Economics and the Environment, 10th Edition

21The Economics of Global Agreements

21.1 Introduction

This books ends where it began, with a focus on climate change. The reality of global warming burst into human consciousness just 35 years ago, suddenly and at a scale dwarfing the local and regional pollution problems that defined the twentieth century. Incredibly, the human ecological footprint is now disrupting the entire planet's climate control system. Even if we manage to hold warming to the low end of 4 degrees F, still we will have pushed the earth into a climate that is fundamentally different from the one that has supported human civilization for the last 10,000 years. In the coming decades, human‐induced global warming will challenge both humans’ adaptability and the survival of perhaps half the species on the planet. Mitigating and adapting to climate change will be the work of your generation.

Since our early introduction to climate change, we have explored four difficult, but general, environmental economic questions. The answers to these questions can help us address the global warming challenge. First, how much pollution—in this case, global warming—is too much? We considered three broad answers to this normative question: efficiency, safety, and ecological sustainability. Efficiency advocates would have us carefully balance the very real costs of slowing global warming against the obvious benefits. In contrast, both safety and ecological proponents find benefit–cost analysis too narrow a basis for choice ...