A few weeks ago I wrote about the seemingly different futures foretold by climate science and climate economics. The former is filled with peril and haunted by the unthinkable, the latter blithely assured of continued prosperity. Most economic modeling, you'll recall, forecasts the continued rise of global gross domestic product (GDP) -- people in the future will be richer than we are today. Depending on various assumptions, climate damage will reduce the rate of GDP growth anywhere from 2 to 20 percent by 2050, but under no scenario does climate damage stall or reverse that rate of growth. Collapse is absent from most models, even as a worst-case scenario.
How should we react to what the economic modeling tells us? A survey of the wonk landscape reveals three broad camps: conservatives, liberals, and reformists.
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