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Started by aa1234779, August 20, 2017, 07:35 AM

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scarface

#240
Tonight, I found an interesting article in the newspaper Le monde about climate change.
Maybe you will be interested in this article.


Dominique Méda: "Climate change forces us to review our knowledge, including in economics"
The sociologist details, in his column, the failure of economists to understand the ecological catastrophe with their traditional tools


During a climate walk in Quezon, Philippines, September 25, 2020.



Should environmentalists break with the critique of growth, productivism and capitalism, to realistically lead the “ecological transition”? In 1972, the Club of Rome report titled "Limits to Growth" (Rue de l'Echiquier, 2012) - better known as the "Meadows Report", signed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dennis and Donnella Meadows - predicted a collapse of our societies before the end of the 21st century if drastic measures were not taken to slow the pace of growth.

These results were immediately and violently criticized by an economist, William Nordhaus, future recipient, in 2018, of the Bank of Sweden's Prize in economics. He criticized the Meadows in particular for not introducing the notion of price into their model: the price signal would, according to him, make it possible to organize the substitution of one scarce resource for another and to stop, thanks to technological progress, the risk of depletion of natural resources and pollution. With the crisis of the late 1970s, the work of the Meadows was forgotten and it is the model proposed by Nordhaus that was widely adopted, as recounted in the fascinating book Les Modèles du futur (La Découverte, 2007).

The accuracy of the Meadows projections, however, has been confirmed by an Australian researcher, Graham Turner, who compared them to real data: he demonstrated the validity of most of the MIT team's predictions. As for the work of Nordhaus, they have been the subject of strong criticism in recent years: according to his opponents, the economist has minimized the effects of climate change, considering that it would only occur in a very distant future, and would have been mainly interested in the cost of the ecological transition without taking into account physical questions, indicating for example that a warming of 6 degrees would cost 10 points of GDP and that the optimal solution would consist of a warming of 3.5 °C in 2100…

In an article published in 2019 on the Mint Magazine website and translated in French, Australian economist Steve Keen strongly denounced the work of Nordhaus. According to him, he has failed to integrate into his equations a decisive notion for climatologists: that of the tipping point, which means that changes are not linear and can experience sudden changes once certain thresholds are reached. He concluded his reflections thus: “Rather than 'integrating climate change into long-term economic analysis', as his Nobel Prize winner mentions, Nordhaus took the human species on a walk that leads them to the possibility of 'a massacre. He will take his Nobel Prize to his grave, but we, we have to get out of this death march now. Given the irreparably bad level of work economists have done on the economic consequences of climate change, this task should be left in the hands of climatologists.
like Steffen, Lenton and Garrett. They can at least be trusted to understand what global warming is."