An economist’s guide to climate change
4/30/202615 min
Solutions to climate change, like building clean energy, come with a price tag. But unchecked warming also brings serious costs. As we make investments to rein in our climate pollution, how should we weigh costs and benefits? Dr. Jennifer Morris of MIT joins the show to explain how economists have tried to pin down the dollar costs of a warming planet, and why a clear answer has proved elusive. Together, we’ll ask how the tools of economics can help us plan for a better, more prosperous future, even in the face of uncertainty.
For a deeper dive and additional resources related to this episode, visit: https://climate.mit.edu/podcasts/e6-economists-guide-climate-change
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First 90 secondsMadison Goldberg· Host0:00
[pensive music] I'm Madison Goldberg, and you're listening to Ask MIT Climate. Today, we're asking a question that's long attracted the attention of economists: how much should we be willing to pay to stop climate change? So spoiler alert, we're not going to come up with a perfect answer, but by exploring how economists and climate scientists have tried to grapple with the dollar costs of a warming planet, we can learn a lot about the risks we're facing and the policies designed to protect against them. Our guest is Jennifer Morris.
Jennifer Morris· Guest0:35
I am a principal research scientist at MIT in the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, or CS3. I'm an economist, and I'm thinking about ways that changes in climate might feed back to impact the economy.
Madison Goldberg· Host0:53
Dr. Morris is going to help us navigate the crossroads of climate science and economics, and she'll explain why even though pinning down the cost of climate change is complicated, really complicated, we can't afford to ignore it. Okay, we're gonna try to spare you and also me the economics jargon in this episode, but we do have to start off with one important definition.
Jennifer Morris· Guest1:18
There's a term that is often used called the social cost of carbon. [pensive music] Um, so this is what is the dollar cost we can assign to a unit of carbon emissions that are released?