Samuelson's text was first published in 1948, and it immediately became the authority for the principles of economics courses. The book continues to be the standard-bearer for principles courses, and this revision continues to be a clear, accurate, and interesting introduction to modern economics principles. Bill Nordhaus is now the primary author of this text, and he has revised the book to be as current and relevant as ever.

Commentators on John Broome's Tanner Lecture. The Tanner Lectures are a collection of educational and scientific discussions relating to human values. Conducted by leaders in their fields, the lectures are presented at prestigious educational facilities around the world.

This paper discusses some ethically relevant aspects of William Nordhaus’s contribution to climate change policy evaluation. Nordhaus's approach can shed light on one—but only one—dimension of the climate change problem. His boldest claims notwithstanding, there is nothing particularly "optimal" about the temperature increases associated with his most famous modeling choices.

Controversies about time discounting loom large in decisions about climate change. Prominently, a particularly controversial debate about time discounting in climate change decision-making has been conducted within climate economics, between the authors of Stern et al. and their critics :977–981, 2006; Weitzman in J Econ Lit XLV:703–724, 2007; Nordhaus in J Econ Lit XLV:686–702, 2007). The article examines the role of values in this debate. Firstly, it is shown that time discounting is a case in which values are key (...) because it is at heart an ethical problem. Secondly, it is argued that time discounting in climate economics is a case of economists making frequent and routine references to ethical values and indeed conduct ethical debates with each other. Thirdly, it is argued that there is evidence for deep and pervasive entanglement between facts and values in the prevalent methodologies for time discounting. Finally, it is argued that this means that economists have given up the ‘value-free ideal’ concerning time discounting, and discussed how the current methodology of time discounting in economics can be improved. (shrink)

The urgent importance of dealing with the climate crisis has led some influential theorists to argue that at least some demands for justice must give way to pragmatic and strategic considerations. These theorists (Cass Sunstein, Eric Posner, and David Weisbach, all academic lawyers, and John Broome, an academic philosopher) contend that the failures of international negotiations and other efforts to change economic policies and practices have shown that moral exhortations are worse than ineffective. Although Broome's position is similar in these (...) respects to that of Sunstein, Posner and Weisbach, it differs in other important respects, including his understanding of the idea of justice, his disagreement with the policy approach (which he calls "efficiency with sacrifice") favored by the economists Nicholas Stern and William Nordhaus, and his proposal for establishing a new international financial institution, a World Climate Bank, in addition to putting a price on carbon. Elsewhere I offer a critical analysis of the position taken by Posner and Weisbach in their book, Climate Change Justice. Their arguments against allowing principles of distributive justice (narrowly understood) to constrain treaty negotiations fail to rule out the principles of John Rawls' Law of Peoples (which is a conception of the moral basis of a just international order, including states' obligations to secure basic human rights for all). Therefore their arguments against shaping climate treaties to reflect any principles of justice do not succeed in supporting their position. Here I offer a critical analysis of Broome's position. I raise and discuss objections to Broome's proposal for a WCB, and I argue that the continued relevance of these objections is contingent on how the proposal for a WCB may get developed. (shrink)

Integrated assessment models of climate and the economy provide estimates of the social cost of carbon and inform climate policy. We create a variant of the Regional Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (RICE)—a regionally disaggregated version of the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE)—in which we introduce a more fine-grained representation of economic inequalities within the model’s regions. This allows us to model the common observation that climate change impacts are not evenly distributed within regions (...) and that poorer people are more vulnerable than the rest of the population. Our results suggest that this is important to the social cost of carbon—as significant, potentially, for the optimal carbon price as the debate between Stern and Nordhaus on discounting. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 345-359, October 2011.

Insufficiently radical environmentalism is inadequate to the problems that confront us; but overly radical environmentalism risks alienating people with whom, in a democracy, we must find common cause. Building on Paul Ricoeur’s work, which shows how group identity is constituted by the tension between ideology and utopia, this essay asks just how radical effective environmentalism should be. Two “case studies” of environmental agenda—that of Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, and that of David Brower—serve to frame the important issues of (...) cooperation and confrontation. The essay concludes that environmentalism must lead with its utopian aspirations rather than its willingness to compromise. (shrink)

Integrated assessment models (IAMs) of climate and the economy provide estimates of the social cost of carbon and inform climate policy. With the Nested Inequalities Climate Economy model (NICE) (Dennig et al. PNAS 112:15,827–15,832, 2015), which is based on Nordhaus’s Regional Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy (RICE), but also includes inequalities within regions, we investigate the comparative importance of several factors—namely, time preference, inequality aversion, intraregional inequalities in the distribution of both damage and mitigation cost and the (...) damage function. We do so by computing optimal carbon price trajectories that arise from the wide variety of combinations that are possible given the prevailing range of disagreement over each factor. This provides answers to a number of questions, including Thomas Schelling’s conjecture that properly accounting for inequalities could lead the inequality aversion parameter to have an effect opposite to what is suggested by the Ramsey equation. (shrink)

Este texto propõe uma crítica da tecnologia conforme abordada na narrativa pós-natureza do antropoceno. Para essa narrativa, também chamada de pós-ambientalismo, o antropoceno é o momento histórico em que fica clara a impossibilidade de uma noção idealizada da natureza, distinta da intervenção humana. Neste texto, argumenta-se que, embora tenha méritos no questionamento de aspectos cruciais do pensamento moderno, essa narrativa tem também problemas teórico-conceituais significativos derivados da centralidade atribuída à mediação técnica, que acaba convertendo-a em uma espécie de metafísica. A (...) exposição das teses da narrativa pós-natureza do antropoceno se dá a partir do diálogo com textos de ativistas do pós-ambientalismo, como Michael Shellenberger e Ted Nordhaus, e de pensadores que fornecem a essa corrente o fundamento teórico-conceitual, como Bruno Latour e Peter Sloterdijk. A crítica se ampara na argumentação dos filósofos contemporâneos Dieter Mersch e Andreas Luckner, que desdobram ideias já sinalizadas por Martin Heidegger e indicam caminhos para compreender os limites de perspectivas metafísicas sobre tecnologia. (shrink)

The normative foundations of the environmental movement can be thought of in a range of different ways. The present paper is a commentary on very interesting papers by Thomas Dunlap, Thomas Hill and Kimberly Smith, who take up the spiritual, ethical and political perspectives respectively. Their accounts are described and evaluated.

Over the past few decades, we have improved our understanding of the health impacts of climate change.1 Although many public health researchers have contributed to this knowledge, relatively few are aware of how their work may relate to the social cost of carbon. The social cost of carbon is a core economic concept in climate policy and one that can—and should—benefit directly from research produced by the public health community. The concept’s importance was recently highlighted by this past year’s Nobel (...) Prize in Economic Sciences, which was awarded to William Nordhaus in part for his pioneering work developing models to estimate the social cost of carbon. Below we describe this concept, explain how it is calculated, and provide some brief guidance on how health research can improve its estimation. (shrink)