CAMBRIDGE MA. – Eminent Harvard economist Richard Zeckhauser presented a case for additional climate adaptation measures in the newest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.”
The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Listen to the interview here.
Hosted by Robert N. Stavins, A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, Environmental Insights is intended to promote public discourse on important issues at the intersection of economics and environmental policy.
Zeckhauser, the Frank Ramsey professor of political economy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a fellow of the American Economic Association (as well as numerous other honorifics), lamented a phenomenon that he terms “the pumped equilibrium,” in which people hold exaggerated expectations about confronting the challenge of climate change if we don’t drastically increase our efforts.
“People started at least three decades ago saying, ‘Climate change is a terrible problem, but we can control it by cutting back on our greenhouse gases and this is the last decade that we can do that. If we don't do it this decade, we're dead.’ And then, the next decade they said… the same thing. And this decade they're saying… the same thing. And they keep telling us that we're going to be able to [limit the global temperature increase to] two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, or even more recently, 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. I think that’s unrealistic.”
Zeckhauser said a realistic assessment of the current state of climate change requires new approaches to make an impact.
“The United States has done a so-so job of cutting our emissions by about 10 percent over a number of years, but at the same time, China has increased its emissions by 13 percent, and you can expect that countries like India will be growing much faster in its emissions [levels],” he remarked. “So, I think that we should take a sober look at these problems and say, ‘What else can we do?’”
Climate adaptation, Zeckhauser stated, holds the potential for greatly reducing the impacts of climate change. He cited one example in which scientists have proposed building a 100-foot-tall berm around a fjord in Greenland where warm water currently flows in and melts the ice sheets.
“This is very speculative. Will this work? I sure hope so. It's within our realm of technological capability, but I think we should be looking for many solutions like this that could enable us to deal with… what I consider to be [the] catastrophic track that we're on,” he said. Other potentially effective adaptation measures, he stated, include increasing the alkalinity of the oceans and enforcing smarter logging policies to protect mature trees.
When questioned about the distributional implications of climate change, Zeckhauser remarked, “I think dealing with climate change and reducing its impact will automatically have very beneficial distributional consequences… The places that are currently suffering the most from climate change are the hottest places in the world, which are both suffering under [rising] temperatures and having their weather patterns shifted. So, you would be doing God's work in restoring or preserving the planet, and you'd be doing work that's to the benefit of the most affected people in the world.”
Zeckhauser also spoke of the challenges posed by massive migrations of people who want to escape rising temperatures in the south by heading north.
“Those [migration patterns] are very uncomfortable for the people in both places – the people who have to do the migration, which is frequently very dangerous and expensive, the people who are still trapped in the old place because they don't have enough resources, and the people whose areas are being affected by the new people who are coming.”
Zeckhauser said that ultimately, it is up to policymakers around the world to confront the climate change challenge.
“This is a political problem on a global scale. So, even if you didn't want to worry about it, as a political actor, as the president of the United States has to be and our climate envoy has to be, and the UN has to be, you have to pay serious attention to it,” he remarked.
Zeckhauser’s interview is the first episode of 2024 in the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month.
“Environmental Insights is intended to inform and educate listeners about important issues relating to an economic perspective on developments in environmental policy, including the design and implementation of market-based approaches to environmental protection,” said Stavins. “We speak with accomplished Harvard colleagues, other academics, and practitioners who are working on solving some of the most challenging public problems we face.”
Environmental Insights is hosted on SoundCloud and is also available on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Spotify.
LINK TO PODCAST: https://on.soundcloud.com/VPBMK