Another day; another seminar – it's just the hectic life of a retiring academic.
This time, it was a trip to Bath to listen to Michael Finus, who has a Chair in Environmental Economics, give an I-SEE seminar on the contribution of economics to the debate about climate change. The pre-blurb for the event, said that Finus would ...
"review possible contributions of economics to the climate change debate [,] aim to point out the deficiency of some approaches in economics which have been very influential in the policy debate [and] then discuss a couple of issues to which economics can contribute something meaningful to the discussion about addressing the climate change problem."
I went along all enthused as I hoped that, in addition to talking about the the contribution of economics to the debate about climate change, he might also touch on the contribution of climate change to the debate about economics. But he didn't. There were some fine graphs and tables, however. His final slide was this cartoon from the Economist in 2009:
I'll say some more later on about the actual discussion, but the cartoon shows that, in Finus's capable hands, economics lived up to its reputation as the gloomy science.
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