SEI helps launch www.RealClimateEconomics.org

Friday, 08 May 2009 16:53

SEI senior researcher Frank Ackerman initiated and produced the content for the first version of a new website launched by Economics for Equity and the Environment Network (E3) to demonstrate the weight of economic analysis in the peer reviewed literature that supports immediate, large-scale policy responses to the climate crisis.

The Real Climate Economics website offers a reader’s guide to the real economics of climate change, an emerging body of scholarship that is consistent with the urgency of the problem as seen from a climate science perspective.

As the climate policy debate intensifies, economic analysis is playing an increasingly central role. The case for inaction is no longer argued on the grounds of skepticism about the science; instead, some have claimed that it will be too expensive to take more than token initiatives.

There is now extensive economic analysis that challenges and refutes this idea. The peer-reviewed articles included on this website demonstrate that:

- Risk and uncertainty are fundamental to the climate problem;
- Ethics and equity are inseparable from economic analysis of climate change
- Marginal analysis of small changes and modest adjustments of market-based instruments are inadequate to the task of understanding and protecting the earth’s climate.

Visit www.realclimateeconomics.org