Date of interview: December 2021
I am very happy to present Richard Tol in the series Meet Top Enviromental Economists. Richard is a Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Sussex, the Professor of the Economics of Climate Change, Institute for Environmental Studies and Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a Research Fellow of the Tinbergen Institute and CESifo. He specialises in the economics of energy, environment, and climate, and is interested in integrated assessment modelling.
Richard ranks among the top 150 economists in the world and among the top 50 most-cited climate scholars. He wrote over 200 academic publications and three books. He is an editor for Energy Economics, and an associate editor of Economics the e-journal. He advises national and international policy and research and was also an author (contributing, lead, principal and convening) of Working Groups I, II and III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Richard is definitely one of the more vivid figures in environmental economics, someone that should be listened to. Not everyone agrees with him, but I believe he tries to give a research-based and neutral view of problems related to climate and energy issues. He is very direct, which does not go down well with some people, and the press is terribly good at quoting him out of context, which led to some controversial claims. I hope that this interview is able to set some of those issues right, and sheds light on the man behind the myth. Enjoy the Express Views interview, the podcast, and the Meet Top Environmental Economists interview.
Here is the Express Views interview with Richard:
Here is the podcast version of the Express Views interview:
And, last but not least, here is the Meet Top Environmental Economists interview:
How did you become an environmental economist?
The answer is I don’t know, because there’s no pattern there. I started not as an Environmental Economist but I actually trained as an Econometrician. We did much more maths and computer science than we did economics. Taking time series analysis and Bayesian econometrics was my specialty. I was deeply disillusioned with economics at that stage because we had a fairly traditional education. Economics was taught through rigor over realism, with beautiful mathematical proofs, but absolutely no connection with reality. I also did a minor in Environmental Science at the time. After I graduated, I started working for the Institute for Environmental Studies, which is very policy-focused. It’s very interdisciplinary, which I enjoyed much more than pure economics. And so I stayed there and did my Ph.D. there. Then I moved first to Carnegie Mellon (University in Pittsburg), which was also a very interdisciplinary group, and later to Hamburg, where I was actually a professor of Geoscience. My work was always very much applied policy analysis. I then spent some time in Princeton, again with the environmental group, and then the Economic and Social Research Institute where I was a Policy Advisor. Ten years ago I moved to Sussex where, for the first time, I was an economist, again. I’m completely flabbergasted by how economics had changed: it had become what I had thought it should be 20 years earlier. Economics should be mainly an empirical science.
I’m driven by trying to solve and understand problems, and I don’t care if that problem crosses a disciplinary boundary.
That is really my background, and that is how I approach Environmental Economics: as mostly an empirical topic that is there to advise policy. I’m driven by trying to solve and understand problems, and I don’t care if that problem crosses a disciplinary boundary.
When I was younger, I was pretty green. I don’t think that anybody, nowadays, would mistake me for a green. Nowadays, what drives me is the next interesting problem to solve. There are two elements to that. One is I like to work with people. So if somebody comes along and says, “I need help with this particular paper”, then that is something that motivates me because I like doing that, particularly with younger people.
Other than that, sometimes, it’s a stupid paper that somebody published and I want to show them wrong. Or sometimes it’s just a problem that came up in some other context that I don’t know how to solve and that I would like to solve it.
In the end, Kenneth Arrow was the one who convinced me not to abandon economics.
I have heard when you met Kenneth Arrow for the first time that you got into a fight with him. What was that about?
If Arrow taught me one thing, you should always know who you’re talking to. When we met for the first time then I said we could use Arrow-Debreu(-McKenzie) to interpret observed interest rates as revealed preferences. He was upset by that, and I ended up defending general equilibrium theory against Arrow.
It took me a while to understand that the Impossibility Theorem was Arrow’s answer to the social planners (then the dominant strain in economics) and that his work on dynamic general equilibrium theory is another impossibility theorem (future markets cannot be complete) aimed at the free marketeers (then the emerging strain in economics). In the end, Kenneth Arrow was the one who convinced me not to abandon economics.
If you were to give a list of articles that a young researcher in your line of research should read, what would it be and why?
Everyone in this field should read Tom Schelling’s 1992 presidential address in the AER. If you’ve read it already, you should read it again. Jean-Michel Chevet’s 2011 paper in the AER is underappreciated. Matt Kahn’s 2005 paper in REStat is often cited but rarely understood. The current frontier is defined by Meredith Fowlie’s 2018 paper in the JPE, Lint Barrage’s 2020 paper in REStud, and Eric Zou’s 2021 paper in the AER.
What advice would you give to young students who want to work in the field of energy economics or climate economics?
The most important thing is that you should find a niche for yourself. And that niche should fulfil various criteria. One, it has to be a gap in knowledge. If you work on something that other people haven’t worked on before, then that is important.
It should also be something that sufficiently motivates you, where you actually can make the effort needed to make a contribution. Sometimes I see young people who identify a research question, but then they’re going for it half-heartedly. That is a route that barely leads to success. The reason is that, if you study most people’s careers, the research that you do during your Ph.D. is what you are going do for the next 30 years. Very few people actually completely change track. So, the steps that you make early in your career are actually very important. It is, of course, true that once you know more about something, it becomes more interesting. So maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds.
But, definitely, what people should do is find a gap in knowledge that interests them, and that they also feel they can solve. They either already have or can acquire the skills to actually do something about this.
A lot of young people also come and say, “I want to be like X”. And then they typically take somebody they admire but who’s very young, which is a big mistake. Because the person is still around and you’re competing with the best in the field. You want to be like him or her. You’re never going to catch up. So they should find their own way of doing things and their own interests.
And then, of course, they should acquire as many skills as they need to solve problems. Particularly at a young age, it’s much easier to acquire skills. But, of course, you should also have domain knowledge. You should actually know what you’re talking about. That is something that you can always acquire later.
If somebody has a background in applied labor, so she knows about e.g. identification, then I would advise against going into climate or environment because there’s a whole bunch of such people around these fields already and so it’s much harder to make a contribution. Whereas in Energy Economics many things can be done.
If it is somebody who comes with a background in industrial organization, then I would say, “Well, energy is a very rich field for industrial organization. But… it’s also a very crowded field. And there’s actually a couple of Nobel laureates who have made their mark in energy economics. So contributing as an industrial organizer to Energy Economics is actually pretty tough, whereas in environmental economics there is actually very little of this stuff going on. There’s a good bit of the second-best, and how to regulate from the second-best, but it’s still a pretty small field. And the empirical applications of industrial organization in environmental economics are far too few.
Everybody assumes, in all of the prospective models, as well as in a lot of retrospective models, that we have this perfect first-class implementation, which is complete nonsense.
What future direction would you envision for Energy Economics or Climate Economics? And also, what kind of obstacles would you see there?
I think that the biggest issue has to do with the transformation to a carbon-neutral or low carbon energy system. And everything that comes with that. And the biggest issues there concerns the distributed power generation. Consumers become producers, consumers become stores of energy. That is terribly important to understand how we actually decarbonize the energy sector.
Methodologically, the big issue in energy economics is that the credibility revolution hasn’t reached the field. We see an increase in laboratory experiments, some field experiments but not a great many. Using natural experiments is still something that is rare.
So, that is something that is going to change dramatically over the next decade. And a lot of the work that is currently being published will be seen as obsolete within 10 years.
The methodological bias is the curse of Nordhaus, in that when climate economics started, climate policy was in the future. Another part of the curse of Nordhaus is the focus on the first best. I called it the curse of Nordhaus. Nordhaus knows this, he hates this. He doesn’t want a thousand mini-Nordhauses walking around.
The other things that I hope will happen is that people are going make more use of the rapidly increasing availability of data.
In terms of obstacles, I am not convinced that there is an ideological bias or at least not one that is special to the economics of climate change. Of course, economists documented ideological biases, but I don’t think that climate economists are in any way special there.
The methodological bias is the curse of Nordhaus, in that when climate economics started, climate policy was in the future. Another part of the curse of Nordhaus is the focus on the first best. The DICE model provides the first-best solution to the climate problem, which is, of course, a very useful yardstick. But there are still large numbers of relatively young researchers who are doing what Nordhaus did. But with different parameters and different calibrations and so on and so forth.
But it’s still the first best. And we are arguing about what the discount rate should be and whether we should include an ambiguity aversion or whether we should include loss aversion and all that stuff, right? We’re not talking about how are we actually solve this kind of problem in the real world, not in the idealised world of our models. This is institutional inertia. Rather than asking, “Did Nordhaus actually ask the right question? Yes, he did in 1982. And in 1991, he still asked the right question.” But you will not ask the question that Nordhaus did in 2021.
I called it the curse of Nordhaus. Nordhaus knows this, he hates this. He doesn’t want a thousand mini-Nordhauses walking around. He likes people who challenge what he has done. Not repeat, not some variation on a theme. He doesn’t like that at all. So it’s not the old guys who are blocking this or blocking innovation. It’s the young guys who are not sufficiently imaginative or sufficiently daring to just go do something else entirely.
You have recently been involved in some controversies. Some of these come from one of your paper that you published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. You found that for low levels of warming this may help economic growth, and higher levels of warming result in reductions to economic growth. And then it was found out that the paper has some errors, of course we all make errors. So, that’s not the issue. But the unfortunate thing is, of course, that the article had a significant impact on policy and many people now believe the first result still holds. Could let our readers know what the latest results are on that line of research?
The Journal of Economics Perspective paper indeed had a few errors. They were of two kinds. Some data was wrong in the printed table, but right in the data set. So, this did not actually affect the conclusions at all. Then there were some minor miscodings, where a number was 2.2, rather than 2.3, and stuff like that. So it did not affect the results at all in any substantive way.
Since then, two things that have happened. First, a number of new estimates of the total economic impact of climate change have been published and they should be added. I’ve added a few but not all of them. The other issue is, there’s been now seven papers or so that estimate the impact of climate change, ot on the level of economic welfare, but on the rate of economic growth. Those two sets of estimates have to be reconciled, which I hope to do over the next months. So there is no update there.
There is a website in the UK called ‘The Conversation’. It has apparently banned comments from you, because they believed you to be among a group that they called ‘climate change deniers’ or ‘climate change skeptics’, such as Bjorn Lomborg. Would you, want to set the record straight? What would you say to all those that call you a climate skeptics?
I wasn’t aware that I was banned from The Conversation. That’s news to me. It reveals just how strange the debate on climate policy has become.
From mid-1990 onwards, I have argued for climate policy. And definitely for the last 20 years or so, I’ve argued for a carbon tax. I don’t know where people get the idea that I am against carbon policy. The reason that people do this is, of course, because at the same time, I push back against the alarmism and the doomism.
My first paper was an econometric one: A time-series analysis of the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations. It was the first, as far as I know, that shows that CO2 has a significant effect on temperature and that both are cointegrated. So, the notion that I would deny that there is a relationship or that human activity has a significant effect on the temperature is just historically wrong. You can just go to that 1992 paper and read my words on this, which people apparently do not do. The idea that I would deny the human influence on climate, it’s just ridiculous.
From mid-1990 onwards, I have argued for climate policy. And definitely for the last 20 years or so, I’ve argued for a carbon tax. I actually used to be ambivalent about whether we wanted a carbon tax or tradable permits. It used to be more on the tradable permit side, and now I’m more on the carbon tax side.
So I don’t know where people get the idea that I am against carbon policy. The reason that people do this is, of course, because at the same time, I push back against the alarmism and the doomism. Also I push back, actually much stronger, against ill-designed climate policy. Yes, we should have climate policy, but we should have climate policy that is well designed. For example, we’ve actually seen a number of instances of climate policy that do not serve emission reduction at all, but serve completely different purposes.
I push back against that. Because I am fairly visible and fairly vocal, and sometimes assertive enough, if not aggressive in the tone that I take, people think that smearing my name would help their cause. I think it just helps polarization. And polarization is the last thing that I think we need to solve the climate problem. The other reason that they don’t like me is because I confront them with this sort of stuff.
What you also said is, or what you find, and what you definitely do advocate for is for is a rather low social cost of carbon.
That is also not true: The social cost of carbon that comes out of our models, and that comes out of my meta-analysis, is higher than the social cost of carbon that is applied around the world. David Pearce, I think, said it best. We can argue all we want about what is the optimal environmental policy. But if actual environmental policy is below what anybody reasonably says would be the optimum, then we should not argue with the guy who argues for the lowest carbon tax. We should just argue, raise it first to that level, and then start the argument about whether we should go higher or not.
But if you, let’s say, go to market in Morocco and you start to haggle with the local trader, this guy would start at uh, €100, and you know the actual worth is 20. So maybe just because the bargaining started too high you actually end up with a higher price.
I accept that that is a good strategy if you’re on a market in Morocco. It’s not how we set the carbon tax, right?
How much warming would you expect from a $20 tax on carbon?
That’s a very difficult question and the reason that I hesitate here is because we’ve been taken by surprise just how fast the cost of wind and solar – and solar in particular, has fallen. Much faster than anybody anticipated. The older scenarios where we were looking at 5 or 6 degrees of warming seem completely implausible now – assuming that the climate sensitivity is roughly in the middle of the range cited.
The implication of this is that a fairly modest carbon tax would actually not lead to a very dramatic warming. This is provided that the carbon tax also increases and it doesn’t stay at the 20. If you were to worldwide impose a carbon tax of $20 per ton of carbon, that goes up let’s say 2% a year, then I’d be surprised if we get much above 3 and a half, 4 degrees warming.
Let’s say earth warming will be 4 degrees. On the one hand, we have the wealth of economic analysis that is then saying “a $20 carbon tax is good and the 4 degrees warming is optimal.” On the other hand, we have the results of various environmental scientists, all the results collected in the IPCC reports and that are saying, “Look, a 4 degrees warming would be horrendous. There will be ecosystem collapse, there will be problems of scales that we can hardly potentially envision.” How do these two fit together?
It’s mostly the assessment of values that is different there. In our estimates of the economic impact of climate change, we actually rely on the same information. So, we do look at ecosystem models and we do look at the impacts of sea-level rise and we do look at the economic models, and so on and so forth.
So, the information is practically the same in terms of physical impacts. The big difference is the interpretation in terms of human welfare. I think the natural sciences are simply not qualified to do this.
There’s actually another key difference and that is the role of human agency in a human adaptation. A lot of the very dramatic impact estimates, particularly on sea level rise and agriculture, assume that there is no adaptation. Natural sciences assumes that the humans just let it happen. They assume the farmers will continue to do what they’ve always done and what their grandparents did. This is a very silly assumption, I think that’s simply wrong.
The bigger difference is in the value system that is employed. If you look at climate change from the perspective: what will this do to humans and what will this do to human welfare, the impacts are negative, but not very large. But if you look at it from the perspective: “Oh, my God, I’m going to focus on this one particular species that may go extinct.” Or, if “I’m going to focus on this one particular island that may disappear.” Or, if “I’m going look at one particular ecosystem, and it’s going to be completely different in the future.” Then that is another value-related issue.
The fact that things will be different in the future does not mean that it will be worse in the future. The fact that something disappears does not mean that this is catastrophic. Yes, it is catastrophic for the things that have disappeared, but not necessarily for humans. Or for biodiversity. For example, in the climate debate, there’s always a lot of talk about the polar bear. Actually, the biology and the ecology of polar bears is not at all understood. People who say they know what climate change is going to do to the polar bear are bluffing or lying. But even so, even if the polar bear would go extinct, what does that mean to humans? We hardly interact with the animals. If you look at the biodiversity aspect, they are just a subspecies of brown bear with a different color of fur. But it does not make them a different species.
Would you say that the economists’ estimates of the economic costs of 4 degrees warming are sufficiently good?
I would not say that they’re good, and I would not say that they’re good enough. But, it’s the only estimates that we have. I definitely think that they’re better than the alternatives, at the moment. I think we should work very hard to make them better.
One very unfortunate aspect is that, between 2000 and 2015, there was hardly any funding for this kind of research. Fortunately, over the last couple of years in the United States, unfortunately still not in Europe, there is substantial funding to look again in the economic costs from climate change.
However, most of the funding is misguided because people look at the impacts of weather rather than the impacts of climate. But people are beginning to examine what we can actually learn from the weather about climate.
One problem is that the mechanistic models of adaptation that we use are really not good enough. But because of climate change, we can see fundamental realignment in the way we do things. And the way technology develops and the way economic systems are organized. All of this works towards reducing our impact estimates, not increasing our impact estimates,
Some of the aspect that you studied, related to the social cost of carbon and to the impact of climate change on our world, were also differences between poor and rich. In 2014, you wrote in the Financial Times “Humans are tough and adaptable species. People live on the equator and in the Arctic, in the desert and the rainforest and we survived ice ages with primitive technologies. The idea that climate change poses an existential threat to humankind is laughable.” Would you want to clarify this statement a bit? And especially now with the more recent results that you found in mind, where you actually obtain that the impact of climate change in poor regions can be substantial. We agree that some of humankind will survive 4, 5, 6 degrees, whatever it may be. But the question, obviously, is not necessarily about the existential threat, but, about leading a good life. And the other question is, how does climate change potentially impact those regions that are very poor?
Estimates show indeed, that in rich countries you’ll see small impacts or even positive impacts. In poor countries, the poorest countries, you would see for 2.5 degrees of warming that 20-25% of income would be lost. If you start including the uncertainties the loss can be a good bit larger than that, up to the point, in some local economies, where you have that the economy just collapses.
How do we get people out of this precarious situation? One way, of course, is economic development. The reason that they are so very, very vulnerable, is because they are so poor. One of the things that I used to talk about is the difference in vulnerability to sea-level rise between the Netherlands and Bangladesh. Both are low-lying very densely populated countries. You have floods from the sea or floods from the river. You have your occasional very big storm. However, everybody would think of Bangladesh as terribly vulnerable, while the Netherlands is seen as fairly robust to sea-level rise.
So what is the difference between the two? The history of dike building in the Netherlands started around 1850. If you look at old pictures how dikes were built, then it was mostly manpower. People did not know a whole lot about morphology or sedimentology. They definitely did not have satellite imagery or model computers to calculate how far dikes should be built. And then, when you look at Bangladesh now, it has much better technologies, much better knowledge about how to do this.
Estimates show indeed, that in rich countries you’ll see small impacts or even positive impacts. In poor countries, the poorest countries, you would see for 2.5 degrees of warming that 20-25% of income would be lost. If you start including the uncertainties the loss can be a good bit larger than that, up to the point, in some local economies, where you have that the economy just collapses.
And actually, if you look at per capita income, the Netherlands wasn’t much richer than when it started building dikes than Bangladesh is now and so it’s not economics either. So what is the big difference between the Netherlands then and Bangladesh now? It’s all to do with politics. In 1850, the Netherlands transformed itself from essentially a kleptocracy into a modern democracy where the government was responsive to the people. As soon as the Netherland’s central government was formed, the dike building program started and the Netherlands became a lot safer.
There are two things that have happened in Bangladesh over the last 10 years. One is that they’ve grown economically very, very rapidly. The other is that actually politics have stabilized, not necessarily in a good way from a democratic perspective, because it’s a fairly authoritarian. But they have acquired competence because they’re no longer fighting with the opposition that much. So the priority of politicians is no longer to get rich as quickly as they can before they get out of office. They’ve been in office long enough, they are rich enough, so that they can begin to care about the country.
So this is a story of developments. In a world of 4 degrees, the Bangladesh of 10 years ago, that would be a major disaster. And a much bigger one than most people would imagine, I think. Because most people think of Bangladesh with a major sea-level rise of one and a half meter sea level rise, as you would have to evacuate 60 million people, right? Which is disastrous enough. But where would those people go? They would probably push it to India. But India doesn’t like them at all. There’s already a lot of low-level conflict between India and Bangladesh. I believe that if you have 50 million Bangladeshis pushing into India, that conflict will be worse, much worse. And Pakistan would then get involved. And then you might be talking about nuclear war.
So we have to keep in mind that climate change will not fall on the current world, and we actually can see it coming. And we have plenty of time to do something against this. If we can’t solve poverty, then I would argue that that is still the bigger problem than climate change itself.
But it’s not 4 degrees warming in the current world. It’s 4 degrees in the future world. And that is something that we should keep in mind. Arguably, if in a 100 years time South Asia and Africa are still as poor as they are today, then climate change on top of that would be a complete and utter disaster. But you could also argue, well, if they’re still as poor then as they are now, then we’ve also completely failed in our development policies. And that probably causes more human misery, than future climate change would.
So we have to keep in mind that climate change will not fall on the current world, and we actually can see it coming. And we have plenty of time to do something against this. If we can’t solve poverty, then I would argue that that is still the bigger problem than climate change itself.
Isn’t it also, or shouldn’t it be, a problem of responsibility somehow? Let’s say poor countries have to spend a large budget on adapting to the climate change that we are making, is that how the world should look like? That’s a question of justice, too. If we hurt the developing countries, through our activities, then it’s a question of responsibility.
Of course, we do have a responsibility there, because our trade policy discriminates, and our immigration policy discriminates. It’s an interconnected world, we do have a responsibility. And of course we have a historical responsibility as well. French have a historic responsibility for the mess they created in South Asia, and we Dutch have a historic responsibility for the mess we created in Indonesia.
The question is how to best deal with this, rather than arguing over who is responsible for what. And the current preferred diplomatic solution is to create big pots of money that go through the United Nations and the World Bank, and the IMF. I’m not convinced that is the best solution. Any country has a responsibility to reduce carbon.
I definitely also think that we have a responsibility to spend some of our wealth on charity and development aid. I think that we should also do what we can, not just through donations, but also through the initiation of policies to create room and possibilities for other people to live up economically just as we have.
Do you believe that if we increase our development aid or climate finance to developing countries, then this will go a long way towards, buying us free of our responsibility?
I’m not a fan at all of how a lot of that mitigation money is spent. A lot of adaptation money is simply misspent. It goes to investing a lot into satellites and stuff and it doesn’t help people at all. It goes to research that then tells struggling South Africa farmers that the weather is important, it’s as if they didn’t know that already.
What the World Bank and other multilateral organizations at the moment are doing is that they are withholding support for coal-fired power plants. I’m not so convinced that that is the right thing to do. Yes, that would decrease emissions, but that would also hurt economic growth. And you can’t grow your economy if you ration energy, and that is a big problem in many of the poor parts of the world. Unfortunately, wind and solar are not good enough, at the moment, so you do need to go to fossil fuels. That’s the only feasible solution for many energy systems.
It’s not just that renewables are unreliable and intermittent and all those sorts of things. But also, it is technically much more challenging to run your economy on renewables than it is on thermal power, because you just need much more expertise, much better regulations to actually make the system work. It’s difficult enough to pull this off in a sophisticated country like Germany, and we see lots of problems in the integration of renewables in Germany at the moment. Doing this in Nigeria, it’s just like, gosh, forget it. It just doesn’t work.
I’m not a fan at all of how a lot of that mitigation money is spent. A lot of adaptation money is simply misspent. It goes to investing a lot into satellites and stuff and it doesn’t help people at all. It goes to research that then tells struggling South Africa farmers that the weather is important, it’s as if they didn’t know that already.
Doesn’t this even further suggest that the development money that we provide to the poor countries is very unlikely to substantially help them to get out of poverty? And the further damage that we are doing due to climate change is even simply worsening their problems?
I would even say it’s worse than that. I mentioned briefly Sussex being good at labor economics. We also actually have a pretty strong group in development economics. Development economics now, actually, it’s finally gotten to the stage – not that we know how to develop and how to give development aid – but we definitely know how not to do it. We have a lot of experience with that. But we have now also gotten to the stage that we actually know about small things that help, such as education of girls, build-up of civil service and those other things. And what we’ve seen over the last 10, 15 years or so, is that more and more development money, that used to go to the education of girls, is now being diverted to what is essentially our priority, climate change.
So I think it’s actually worse than you say. We’re actually, in the name of climate, actively diverting money away from we know what works. There’s been a couple of papers on the effectiveness of the early years of climate aid. And they tell two things. They don’t help, they don’t help development but also they do not reduce emissions. So a lot of the fund money is wasted, and it comes directly at the expense of the development aid that we know that works.
Let’s say, even if most developed aid was spent well and not diverted, then would all this money really help the developing countries in order to increase their growth sufficiently so that damages from climate change would be manageable?
In the end, they have to do it themselves, right? At the end of the day, growth in Africa is generated in Africa, not through external support. Some countries are doing fine, Botswana being one example. Some countries seem to do fine but in fact are going backwards, Ethiopia is an example of that. Some countries just seem to be in a hopeless mess and have been in a hopeless mess since forever. Nigeria is an example of that. Well, there are also signs of hope in Nigeria. There’s parts of Nigeria that are doing very well. But, in the end, they have to do it themselves. They have to reorganize their society and their economy so that it’s conducive to economic growth.
But that brings us then full circle back to the conundrum of responsibility.
If substantial parts of the world do not develop economically, then you could see very dramatic impacts of climate change. If indeed it is impossible for development aid to help them grow, then it is a moral duty for us to not hurt them. And then the only way is for us to reduce emissions as fast as we can.
Developing countries will have to rely much more on non-renewables in the future due to their energy-dependent economic growth, because their energy systems will not be up to the task of wind and solar.
All that is putting much more strain on the ecosystems which are necessary, for example, for agricultural sectors in developing countries. Isn’t all of this coming back to the fact that economic growth and development is simply going in such a way that it is using up too much of our natural resources? And that our current lifestyles are simply not sustainable, even, let’s say if we solve the climate problem?
It really depends on what you’re looking at. What you’re seeing at the moment in North America and in Europe is that we have become so good at agriculture, that we need less and less area for it. If you compare acid rain over Europe now and as it was 40 years ago, things have much improved. So, some things are getting better, some things are getting worse. Of course, it is not interesting academically to talk about problems that have been solved.
And the same is true for the news. It is just not interesting if newspapers say that things are getting better. So some things are getting better, some things are getting worse. In general we tend to focus on things that are getting worse because we want to avoid it getting worse still.
What is your position on the Dasgupta Review?
I have not read it in detail, but Partha Dasgupta undoubtedly did a good job. There are definitely issues with extinction. The list of species that are threatened or species that only survive in highly circumscribed circumstances like zoos and those sort of things, is getting longer and longer. And that is definitely something that I am concerned about and I think we all should be.
I would view the Dasgupta review less about biodiversity but more on ecosystems in general. What it’s basically saying is that throughout most of the ecosystems that exist demand is exceeding the supply. Since you’re advocating development as one of the ways out of the problem of climate change, will this not conflict with further pressure on ecosystems?
I don’t think that development is necessarily good for the environment. Yet poverty places an enormous burden on the environment. But the intensification of agriculture and urbanization actually reduce the pressure on the environment. And that should be kept in mind out there.
I think you got me wrong there. I don’t think that development is necessarily good for the environment. Yet poverty places an enormous burden on the environment. But the intensification of agriculture and urbanization actually reduce the pressure on the environment. And that should be kept in mind out there. If you look at agricultural production throughout Africa, they get so little off their fields. It is low intensity agriculture, and if they were to intensify agriculture, they can do with a lot less lands than they need now.
Okay, but I guess you also saw the positive relationship between ecological footprint and income.
There are definitely things that go up, as well as others go down. If you’re worried about nature, then the big impact is agriculture. And just the amount of area that you need for agriculture. If you’re talking lands, then biofuels and traditional biomass for heating and cooking, that’s a complete disaster. So if you move to modern fuels and modern construction materials and modern agriculture, you can actually dramatically reduce your environmental impact.
That’s true. But maybe not on the raw materials that we’re otherwise using in order to construct our houses, our cars, and our consumption lifestyle in general. Do you have a specific opinion on whether we are too far developed? Whether we should see some degrowth in order to put less strain on ecosystems?
The degrowth crowd, I think, is awfully irresponsible, and also completely naive. Degrowth is just an euphemism because they do not dare to say the real words, which is economic shrink. And to call for economic shrink in a world that is full of poverty – I think it’s just repugnant. It is morally wrong to say the economy should shrink. I can understand that a rich academic would say, “Oh, I have enough and I could do with less.” But at the same time you should be aware enough of the data to know that you’re in the top 1%. And for that top 1% to say to the other 99%, “You can’t grow anymore.” I don’t know how they dare to get these words out of their mouth.
And if they were only referring to the rich, and not to the poor, giving the poor the right to grow to a certain extent?
Then I say: go do your math. I mean if the 1% stops growing, but the 99% continue to grow, then the economy continues to grow. The idea that you can take the wealth from the top 1% and give it to the 99%.
Yep, I agree with the point. I had to ask… So, let’s go to a different topic. Do you know the concept of holidays or do you take your papers to the beach?
I am aware of holidays, yes. The family sleeps much more than I do. So there are times, early in the morning and late at night, that I am awake and they sleep. Also, I’m also the editor of a pretty big journal. And if you don’t keep up, then you’re in trouble. So yes, there’s always work.
Please feel free to suggest someone else who you would like to see in this series of interviews.
Maureen Cropper and Charlie Kolstad would be top of my list.
ingmar schumacher 