Whenever Australia starts to have a serious conversation about addressing climate change, headlines appear in newspapers of an economic apocalypse. This happened again in the Australian this week based on work by a long-standing economic modeller of climate policy, Brian Fisher.
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| Whenever Australia starts to have a serious conversation about addressing climate change headlines appear in newspapers of an economic apocalypse. |
So, what do economic modelling exercises tell us of the impact of reducing Australia’s contribution to global warming, and more importantly, what do they not? Should we cower in fear of action or embrace the inevitable change and manage the human and economic costs of transition?
Firstly, economic modelling results are not predictions. They are based on hypothetical future worlds. Economists try to capture the dynamics of economic systems in their models to understand the relative impact of different policy options. This means they are always wrong because economists can’t predict the future. Economic modellers are not the crystal ball gazers we read about in fantasy books.
Read the story from The Guardian by Erwin Jackson - “Australian headlines are designed to scare people into not acting on climate change.”
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