What the Climate Fight Is Really About
Hint: It's about minimizing risks and uncertainties.
Columns
My monthly, globally syndicated column for Project Syndicate, translated into a dozen languages, and my earlier bi-weekly Risky Climate column for Bloomberg Green.
How to Think About Climate-Tech Solutions
To think that technology will save us from climate change is to invite riskier behavior, or moral hazard. Whether a climate technology creates new problems has little to do with the solution, and everything to do with us.
Will the Banking Busts Hurt Clean Tech?
Rather than impeding the clean-energy race, the recent collapse of the US start-up community's go-to bank offers valuable lessons for managing the public-private minuet that the net-zero transition requires. The doomsayers are missing the bigger picture.
Europe Must Tax Brown and Subsidize Green
The US Inflation Reduction Act is a landmark legislative package that should be welcomed around the world, despite its putatively protectionist features. Owing to the positive learning-by-doing spillovers that follow from green subsidies, Europe and the rest of the world ultimately will benefit, too.
Realism About Techno-Optimism
Speeding up the adoption of already proven and scalable technologies, and exposing the many hidden costs associated with fossil fuels, is a necessary goal. Achieving it will require new policies to guide investments in the right direction, and techno-optimists ought to be the loudest advocates.
Predictions for 2023
Project Syndicate
The Case for Mandating Climate-Risk Disclosure
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a proposal to require some companies to disclose information relating to the risks they face from climate change. But the agency is coming under pressure to scrap or water down the proposal because of a recent Supreme Court decision.
Who Pays for Climate Change?
In the face of a massive financing gap for climate-change mitigation and adaptation in developing countries, everyone accepts the need for more "creative" measures to unlock and redirect private capital. But proposals like carbon credits must be understood merely as stepping stones, rather than as lasting solutions.
Some Green Technologies Are More Equal Than Others
With more governments embracing industrial policies to transform their economies, picking the right technologies to subsidize will become a key challenge. To navigate the minefield of entrenched interests, techno-hype, and political pressures, policymakers must embrace a mix of openness and caution.
The High Stakes of Climate-Risk Accounting
Although businesses and investors stand to make a lot of money if they can properly navigate the new risk environment, no one seems to have a good explanation for why we are where we are. Climate risks, in particular, have been systematically underestimated, and thus mispriced, for decades.