Paul Bass Photo
Economist William Nordhaus addresses the press Monday after winning the Nobel Prize.
On a day when a new gloomy report emerged about the future of the planet, a ray of hope emerged in New Haven.
The gloomy report was issued Monday by a United Nations scientific panel. It predicted a deadly mass global climate crisis by 2040, much sooner than previously expected.
Meanwhile, Yale Professor William Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics Monday for his decades of research into climate change — and sounded a note of optimism that the work he and others are doing will eventually help address the crisis.
He sounded that note of optimism during a celebratory press conference on the second floor of the School of Management’s main Whitney Avenue building.
Nordhaus acknowledged that under the “anomalous hostility” of the Trump administration the United States has taken steps back from joining with other countries to cut carbon emissions. But he called that only a temporary setback.
“All I can do is hope we can get through this without too much damage. Outside of the United States, there is widespread acceptance of the science and economics behind climate change,” he said. “I think we just need to get through this difficult period.
“I’m supremely confident it is going to happen. There’s a lot of momentum here.”
He expressed confidence specifically about the growing support for market-based solutions like those he has focused on is recent years, such as carbon taxes, which factor in the true environmental cost of using polluting fossil fuels in goods and services; and financial incentives for companies to develop green technology.
Conservative Republican and liberal Democratic economists have reached consensus on market-based solutions, noted Nordhaus, who began studying economic approaches to climate change in the 1970s and has served on Yale’s faculty since 1967. He said he hopes to see that consensus catch on beyond the community of economists.
The Nobel Committee’s decision to award him its economics prize can only help, he said, by “recogniz[ing] what the stakes are here.”
Nordhaus has most recently put his ideas into practice at Yale, where he spearheaded an experiment in assessing charges on different buildings within the university based on their carbon dioxide emissions. (Click on the video for an explanation of how the system works.) The idea is to make it worth each department’s financial while to reduce energy consumption. And the hope is that other universities will adopt the same system — and take one more small step toward saving the planet.
Nordhaus arrived late for the press conference because he was finishing up teaching students.
“He didn’t want to miss class,” observed Yale President Peter Salovey. “If you don’t want to cancel class on the day you win the Nobel Prize, you’re never going to cancel it.”
Charging the various Yale buildings for their emissions is clever and all, but it's nearly an empty gesture when Yale's endowment is invested in polluting fossil fuel companies who actively fight against effective approaches to the climate problem.