for-evacuation fire warning in early May. Rising temperatures, longer droughts, extremely wet years, and unprecedented wildfires in California are raising public awareness that the future will likely be increasingly difficult. With a rapidly changing and variable climate, the ways in which we think about and manage energy, water, agriculture, and forests are changing significantly, yet old ways of thinking tied to the prior coevolution of understandings of reality and social organization persist and slow our response (Norgaard et al., 2021).

Thirty years ago, the global community of climate scientists was a few thousand. Today the community is orders of magnitude larger and blends into multiple millions more as environmental and energy scientists have restructured their research, engineers design new technologies, architects have adapted their designs, policymakers and planners have reconsidered public options, and managers have rethought how to engage with the realities of climate change. The scenarios of global integrated assessment models help inform national and regional models that guide the patchwork quilt of national, regional, and local climate adaptation plans. At the same time, local and regional phenomena raise questions about the dynamics of the global system. As we try to understand and respond to the diverse, interacting ramifications of climate change, we are beginning to see a dynamic, polycentric process of interactive learning and preparing for likely futures of Planet Earth.

Global environmental change is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. It is an existential challenge. Yet economists are notably absent in the mobilization to confront and work with it. William Nordhaus (2019) has encouraged economists to get involved. Andrew Oswald and Nicholas Stern (2019), on the other hand, document that the most cited economics journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, had yet to publish an article on climate change and that economics students rarely find the forecasts of global climate science included in their classes. Stephen Polasky et al. (2019) argue that the economics profession is simply not structured to address the greatest existential crisis of all time. They note that in 2018, the American Economic Review had but two articles that focused on any aspect of energy, environment, or ecology. For earthly matters, there are specialty journals. Though classical economists tried to speak to the material realities of land and agriculture (Schabas, 2007), neoclassical economists work in precise equations of socially constructed abstractions whose complex histories they avoid exploring (Hodgson, 2016). In short, mainstream economists, and many economists in lesser streams, and those stuck in eddies as well, have become detached from the realities of Planet Earth.[2] Steve Keen (2020) argues that the few economists who are trying to address climate change are still doing a dismal job at characterizing and developing responses to the existential threat of climate change. Keen’s assessment echoes those made more than a decade earlier by DeCanio (2003), Baer (2007), Weitzman (2009), and Spash (2010) with respect to the difficulties of incorporating a likely catastrophe for future generations into a tradition of utility optimization within the conceptual guardrails of market thinking. Optimizing dominates prescriptive economic analyses. Resilience thinking to sustain safe operations now dominates non-economic policy discourses, corporate planning, and personal strategy advising.[3] Economies continue, but the economics profession and supporting economistic beliefs are losing their relevance, and in this paper I argue that that is a good thing.  read more