Thirty years ago, on this day, June 16, 1993, an OECD/IEA conference “International Conference on the Economics Of Climate Change” ended in Paris.
What a doomed species we are.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359.6ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
The Earth Summit happened. And now everyone was gonna have to figure out the economics of climate change. The IEA and the OECD were good venues for this, both of them with one foot in the technology. So see for examplethe carbon disposal symposium in Oxford earlier in the year. And IEA had been playing around with the science since well, February of 1981, at the latest. IEA had been looking ideas about what would you do about the economics of climate change? This stuff had been discussed as far back as the mid 1970s by Nordhaus for IASSA
What I think we can learn from this
And the same sets of ideas get moved around the chessboard. And then a new game starts and they set the chess pieces up. And round and round and round it goes. Questions of political and social cultural power, are, of course, bracketed or sidestepped altogether, because that would be normative and not easily quantified. And might take you towards things like new international economic orders, an old unpopular (with the rich) idea from the 1970s…
What happened next
The carbon dioxide kept accumulating. And the economists and so forth, kept flying from conference to conference.
See also – Stern admits he under-estimated speed of changes
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.