Thomas Schelling on Climate Change
by ilene - July 15th, 2009 2:20 pm
Mark Thoma at Economist’s View presents and comments on the following article in The Atlantic which looks at global warming from a rather different perspective than the more common ones.
Thomas Schelling on Climate Change
Conor Clarke interviews Thomas Schelling on the implementation of climate change policy (the excerpts run across several questions):
An Interview With Thomas Schelling, Part Two, by Conor Clarke: This is the second part of my interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling. Part one is here. In this part we talk very generally about climate change…
…It’s not obvious that averting global climate change is in the rational self-interest of anyone … alive today. The serious consequences probably won’t occur until 2080 or 2100 or thereafter…, [and] those consequences are going to be distributed in a radically uneven way. The northwest of the United States might actually benefit. So how does a negotiation process work? How does a generation today negotiate on behalf of future generations? And how do we negotiate when the costs are distributed so unevenly?
Well I do think that one of the difficulties is that most of the beneficiaries aren’t yet born. More than that: Most of the beneficiaries will be born in … the developing world. By 2080 or 2100 five-sixths of the population, at least, will be in places like China, India, Indonesia, Africa and so forth. And what I don’t know is whether Americans are really willing to understand that and do anything for the benefit of the unborn Chinese.
It’s a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious. I think there’s a significant likelihood of a kind of a runaway release of carbon and methane … that will create a huge multiplier effect, and it could become very serious. …
If I were to come clean to the American public I would say that, except for a very low probability of a very bad result — which is the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which would put Washington DC under water — we are probably going to outgrow any vulnerability we have to climate change. … You know, very little of the US economy is susceptible to climate.…