A Yale professor, known for his work on the economics of climate change, has won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
William Nordhaus has developed models to find an efficient path for coping with climate change since the 1970s.
He says market solutions, like a carbon tax, would have the strongest impact on climate change.
“The reason is, if you look around, who are we talking about? Who is going to solve the problem? It’s you and me. There are billions of individuals, millions of firms, thousands of governments, hundreds of nations, and for them to take action they’re going to have incentives. And the kind of incentives we’re talking about, they’re not speeches, we can sermonize all day, but the incentives of market prices. And to raise the prices of goods and services that are carbon-intensive and to lower the ones that are less carbon-intensive.”
Nordhaus says the Trump Administration’s denial of climate change will be short-lived.
“This administration won’t last forever. I think it’s really anomalous, in the United States, this degree of hostility to environmental policy and climate change policy. So all I can do is that we’ll get through this without too much damage.”
Nordhaus shares the prize with Paul Romer, professor of economics at New York University.
