How Idealism Can Fight Climate Change

Robert Shiller:

How Idealism, Expressed in Concrete Steps, Can Fight Climate Change: Idealism combined with an intriguing application of economic theory may accomplish what international conferences have not: solve the seemingly intractable problem of global warming.

Despite periodic flurries of optimism, diplomacy has been largely disappointing. ... From an economic standpoint, international efforts until now have foundered on a fundamental “free rider problem.” ... Why not just take a “free ride” and let others do the hard work? ...

But there are other ways to look at this... In a new book, “Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” (Princeton 2015), Gernot Wagner of the Environmental Defense Fund and Martin L. Weitzman, a Harvard economist, question that assumption. In a proposal that they call the “Copenhagen Theory of Change,” they say that we should be asking people to volunteer to save our climate by taking many small, individual actions. ...

The world is a diverse and complicated place, however. In order to combat global warming, social movements aren’t enough. We also need a concrete framework on a global scale.

In his presidential address before the American Economic Association in Boston in January, William D. Nordhaus of Yale proposed what he calls “climate clubs”..., a group of countries that agree to create incentives for people to reduce carbon emissions, while also erecting tariff barriers on imports from countries that are not members of the club. ...

To actually solve the extremely challenging problem of climate change, we may want to rely on both theories...