I’m gonna start doing semi-regular rants, drawing on (okay, pointing you towards) stuff that I’ve already written here (4 years) and elsewhere. Some may end up as academic article submissions, or chapters in one of the books I am writing. First up: climate models, economic models and features not bugs.
So folks at Carbon Tracker Initiave and University of Exeter have put out a report
Recalibrating Climate Risk – Carbon Tracker Initiative
You can read about it on the Grauniad under the heading Flawed economic models mean climate crisis could crash global economy, experts warn | Green economy | The Guardian
I am old enough to remember all the talk in 2013 about “unburnable carbon” and “stranded assets”
I am even old enough to remember – 20 years ago now – the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.
Okay. In no particular order.
- Deep breath: We. Have. Known – if we wanted to – . For. A. Long. Time. That. “Our”. Economic. “Models”. Are. Shit.
Here’s one of my favourite quotes about this, from a 1980 book called Friendly Fascism
“If we just enlarge the pie, everyone will get more”. This has been the imagery of Capitalist growthmanship since the end of World War II- and I once did my share in propagating it. But the growth of the pie did not change the way the slices were distributed except to enlarge the absolute gap between the lion’s share and the ant’s. And whether the pie grows, or stops growing, or shrinks, there are always people who suffer from the behaviour of the cooks, the effluents from the oven, the junkiness of the pie, and the fact that they needed something more nutritious than pie anyway.”
2. The “economics of climate change” dates back further than a lot of people understand. In the mid-1970s the then newly-minted International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis hosted seminars and study programmes on energy and also climate. I’ve blogged about these guys a lot.
One of the people they got do to some work, in 1975, was William Nordhaus. Nordhaus is an idiot, but one who has fancy graphs and is telling the rich what they want to hear, so of course he has won a “Nobel Prize” (the fake one, set up by the bank). This take-down is worth your time.
3. The economic models have been designed and used to spread bullshit about the costs of switching from fossil fuels. That’s not to say there are not HUGE economic, social, political, cultural, psychological etc costs involved in getting off fossil fuels – of course there are. But the models have been literally funded by the usual suspects to help keep the usual suspects rich. Check out the ABARE saga as one example of this use of absurd modelling to create “facts” around costs and so decrease pressure on the meat-puppet politicians (and shout out to Royce Kurmelovs for his recent archive dive and forthcoming article).
4. The economic models are lapped up and given credence by people (mostly denialist old men) who complain bitterly about the purported inaccuracy of climate models (the climate models are pretty good, though sometimes underestimate the speed and scale of physical changes.)
5. None of this will change until or unless civil society (which is broader than social movements) gets up on its hind legs and stays there, demanding actual change. That won’t happen, and even if it did, we have some already existential (and escalating) consequences about to slap us around the face and kick us in the nads, thanks to near forty years of political and social movement inadequacy.
6. That’s it. That’s the rant.
Things to read
Fressoz, J.P. 2025 In tech we trust: A history of technophilia in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate mitigation expertise – ERSS.
Keen, S. (2021). The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change. Globalizations, 18(7), 1149–1177. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856
Pindick, R. 2015. The Use and Misuse of Models for Climate Policy | NBER
Schrickel, I. (2017) Control versus complexity: approaches to the carbon dioxide problem at IIASA
Wynne, B. (1984) The Institutional Context of Science, Models, and Policy: The IIASA Energy Study. Policy Sciences