MADRID, Jan. 9, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --
- The award goes to the Yale
University professor for developing a pioneering model that
successfully integrates climate science and economics to identify
the most effective paths against global warming.
- Nordhaus's models are now widely applied by the scientific
community to determine the costs and benefits of reducing
CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions compared to the
costs and benefits of inaction.
- "His models are used worldwide to analyze climate policy
options," in the words of the jury's citation, since they serve to
estimate the socioeconomic consequences of continuing emissions,
and to decide the most effective steps to confront the risk.
- For the new laureate, the best way to alleviate climate change
would be to tax carbon emissions at 40
euros per ton, against a current cost in Europe of approximately 7.5 euros.
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate
Change category goes, in this tenth edition, to economist
William Nordhaus, of Yale University (USA) for founding the field of climate change
economics, by "pioneering a framework that integrates climate
science, technology and economics to address the critical question:
What should the world do to limit climate change?"
Nordhaus (New Mexico, USA,
1941) began studying the economic impact of climate change in 1975,
just as climate scientists were issuing their first, tentative
warnings about a rise in global temperatures due to greenhouse gas
emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels. He stumbled on the
problem quite by chance, through sharing an office with
climatologist Allan H. Murphy during
a research stay in Vienna. The
complexity of the challenge and the dearth of information on the
variables involved meant it took Nordhaus over fifteen years to
develop his model. By then an active community of climate
researchers was already in existence, but the climate change issue
had yet to garner the attention of economists.
Today, Nordhaus's DICE (Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy)
model, and its regional variant RICE,
are "widely used," the citation affirms, to estimate the costs and
benefits of curbing emissions. And numerous economists around the
world are constructing and comparing their own assessment models,
with similar conclusions. This growing community draws its
inspiration from Nordhaus's groundbreaking work, without which,
says the jury, we would have no reliable handle on the
socioeconomic consequences of continuing emissions or to decide
which counter-measures to apply.
"Nordhaus used his models and economic insights to illuminate
such considerations as the role of discounting future climate
damages, the risk of catastrophic damages, and the role of
technological change in the energy system," the citation concludes.
"Owing to the transparency and simplicity of his approach, his
models are used worldwide to analyze climate policy options."
Nordhaus himself explained these models yesterday after hearing
of the award: "They are an attempt to represent all the key
linkages between economics and climate in the simplest possible
manner: variables like population, GDP, use of carbon fuels and
climate change. I had to come up with equations to represent the
linkage between, say, population and economic growth, on the one
hand, and emissions, on the other, and then on to climate change.
It took me a long time to develop DICE because it required finding
the different pieces then putting them together in a form that
could be operated on a computer to get results."
Among his constant preoccupations has been the quality of
statistical information and the integration of data drawn from
varied disciplines. And it was this which led him to propose
incorporating environmental factors and non-market activities into
a new system of national accounts.
More expensive carbon
For Nordhaus, the crux of the matter is to set a realistic price
on carbon. This, in his opinion, is the right way to go about
limiting climate change: "The key insight of my work was to put a
price on carbon in order to hold back climate change. The main
recipe to alleviate climate change is to make sure governments,
corporations and households face a high price on their carbon
emissions. Today it is virtually zero. If the price were higher
people would have other choices, like renewable energies. It's not
a recipe that tastes very good, but it's the one that will
work."
After decades championing the taxation of carbon emissions,
Nordhaus has his reservations about the effectiveness of the Paris
agreement: "The Paris Accord has good points, but it is purely
voluntary, and the measures taken are insufficient to slow
emissions of CO2 and other gases. For a start, the price
put on carbon emissions is far too low, I would guess just 10% of
what is needed right now if we want to curb emissions. The Paris
effort is worthwhile, because it is a good thing to bring countries
together, but is much too little to reach the goal of reducing
emissions to contain temperature rises at under 2ºC."
Taxing emissions would boost investment in clean technologies
and renewable energies. In carbon emission rights trading in the
European Union, the price of carbon is around 7.5 euros per ton, when according to Nordhaus it
should really stand in the interval of 30 to 40 euros.
In conversation yesterday, he declined to define himself as
either optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to limit climate
change. He is adamant however, that "we have to be realistic." To
denialists and skeptics, "I would say that this is a very important
problem that is getting worse, with a major impact in terms of sea
level rise, wildfires, the consequences for human health… This is
something that is real. If we care about our country, not just
today and tomorrow, but in the long run, we have to take this
seriously and work with other countries to stop it. Here in
the United States, we take all
kinds of steps to protect our national security, making investments
on a major time scale, and we should do exactly the same with the
challenge of climate change. It is not something that will harm our
economy, it will help our economy."
For Nordhaus, the skeptics who still cast doubts on the science
of climate change are "like the people decades back who refused to
accept the evidence that smoking causes cancer. But today all the
evidence suggests that climate change, like smoking, is dangerous
in the extreme."
The new laureate is aware that his work has yet to translate
into practical policy measures: "So far virtually nothing has been
done at the global level to slow climate change. We are moving in
the right direction, but for every two steps forward we take one
step back. This is one of the most difficult political processes we
are currently facing, because it forces us to impose costs now in
order to protect the distant future, and that is a hard sell."
His latest book, released in 2013 with the title The Climate
Casino, addresses the risks and socioeconomic uncertainty of a
world threatened by climate change. "Climate," he says, "is a
casino in the sense that we are taking serious risks with our
planet and ourselves. But we don't need to walk into that casino,
we can take steps now to mitigate and reduce the risks."
Bio notes
William Nordhaus studied at
Yale University then went on to earn a
PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. On completion of his thesis, in
1967, he joined the faculty at Yale,
where he remains to this day. Currently Sterling Professor of
Economics, he also holds a professorship in Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental
Studies.
A member of President Jimmy
Carter's Council of Economic Advisors from 1977 to 1979, he
has also served on numerous committees of the U.S. National Academy
of Sciences, including the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative
Energy Systems, the Panel on Policy Implications of Greenhouse
Warming, the Committee on National Statistics, the Committee on
Data and Research on Illegal Drugs, and the Committee on the
Implications for Science and Society of Abrupt Climate Change. He
also chaired a panel of the National Academy of Sciences which
produced a report, Nature's Numbers, that recommended
approaches to integrate environmental and other non-market activity
into national accounts.
Co-author since 1985 of Paul
Samuelson's classic textbook Economics, his many
publications include Invention, Growth and Welfare; Is Growth
Obsolete?, and The Efficient Use of Energy Resources.
Some of his titles, like Managing the Global Commons: The
Economics of Climate Change (1994) and Warming the World
(2000), explored previously uncharted ground. Other well-known
works are A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global
Warming Policies (2008) and, most recently, The Climate
Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World
(2013).
Nordhaus is on the research staff of the U.S. National Bureau of
Economic Research and has been a member and senior advisor of the
Brookings Panel on Economic Activity. He is also a member of the
Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Experts and was the
first Chairman of the Advisory Committee for the Bureau of Economic
Analysis. In 2014-2015 he served as President of the American
Economic Association.
About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge
Awards
The promotion of knowledge based on research and artistic and
cultural creation, and the interaction of these domains, forms a
core strand of the BBVA Foundation's action program, along
with the recognition of talent and excellence across a broad
spectrum of disciplines, from science to the arts and
humanities.
In line with these objectives, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers
of Knowledge Awards were established in 2008 to recognize
outstanding contributions in a range of scientific, technological
and artistic areas, together with knowledge-based responses to the
central challenges of our times. The areas covered by the Frontiers
Awards are congruent with the knowledge map of the 21st century, in
terms of the disciplines they address and their assertion of the
value of cross-disciplinary interaction.
Their eight categories span classical areas like Basic
Sciences (Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics), Biomedicine and
other areas characteristic of our time, like Biomedicine,
Information and Communication Technologies, Ecology and
Conservation Biology, Climate Change, Economics, Finance and
Management and Development Cooperation, and the particularly
innovative realm that is Contemporary Music.
The BBVA Foundation is aided in the evaluation process by the
Spanish National Research Council
(CSIC), the country's premier public research organization. As
well as designating each jury chair, the CSIC is responsible for
appointing the technical evaluation committees that undertake an
initial assessment of the candidates put forward by eminent
institutions from all around the world, and draw up a reasoned
shortlist for the consideration of the juries.
Climate Change jury and technical evaluation
committee
The rigor, quality and independence of the judging process has
earned these awards the attention of the international scientific
community and a firm place among the world's foremost prize
families.
The jury in this category was chaired by Bjorn Stevens, Director of the Max Planck
Institute for Meteorology (Hamburg,
Germany). The secretary was Carlos Duarte, Director of the Red Sea
Research Center and holder of the Tarek Ahmed Juffali Chair in
Marine Biology at the King Abdullah University of Science and
Technology (Thuwal, Saudi Arabia).
Remaining members were Scott
Barrett, Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural
Resource Economics at the School of International and Public
Affairs and the Earth Institute at Columbia
University (USA);
Sandrine Bony, senior scientist at the Laboratoire de
Météorologie Dynamique/Institute Pierre-Simon Laplace (LMD/IPSL) in
Paris (France); Miquel
Canals, Director of the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics
at the University of Barcelona
(Spain); Martin Heimann, Director Emeritus at the Max
Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Jena, Germany) and a professor at the Friedrich
Schiller University, likewise in Jena; Edward Rubin, Professor of Engineering and
Public Policy and Alumni Chair Professor of Environmental
Engineering and Science at Carnegie Mellon
University Mellon (Pittsburgh, USA); and Julie
Winkler, Professor of Geography in the Department of
Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University (USA).
The CSIC Technical Committee was coordinated by María
Victoria Moreno, the Council's
Deputy Vice President for Scientific and Technical Areas, and
formed by: Francisca Martínez, Scientific Researcher at the
Andalusian Earth Sciences Institute (IACT); Eulalia Moreno, Coordinator of the CSIC
Natural Resources Area and Research Professor at the Arid Zones
Experimental Station (EEZA); and Rafael Simó Martorell,
Research Professor in the Institute of Marine Science (ICM).
LAUREATE'S FIRST
DECLARATIONS AND IMAGES
A video recording of
the new laureate's first interview on receiving news of the award
is available from the Atlas FTP with the following
coordinates:
Server:
5.40.40.61
Username:
AgenciaAtlas4
Password:
mediaset17
The name of the video
is:
"PREMIO CAMBIO
CLIMÁTICO"
In the event of
connection difficulties, please contact Miguel Gil at
production company Atlas:
Mobile:
+34 619 30 87 74
E-mail:
mgil@mediaset.es
|
Calendar of
upcoming award announcements
|
|
Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT)
|
Tuesday, January 16,
2018
|
Basic
Sciences
|
Tuesday, January 23,
2018
|
Biomedicine
|
Tuesday, January 30,
2018
|
Ecology and
Conservation Biology
|
Tuesday, February 6,
2018
|
Contemporary
Music
|
Tuesday, February 13,
2018
|
Economics, Finance
and Management
|
Tuesday, February 20,
2018
|
Development
Cooperation
|
Tuesday, February 27,
2018
|
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