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From Economic Fantasy to Ecological Reality on Climate Change

Summary:
This was an invited talk to the Oxford Department of International Development "Climate Change and the Challenges of Development Lecture Series", on my criticisms of the application of neoclassical economics to climate change. I focus on the new paper by Dietz et al. that allegedly calculates the economic costs of tipping points: Dietz, S., J. Rising, T. Stoerk and G. Wagner (2021). "Economic impacts of tipping points in the climate system." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(34): e2103081118. (https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/34/e2103081118.full.pdf) Upon closer examination, this papers fails to consider tipping points in any credible way, and this is obvious in its incredible claim (in the original sense of the "not credible"), that: “Tipping points reduce

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This was an invited talk to the Oxford Department of International Development "Climate Change and the Challenges of Development Lecture Series", on my criticisms of the application of neoclassical economics to climate change. I focus on the new paper by Dietz et al. that allegedly calculates the economic costs of tipping points:



Dietz, S., J. Rising, T. Stoerk and G. Wagner (2021). "Economic impacts of tipping points in the climate system." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(34): e2103081118. (https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/34/e2103081118.full.pdf)



Upon closer examination, this papers fails to consider tipping points in any credible way, and this is obvious in its incredible claim (in the original sense of the "not credible"), that:



“Tipping points reduce global consumption per capita by around 1% upon 3°C warming and by around 1.4% upon 6°C warming"



This is ridiculous: the tipping points they consider are: Arctic summer sea ice, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (“Gulf Stream”), the Amazon Rainforest, the Indian Monsoon, Permafrost, and Ocean methane hydrates. If all 8 of these tripped--especially with a temperature 3-6°C above pre-industrial levels, we would be experiencing a climate utterly unlike anything Earth has seen for tens of millions of years.



The thought that this would just reduce global consumption by just 1.4%--compared to what it would be if none of these tipping points were triggered--doesn't pass what Nobel Laureate Robert Solow once called "the smell test": "every proposition has to pass a smell test: Does it really make sense?". I show why this paper stinks in Solow's sense.
Steve Keen
Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian-born, British-based economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen's thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Augusto Graziani, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and François Quesnay.

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