Lord Stern on Climate Change

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the major problems facing the planet. It also raises a host of interesting and challenging economic issues, from the selection of policy instruments (command and control regulation, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and hybrid schemes), through the analysis of risk, uncertainty and irreversabilities, to the global political economy of reaching an effective international environmental agreement which adequately addresses equity and development issues. The scale and potential impact of climate change on global well-being puts the current, but temporary in nature, financial crisis in perspective. Lord Nick Stern, whose 2007 Review of the Economics of Climate Change (link) did much to raise awareness of the urgency of the problem, has recently published a new book updating his views - A Blueprint for a Safer Planet. An audio file of the informative and very accessible LSE lecture by Nick Stern, to launch his book, can be downloaded at: link). It is well worth listening to both as an economist and as a responsible citizen.