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Review of Environmental Economics and Policy Advance Access originally published online on April 23, 2008
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 2008 2(1):94-113; doi:10.1093/reep/ren001
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Why Economic Analysis Supports Strong Action on Climate Change: A Response to the Stern Review's Critics

Simon Dietz* and Nicholas Stern**

* Department of Geography and Environment and Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK. e-mail: s.dietz{at}lse.ac.uk
** London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

Economic research that opposes the strategy of strong and urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions often makes the observation, misleadingly, that while scientists, environmentalists, politicians, and others would favor strong action, economists would not. Drawing on the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, this paper argues that strong and urgent action is in fact good economics. Much of the previous economic literature on climate change has failed to grasp the necessary scale and timing of action because it has failed to simultaneously assign the necessary importance to issues of risk and ethics. The case for strong and urgent action set out in the Review is based, first, on the severe risks that the science now identifies and, second, on the ethics of the responsibility of current generations for future generations. It is these two issues—risk and ethics—that are crucial.

JEL Classification: A11, H43, Q54s

We are grateful to Suzy Leonard, Robert Stavins, and one anonymous referee for useful comments on this paper, and to Dennis Anderson and Dimitri Zenghelis for a helpful discussion of the other papers in this symposium.


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