Gernot Wagner, "Climate Shock" | Talks at Google

Gernot Wagner visited Google's Cambridge, MA office to discuss the book he co-authored with Martin L. Weitzman, "Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet".
In the book, the authors explore the likely repercussions of a hotter planet, drawing on and expanding from work previously unavailable to general audiences. They show that the longer we wait to act, the more likely an extreme event will happen. Zeroing in on the unknown extreme risks that may yet dwarf all else, the authors look at how economic forces that make sensible climate policies difficult to enact, make radical would-be fixes like geoengineering all the more probable. What we know about climate change is alarming enough; what we don't know about the extreme risks could be far more dangerous. Wagner and Weitzman help readers understand that we need to think about climate change in the same way that we think about insurance -- as a risk management problem, only here on a global scale.
Gernot Wagner is lead senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund. He is the author of But Will the Planet Notice? Martin L. Weitzman is professor of economics at Harvard. His books include Income, Wealth, and the Maximum Principle.
www.gwagner.com scholar.harvard.edu/weitzman