William Nordhaus, co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work with Paul Romer on incorporating Climate change into long-term macroeconomic analysis, died on October 30 at the age of 85. Yale News said he died from glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.
Nordhaus was a professor and later an administrator at Yale, where the university described him as a central figure on campus for more than five decades. He began studying climate change in the 1970s and is widely regarded as the first economist to focus on the issue.
In 1992, he published the DICE model, short for Dynamics Integrated Climate Economy Model. It sought to estimate the future costs of greenhouse-gas emissions and use those calculations to establish a present price for polluting activities. The approach helped pioneer the idea of pricing carbon per tonne of CO2 as an incentive for the energy transition and became a foundation for economic assessments of climate policy.
Nordhaus’s early estimates placed the price of a tonne of carbon at around four or five dollars. Those conclusions led some economists to view him as relatively conservative because they appeared to understate the need for stronger climate action. He later clashed with British economist Nicholas Stern over Stern’s more alarmist 2006 report, particularly its treatment of discounting and the cost of irreversible climate impacts such as deforestation.
As scientific knowledge about global warming advanced, Nordhaus revised his models and incorporated increasingly higher costs. He ultimately supported a global carbon tax, while more traditionally oriented economists argued that a single worldwide carbon price could be established through free-market forces alone.
Sources: Le Monde Économie.