You might also like
WASHINGTON: Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist, is trying to persuade global warming negotiators that they’re marching up a blind alley. He says it’s probably too late to achieve anything substantial at the long-awaited United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December, so real progress will have to come afterward.
That’s not a message the negotiators want to hear, but Stiglitz doesn’t care. “I’m saying we ought to be facing reality. We have to learn from our failures,” he said in a phone interview this week.
Stiglitz gave Bloomberg reporters a preview of remarks he was scheduled to deliver on Friday in Paris at the International Scientific Conference, one of the last big conclaves leading up to the December summit. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York, may be the favourite American economist of the developing world, because he often takes its side against the rich countries, particularly the US.
Plan A for climate change was a cap-and-trade system: Set caps on the amount of greenhouse gases that countries could spew into the air, then let those countries trade their emission rights with each other. Emitters that can cut cheaply make the biggest reductions, so cap-and-trade achieves any given amount of emission reductions at the lowest possible cost.
