Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger:
Paul Krugman asserts that a carbon price is still the most important climate policy because... well, because he's Paul Krugman and he says so.
Now, I can get annoyed with Krugman as much as the next guy. But here is the part of the interview with Ezra Klein that Ackerman and Shellenberger find so offensive:
Let’s step back for a moment. What do you think we should be worrying about in 10 years?
I really think 10 years from now the signs that we’re on a runaway climate change will start to become a lot more obvious. It won’t be big rises in temperature yet, but will be enough to make people look around and say, oh my God. But by then, it will be very hard to bring it under control.
Are you a technological optimist on this?
Well, there are different kinds of technological optimists. One kind of technological optimist says we’ll spontaneously develop technologies that give us perfectly clean energy. I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies. And then there’s geoengineering, which we may eventually use out of desperation, but is full of unintended consequences and political questions. That won’t affect all countries equally. It will hurt some countries and help others. It would be a helluva thing to throw into the global situation.
I’m a technological optimist in that I think if we had appropriate pricing, we’d find it remarkably easy. The cost of getting out of rising emissions would be much lower than legend has it. But I’m not politically optimistic that we’ll do that.
So you’re an economics optimist. You think if we got the price right, we could get the technology right.
Yes. But it’s scary stuff.
My criticism would be that no economist can really make a ten year geoforecast ("runaway climate change"). And I'd also critique the notion that anything so huge is easy. But, I don't really find anything to suggest that Krugman is being Krugman here.
