Gary Yohe

By Gary Yohe

Modeling is a critical part of crafting adaptive and mitigative responses to existential threats like the COVID-19 coronavirus and climate change. The United Nations, in its efforts to promote 17 Sustainable Development Goals, has recognized both sources of risk as cross-cutting themes in part because both expose the wide list of social and economic challenges facing the globe. Here, evidence is presented to encourage the research communities of both topics to work together within and across the boundaries of their international infrastructures, because their modeling approaches, their social objectives, and their desire effectively to bring rigorous science to opinion writers and decision-makers are so similar. Casting decision analysis in terms of tolerable risk, conducting policy relevant counterfactual experiments, participating in organized model comparison exercises, and other research strategies are all part of their common scientific toolsets. These communities also share a responsibility to continue to hone their communication skills so that their insights are more easily understood by the public at large—skills that are also essential to protect their science from attack by groups and individuals who purposefully espouse their own misguided or deliberately misstated perspectives and/or, sometimes, their own corrupted personal agendas.

Part of the book: Environmental Issues and Sustainable Development

By Gary Yohe

In the decades-long debate about how best to design policies that would most efficiently and equitably limit the emission of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from all human sources, economists have persistently called for designs that included some way of pricing carbon. Nonetheless, but with some notable exceptions, very few implemented policies have moved very far away from traditional command and control strategies wherein the only price is what economists call a “shadow price” that is barely visible to the general public. To understand why that is so despite economists’ objections and to keep those reasons front of mind, it is useful to review the underlying economics from time to time, especially in the context of pricing’s advantages in coping with the enormous uncertainties and long time horizons that add unprecedented complexity to the regulatory problem. This essay does just that. It starts with the theory behind economists’ unfaltering position, starting with Marty Weitzman’s seminal comparison of price and quantity controls under uncertainty in 1974. It continues by considering how the application of Weitzman’s finding to environmental controls can handle the twin monumental challenges to design issues posed by coping effectively with uncertainty over long periods of time. A third section provides evidence that some with position in the policy arena have not been shy in speaking these insights to power over many years before concluding remarks offering some suggestions about what the future could hold, depending on the results of the 2024 presidential election in the United States.

Part of the book: Climate Policies