Gernot Wagner | |
---|---|
Born | 1980 Austria |
Nationality | Austrian & American |
Spouse | Dr. Siripanth Nippita (m. 2002) [1] |
Academic career | |
Field | climate economics |
Institution | Columbia Business School |
School or tradition | environmental economics |
Alma mater | Harvard University Stanford University |
Doctoral advisor | Robert N. Stavins |
Influences | Nat Keohane Martin Weitzman Richard Zeckhauser |
Awards | Top 15 Financial Times-McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2015; Austrian of the Year 2022 |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
Gernot Wagner (1980 in Austria) is an Austro-American climate economist at Columbia Business School, where he is a tenured full professor. [2] [3] He holds an AB and a PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University, as well as an MA in economics from Stanford University. A founding co-director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program (2017-2019) [4] he joined the faculty of New York University in 2019, moving to Columbia University in 2022. [5] [6] Wagner writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, and is the co-author, with Martin L. Weitzman, of Climate Shock, [7] a Top 15 Financial Times-McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2015. [8] He won the "Austrian of the Year" award in 2022, awarded by Austrian daily Die Presse. [9]
Wagner was an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund from 2008 to 2014 and lead senior economist from 2014 to 2016. [7] [10] While there he was a member of the faculty of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and he wrote Climate Shock (2015), a book emphasizing the importance of risk and uncertainty for prompting action on climate change. [11] [12] [13] Wagner was a member of the six-person lead author team, including Suzi Kerr, that wrote the World Bank's Emissions Trading in Practice : A Handbook on Design and Implementation. [14]
"Risk" and "uncertainty" in climate change are often mentioned as reasons to delay action. Wagner's Climate Shock, joint with Martin Weitzman, emphasizes that the "known unknowns" and potential "unknown unknowns" instead increase the need for action. [7] This contrasts with work done, for example, by economists Bill Nordhaus, Richard Tol, and others. Nordhaus, in turn, favorably reviewed Wagner and Weitzman's book in the New York Review of Books. [15] Wagner's latest academic work on this topic, joint with Kent Daniel of Columbia University and Bob Litterman of Kepos Capital further emphasizes the importance of pricing climate risk and uncertainty. [16]
Wagner was the founding co-director, joint with David Keith, of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program founded in 2017 as an interfaculty research initiative. [4] [17] His geoengineering research focuses on economics, governance, policy, and public perception, including the chemtrails conspiracy theory. [18] Together with Dustin Tingley, Wagner finds that in a U.S. public opinion survey conducted in October 2016, 30 to 40% of the U.S. public believed in a version of the conspiracy. [19] The paper also describes what the authors call a "community of conspiracy" in online discourse, in particular on Twitter and other anonymous social media.
On November 23, 2018, Wagner published an open-access article on "Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment." [20] [21] The article was noticed by CNN, where the journalist said: "Scientists are proposing an ingenious but as-yet-unproven way to tackle climate change: spraying sun-dimming chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere." [22] The proposal "estimated the development costs of a stratospheric fleet of sulfur-releasing aircraft at $3.5 billion. This theoretical program would start in 2033 with two aircraft and 4,000 annual flights, increasing over 15 years to nearly 100 aircraft flying hundreds of flights a week," and would cost annually to operate "roughly $2.25 billion". [23]
Gernot Wagner has written five books:
Wagner has been married since 2002 to Dr. Siri Nippita, a gynecologist at NYU Langone Medical Center and the chief of the family planning division as well as the director of Reproductive Choice at Bellevue Hospital. [1] [25] They have two young children and live in New York City. [26] [27]
Robert Merton Solow, GCIH was an American economist and Nobel laureate whose work on the theory of economic growth culminated in the exogenous growth model named after him.
The chemtrail conspiracy theory is the erroneous belief that long-lasting condensation trails left in the sky by high-flying aircraft are actually "chemtrails" consisting of chemical or biological agents, sprayed for nefarious purposes undisclosed to the general public. Believers in this conspiracy theory say that while normal contrails dissipate relatively quickly, contrails that linger must contain additional substances. Those who subscribe to the theory speculate that the purpose of the chemical release may be solar radiation management, weather modification, psychological manipulation, human population control, biological or chemical warfare, or testing of biological or chemical agents on a population, and that the trails are causing respiratory illnesses and other health problems.
Climate engineering is the intentional large-scale alteration of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change. The term has been used as an umbrella term for both carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation modification when applied at a planetary scale. However, these two processes have very different characteristics, and are now often discussed separately. Carbon dioxide removal techniques remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and are part of climate change mitigation. Solar radiation modification is the reflection of some sunlight back to space to cool the earth. Some publications include passive radiative cooling as a climate engineering technology. The media tends to also use climate engineering for other technologies such as glacier stabilization, ocean liming, and iron fertilization of oceans. The latter would modify carbon sequestration processes that take place in oceans.
Mark Lynas is a British author and journalist whose work is focused on environmentalism and climate change. He has written for the New Statesman, The Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, and The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post in the United States; he also worked on and appeared in the film The Age of Stupid. He was born in Fiji, grew up in Peru, Spain and the United Kingdom and holds a degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh. He has published several books including Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007) and The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (2011).
An economic analysis of climate change uses economic tools and models to calculate the magnitude and distribution of damages caused by climate change. It can also give guidance for the best policies for mitigation and adaptation to climate change from an economic perspective. There are many economic models and frameworks. For example, in a cost–benefit analysis, the trade offs between climate change impacts, adaptation, and mitigation are made explicit. For this kind of analysis, integrated assessment models (IAMs) are useful. Those models link main features of society and economy with the biosphere and atmosphere into one modelling framework. The total economic impacts from climate change are difficult to estimate. In general, they increase the more the global surface temperature increases.
William Dawbney Nordhaus is an American economist. He was a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, best known for his work in economic modeling and climate change, and a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Nordhaus received the prize "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis".
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is a 700-page report released for the Government of the United Kingdom on 30 October 2006 by economist Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE) and also chair of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) at Leeds University and LSE. The report discusses the effect of global warming on the world economy. Although not the first economic report on climate change, it is significant as the largest and most widely known and discussed report of its kind.
A technological fix, technical fix, technological shortcut or (techno-)solutionism is an attempt to use engineering or technology to solve a problem.
The social cost of carbon (SCC) is the marginal cost of the impacts caused by emitting one extra tonne of carbon emissions at any point in time. The purpose of putting a price on a tonne of emitted CO2 is to aid policymakers or other legislators in evaluating whether a policy designed to curb climate change is justified. The social cost of carbon is a calculation focused on taking corrective measures on climate change which can be deemed a form of market failure. The only governments which use the SCC are in North America. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that a carbon price of $100 per tonne of CO2 could reduce global GHG emissions by at least half the 2019 level by 2030.
Martin Lawrence Weitzman was an economist and a professor of economics at Harvard University. He was among the most influential economists in the world according to Research Papers in Economics (RePEc). His latest research was largely focused on environmental economics, specifically climate change and the economics of catastrophes.
Solar radiation modification (SRM), is a group of large-scale approaches to limit global warming by increasing the amount of sunlight that is reflected away from Earth and back to space. Among the potential approaches, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is the most-studied, followed by marine cloud brightening (MCB); others such as ground- and space-based show less potential or feasibility and receive less attention. SRM could be a supplement to climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, but would not be a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. SRM is a form of climate engineering or geoengineering.
Arctic geoengineering is a type of climate engineering in which polar climate systems are intentionally manipulated to reduce the undesired impacts of climate change. As a proposed solution to climate change, arctic geoengineering is relatively new and has not been implemented on a large scale. It is based on the principle that Arctic albedo plays a significant role in regulating the Earth's temperature and that there are large-scale engineering solutions that can help maintain Earth's hemispheric albedo. According to researchers, projections of sea ice loss, when adjusted to account for recent rapid Arctic shrinkage, indicate that the Arctic will likely be free of summer sea ice sometime between 2059 and 2078. Advocates for Arctic geoengineering believe that climate engineering methods can be used to prevent this from happening.
Marine cloud brightening also known as marine cloud seeding and marine cloud engineering is a proposed solar radiation management technique that would make clouds brighter, reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space in order to offset global warming. Along with stratospheric aerosol injection, it is one of the two solar radiation management methods that may most feasibly have a substantial climate impact. The intention is that increasing the Earth's albedo, in combination with greenhouse gas emissions reduction, would reduce climate change and its risks to people and the environment. If implemented, the cooling effect is expected to be felt rapidly and to be reversible on fairly short time scales. However, technical barriers remain to large-scale marine cloud brightening. There are also risks with such modification of complex climate systems.
Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is a proposed method of solar geoengineering to reduce global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and increased albedo, which occurs naturally from volcanic winter. It appears that stratospheric aerosol injection, at a moderate intensity, could counter most changes to temperature and precipitation, take effect rapidly, have low direct implementation costs, and be reversible in its direct climatic effects. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that it "is the most-researched [solar geoengineering] method that it could limit warming to below 1.5 °C (2.7 °F)." However, like other solar geoengineering approaches, stratospheric aerosol injection would do so imperfectly and other effects are possible, particularly if used in a suboptimal manner.
David W. Keith is a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He joined the University of Chicago in April 2023. Keith previously served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics for Harvard University's Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and professor of public policy for the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. Early contributions include development of the first atom interferometer and a Fourier-transform spectrometer used by NASA to measure atmospheric temperature and radiation transfer from space.
Novim is a non-profit group at the University of California, Santa Barbara that organizes teams for objective scientific study of global issues and identification options for addressing the concerns, based upon a collaborative problem-solving approach used in the field of physics.
Ted Nordhaus is an American author and the director of research at The Breakthrough Institute. He has co-edited and written a number of books, including Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (2007) and An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015) with collaborator Michael Shellenberger.
The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center located in Berkeley, California. Founded in 2007 by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The institute is aligned with ecomodernist philosophy. The Institute advocates for an embrace of modernization and technological development in order to address environmental challenges. Proposing urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination as processes with a potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species.
The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, referred to as the DICE model or Dice model, is a neoclassical integrated assessment model developed by 2018 Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus that integrates in the neoclassical economics, carbon cycle, climate science, and estimated impacts allowing the weighing of subjectively guessed costs and subjectively guessed benefits of taking steps to slow climate change. Nordhaus also developed the RICE model, a variant of the DICE model that was updated and developed alongside the DICE model. Researchers who collaborated with Nordhaus to develop the model include David Popp, Zili Yang, and Joseph Boyer.
Suzi Clare Kerr is a New Zealand economist. She joined Environmental Defense Fund in 2019 as its chief economist.
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