Why Are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency, and Promise of Tackling Climate Change

摘要

With The Stern Review (2007), Nicholas Stern positioned himself as a leading climate economist and, unlike most others, willing to exert an influence over the political debate. With his follow-up, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet (2009), he popularised the rather convoluted economic discussions of his previous book, not least the idea of climate change being the greatest market failure the world has ever seen. He also connected the conclusions more closely to the political landscape, at that point leading up to the climate meeting (COP 15) in Copenhagen. Since then, much has happened: that meeting failed, but sparked a process that led to a new climate regime with the Paris Agreement, 2015; climate science has progressed and been summarised in two new reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); governments have come and gone; the world has recovered from the global financial crisis, among other things. But in one sense, it is all the same: economies around the world are fuelled by fossil energy and annual emissions of greenhouse gases are still unsustainably high.