Climate work earns econ Nobel
Pair of American researchers of cost, innovation honored
STOCKHOLM — Just a day after a United Nations panel called for urgent action on climate change, the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded Monday to one American researcher for his work on the economics of a warming planet and to another whose study of innovation raises hopes that people can do something about it.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the $1 million prize Monday to William Nordhaus of Yale University and to Paul Romer of New York University.
Nordhaus, 77, who has been called “the father of climate-change economics,” developed models that suggest how governments can combat global warming. He has endorsed a universal tax on carbon, which would require polluters to pay for the costs that their emissions impose on society.
Romer, 62, who has studied why some economies grow faster than others, has produced research that shows how governments can advance innovation. At a news conference Monday at NYU, Romer said his research left him optimistic that society can solve even a threat as challenging as the warming of the planet.
“Many people think that dealing with protecting the environment will be so costly and so hard that they just want to ignore the problem,” Romer said. “I hope the prize today could help everyone see that humans are capable of amazing accomplishments when we set about trying to do something.”
At a separate news conference at Yale, Nordhaus suggested that there was “pretty widespread acceptance” of climate change science outside the United States, and he expressed optimism that the United States would come around.
Referring to the Trump administration’s resistance, Nordhaus said: “I think we just need to get through what is a difficult period. But I’m extremely confident it will happen.”
Sunday’s report from the U.N.’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that managing climate change could prove a matter of life and death. It argued that failing to prevent just one extra degree of heat could expose countless people and ecosystems to life-threatening conditions over the next few decades.