Sally Strange on Nostr: Response from William Nordhaus: “I have been advocating activist climate policies ...

Response from William Nordhaus: “I have been advocating activist climate policies for decades, particularly the use of proven tools like cap and trade and carbon pricing. These have been derided by many environmentalists as ineffective with no viable substitutes. It is too easy to point the finger at researchers, where the real issues are structural, with weak international governance (the COP), poor instruments (such as subsidies), along with myopic political figures. The first step toward effective climate policies would be to devise an effective international governance structure such as the one that has been described as a climate club. Without strong governance, we will see decades more of a process where nations talk loud and carry no sticks at all.

“As to the work resting on the ideology of the fossil fuel industry, that is not only a hallucination (in the AI sense) but also nonsensical. Carbon pricing at levels I have proposed would not only curb emissions sharply but also reduce the value of fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuels constitute 82% of primary energy today, with only a small decline in that share over the last two decades. We need strong and effective carbon pricing policies to make a significant dent in that number.”