I'd be much more inclined to read this if you weren't so political yourself. The bias you portray I figure is the baseline for your thesis vs an objective one. On a glance it looks like you are cherry picking data points followed then by your smart rear end bias. A bias which is annoying to read through and usually wastes readers time and no better than a left wing bias touting the other side.
I'd have to read your econ articles but from this I gather your title should be the "Partisan Economist". But if it works for your personal success then I guess that's all that matters.
Do you apply that same standard to the other side? The alarmists, the catastrophists, the fear mongers? If so, I wonder where you do get your climate knowledge. I'd like to find purely objective neutral analysis too.
But as courts show, and as markets have always shown, adversaries arguing back and forth arrive at the truth more assuredly than so-called objective neutral parties whose only skin in the game is bigger budgets and more power.
Everybody sensible has always know that we just need to tax net CO2 emissions by the right amount (trajectory of right amounts). The public is averse to visible taxes, however, so we had to accept kludges. And most of the kluges implied taxes of more than the right amount.
Now that has blown up. Dancing on the grave of all the old wrong ideas does not really help.
Let's get down to second (not nth) best policies until our environmentalist friends persuade the public to accept the least cost solution.
Two problems here. First, the whole argument is relative to a stawman--the extreme claims of some activists. Of course, climate change is a problem but it evolves very slowly and unpredictably and attempts by the press to pin specific events on it clearly go overboard. Second, it makes no sense to rely solely on the market to fix things when there are huge externalities. The individual carbon user bears virtually none of the environmental cost of his actions.
The article doesn't say that we must "solely" rely on markets, so that seems to be a straw man argument right there.
Second, the argument that even though recent predictions (by "extremists") didn't quite match the reality of what happened but this doesn't preclude future cataclysmic events is highly problematic. First, because many persons in the "mainstream" parroted those views by those "extremists" in a bid to drive immediate action. So much so that if people didn't agree with immediate, drastic actions they were going to be labeled as complicit in causing the predicted dire consequences (that so happened not to materialize before or in the near future).
Third, you do not distinguish between climate change and the consequences of climate change on global economic, health, and national security. I'll grant you that climate change may be unpredictable. However, if you want to debate the impacts from a several degree increase in temperatures versus just one nuclear bomb being launched (and likely chain of events to follow), let's do that.
Count me in on the crowd that would favor building nuclear power plants (like China) while reducing the threat of nuclear bombs as a better approach than some of the ideas put forth so far.
Why is climate change a problem? It's not "of course". It must be proven. And what degree of problem do you rate it as, if it evolves very slowly and unpredictably? I'd say tomorrow's commute traffic is a bigger problem. If that's what you're saying, I apologize, but I'm tired of all this alarm over something which is less of a problem than tomorrow's commute traffic.
The end of mankind has been predicted with regularity since Thomas Malthus.
What actual science assures us above all else is that the natural order is a trend towards equilibrium. This is the exact opposite of what climate alarmists have argued, which is that if radical social engineering is not done NOW, the earth will continue to heat up no matter what.
Thermodynamics tells us that sustained warming trends can only be the result of naturally occurring phenomenon. Arguing otherwise is science illiteracy and always has been.
Here is ChatGPT comparing "Climate Turning Point" to "Monetary-Fiscal Interactions" in response to the query:
Would or would not the opponents of either argument use the rationale in the other argument?
Short answer: yep—opponents on each topic can (and often do) borrow the other essay’s playbook. Here’s how the cross-rationales line up, plus where the analogy breaks.
How they’d borrow each other’s logic
Cochrane’s climate stance (“avoid alarmism; favor innovation/adaptation; don’t overspend now for distant uncertain harms”) Borrow fiscal-essay logic of preemptive discipline + option value “Delay is dangerous. Climate has fat tails and possible tipping points. Like rebuilding fiscal capacity before a crisis, we must cut emissions now to keep future options open. Waiting risks a sudden, costly loss of control (carbon budget exhaustion), and credibility matters—promises later won’t be believed.”
Cochrane’s fiscal stance (“rebuild fiscal space now; monetary policy can’t do it alone; inaction risks a sudden crisis”) Borrow climate-essay logic of alarmism skepticism + market-led adaptation “Debt ‘crisis’ talk is overblown. Models are uncertain; alarmism backfires. Let growth and innovation shrink debt ratios. With r≈g over time, we don’t need painful consolidations now. Don’t sacrifice prosperity for a forecast that might not bite; adjust gradually if and when costs show up.”
Why those cross-moves are tempting
Both issues feature long horizons, deep uncertainty, and potentially huge downside—perfect soil for importing the other side’s rhetoric.
Each has a powerful credibility narrative: “act now or you lose room to maneuver later.”
Where the analogy doesn’t fully carry
Externalities vs. budget constraint
Climate risk is a global externality with diffuse causality; the fiscal problem is a national intertemporal budget identity. One is softer (values/coordination), the other is hard arithmetic.
Irreversibility profiles
Climate has physical irreversibilities/tipping risks; fiscal risks are financial/political and usually reversible (though abrupt).
Control levers
Climate mitigation needs global coordination; fiscal repair can, in principle, be done unilaterally via taxes/spending/reform.
Measurement & feedback
Fiscal strain shows up quickly in rates/auctions/spreads; climate benefits of policy are lagged and noisy, which fuels the “don’t overspend yet” argument.
Bottom line
Would they? Yes.
Climate-action advocates can flip Cochrane’s fiscal logic into: “precaution + credibility ⇒ act early on emissions.”
Deficit doves can flip Cochrane’s climate logic into: “alarmism is costly; let growth/innovation handle debt gradually.”
Should you buy the import? Only with the caveats above. The rhetorical shapes fit; the underlying mechanics differ.
You do have some good economic insights and I really appreciate how much you publish for free. That's pretty rare these days.
But seriously? You can't hide your glee at being able to 'legitimately' write a straw-man hit piece against climate change policies.
I'll just correct some fundamental basics before I go.
"The pandemic taught people that there might be other more pressing existential threats than a degree of heat in 100 years"
The NASA global temperature anomaly is 1 degree since 1980 (45 years) and the trend is obviously not linear. Annual global emissions are many times greater than in 1980 (so we should expect concomitant accelerated warming).
You don't mention anything about tipping points, so your article comes off as if you'd written something like "they said China couldn't build out 80 new biotech labs in 20 years without causing a global pandemic, what retards they all were" in 2018.
There's a hilarious bit where you quote some kind of equivalence between global climate a measured CO2 levels in an actual greenhouse. Was that bit tongue-in-cheek?
To be clear, the last time the earth had over 400ppm of CO2 average temperatures were 3C warmer than today, and up to 14C warmer at the poles (ie no north pole, minimal south pole). There almost certainly wasn't anything like an AMOC (North Atlantic drift), so where I'm from in Britain was glaciated and would have had an extremely short, dry growing season. AMOC collapse would cause the single largest loss of life since the mid-20th century, and that's only 1 of tens of massively impactful tipping points that current CO2 and temperature levels make more likely than not.
Yes, we should try and get global consensus and do everything possible to prevent this reality.
------
I totally agree that some of the focus on climate led to some extremely dumb decisions around other pressing conservation and development needs. However, if some governments and organisations want to pay lip service to climate lobbies and find 'quick fixes' and so they do extremely nonsensical CO2e accounting that lets people tick a box to pay $10 to apparently offset all the CO2 of an entire transatlantic flight by 'preventing future deforestation', if they want to do that, that is a failure of politics, not of climate science and its warnings for us.
It was as warm or warmer during the Medieval and Roman warming periods. So much for being extreme today.
There was a 10-20 year leveling off period recently. You are right -- it is obviously not linear.
What tipping points? The many that have been predicted to occur before now, and did not? The ones that were going to turn the planet into Venus and evidently did not? It was far warmer in the dinosaur ages, and obviously did not tip past any point of no return.
Tipping points are the last refuge of those with weak arguments. We have had MUCH higher levels of CO2 in the past and considerably higher temperatures with no tipping points occurring.
That mischaracterizes his view. Do you understand anything about the cost of preventive actions, the growth of wealth and capability over time, and discounting over time? You are also using the bullshit "boiling" language. You climate panickers are going to kill every last one us. (I can say that if you can talk about boiling.)
I assume you understand those things super goodly. Could you explain to me e.g. how to compute the current value of a future collapse of the Greenland ice sheet?
I wonder if an editor at the NYT will be fired to publishing that piece illuminating the fraudulent, manipulative nature of climate porn.
"Prince Charles — now king of Britain — described it as “literally the last-chance saloon.”" Literally? I don't think climate is literally a bar which is the last place you can get a drink before crossing a border.
Also, activists and media have been declaring "climate crisis" for way longer than 20 years. I've been following it since the 1990s.
I'd be much more inclined to read this if you weren't so political yourself. The bias you portray I figure is the baseline for your thesis vs an objective one. On a glance it looks like you are cherry picking data points followed then by your smart rear end bias. A bias which is annoying to read through and usually wastes readers time and no better than a left wing bias touting the other side.
I'd have to read your econ articles but from this I gather your title should be the "Partisan Economist". But if it works for your personal success then I guess that's all that matters.
Do you apply that same standard to the other side? The alarmists, the catastrophists, the fear mongers? If so, I wonder where you do get your climate knowledge. I'd like to find purely objective neutral analysis too.
But as courts show, and as markets have always shown, adversaries arguing back and forth arrive at the truth more assuredly than so-called objective neutral parties whose only skin in the game is bigger budgets and more power.
Everybody sensible has always know that we just need to tax net CO2 emissions by the right amount (trajectory of right amounts). The public is averse to visible taxes, however, so we had to accept kludges. And most of the kluges implied taxes of more than the right amount.
Now that has blown up. Dancing on the grave of all the old wrong ideas does not really help.
Let's get down to second (not nth) best policies until our environmentalist friends persuade the public to accept the least cost solution.
Two problems here. First, the whole argument is relative to a stawman--the extreme claims of some activists. Of course, climate change is a problem but it evolves very slowly and unpredictably and attempts by the press to pin specific events on it clearly go overboard. Second, it makes no sense to rely solely on the market to fix things when there are huge externalities. The individual carbon user bears virtually none of the environmental cost of his actions.
The article doesn't say that we must "solely" rely on markets, so that seems to be a straw man argument right there.
Second, the argument that even though recent predictions (by "extremists") didn't quite match the reality of what happened but this doesn't preclude future cataclysmic events is highly problematic. First, because many persons in the "mainstream" parroted those views by those "extremists" in a bid to drive immediate action. So much so that if people didn't agree with immediate, drastic actions they were going to be labeled as complicit in causing the predicted dire consequences (that so happened not to materialize before or in the near future).
Third, you do not distinguish between climate change and the consequences of climate change on global economic, health, and national security. I'll grant you that climate change may be unpredictable. However, if you want to debate the impacts from a several degree increase in temperatures versus just one nuclear bomb being launched (and likely chain of events to follow), let's do that.
Count me in on the crowd that would favor building nuclear power plants (like China) while reducing the threat of nuclear bombs as a better approach than some of the ideas put forth so far.
Why is climate change a problem? It's not "of course". It must be proven. And what degree of problem do you rate it as, if it evolves very slowly and unpredictably? I'd say tomorrow's commute traffic is a bigger problem. If that's what you're saying, I apologize, but I'm tired of all this alarm over something which is less of a problem than tomorrow's commute traffic.
It is a scientific fact. In my neighborhood the water will be so high there will not be any land left.
The end of mankind has been predicted with regularity since Thomas Malthus.
What actual science assures us above all else is that the natural order is a trend towards equilibrium. This is the exact opposite of what climate alarmists have argued, which is that if radical social engineering is not done NOW, the earth will continue to heat up no matter what.
Thermodynamics tells us that sustained warming trends can only be the result of naturally occurring phenomenon. Arguing otherwise is science illiteracy and always has been.
Here is ChatGPT comparing "Climate Turning Point" to "Monetary-Fiscal Interactions" in response to the query:
Would or would not the opponents of either argument use the rationale in the other argument?
Short answer: yep—opponents on each topic can (and often do) borrow the other essay’s playbook. Here’s how the cross-rationales line up, plus where the analogy breaks.
How they’d borrow each other’s logic
Cochrane’s climate stance (“avoid alarmism; favor innovation/adaptation; don’t overspend now for distant uncertain harms”) Borrow fiscal-essay logic of preemptive discipline + option value “Delay is dangerous. Climate has fat tails and possible tipping points. Like rebuilding fiscal capacity before a crisis, we must cut emissions now to keep future options open. Waiting risks a sudden, costly loss of control (carbon budget exhaustion), and credibility matters—promises later won’t be believed.”
Cochrane’s fiscal stance (“rebuild fiscal space now; monetary policy can’t do it alone; inaction risks a sudden crisis”) Borrow climate-essay logic of alarmism skepticism + market-led adaptation “Debt ‘crisis’ talk is overblown. Models are uncertain; alarmism backfires. Let growth and innovation shrink debt ratios. With r≈g over time, we don’t need painful consolidations now. Don’t sacrifice prosperity for a forecast that might not bite; adjust gradually if and when costs show up.”
Why those cross-moves are tempting
Both issues feature long horizons, deep uncertainty, and potentially huge downside—perfect soil for importing the other side’s rhetoric.
Each has a powerful credibility narrative: “act now or you lose room to maneuver later.”
Where the analogy doesn’t fully carry
Externalities vs. budget constraint
Climate risk is a global externality with diffuse causality; the fiscal problem is a national intertemporal budget identity. One is softer (values/coordination), the other is hard arithmetic.
Irreversibility profiles
Climate has physical irreversibilities/tipping risks; fiscal risks are financial/political and usually reversible (though abrupt).
Control levers
Climate mitigation needs global coordination; fiscal repair can, in principle, be done unilaterally via taxes/spending/reform.
Measurement & feedback
Fiscal strain shows up quickly in rates/auctions/spreads; climate benefits of policy are lagged and noisy, which fuels the “don’t overspend yet” argument.
Bottom line
Would they? Yes.
Climate-action advocates can flip Cochrane’s fiscal logic into: “precaution + credibility ⇒ act early on emissions.”
Deficit doves can flip Cochrane’s climate logic into: “alarmism is costly; let growth/innovation handle debt gradually.”
Should you buy the import? Only with the caveats above. The rhetorical shapes fit; the underlying mechanics differ.
Thank you John for this great article!
You do have some good economic insights and I really appreciate how much you publish for free. That's pretty rare these days.
But seriously? You can't hide your glee at being able to 'legitimately' write a straw-man hit piece against climate change policies.
I'll just correct some fundamental basics before I go.
"The pandemic taught people that there might be other more pressing existential threats than a degree of heat in 100 years"
The NASA global temperature anomaly is 1 degree since 1980 (45 years) and the trend is obviously not linear. Annual global emissions are many times greater than in 1980 (so we should expect concomitant accelerated warming).
You don't mention anything about tipping points, so your article comes off as if you'd written something like "they said China couldn't build out 80 new biotech labs in 20 years without causing a global pandemic, what retards they all were" in 2018.
There's a hilarious bit where you quote some kind of equivalence between global climate a measured CO2 levels in an actual greenhouse. Was that bit tongue-in-cheek?
To be clear, the last time the earth had over 400ppm of CO2 average temperatures were 3C warmer than today, and up to 14C warmer at the poles (ie no north pole, minimal south pole). There almost certainly wasn't anything like an AMOC (North Atlantic drift), so where I'm from in Britain was glaciated and would have had an extremely short, dry growing season. AMOC collapse would cause the single largest loss of life since the mid-20th century, and that's only 1 of tens of massively impactful tipping points that current CO2 and temperature levels make more likely than not.
Yes, we should try and get global consensus and do everything possible to prevent this reality.
------
I totally agree that some of the focus on climate led to some extremely dumb decisions around other pressing conservation and development needs. However, if some governments and organisations want to pay lip service to climate lobbies and find 'quick fixes' and so they do extremely nonsensical CO2e accounting that lets people tick a box to pay $10 to apparently offset all the CO2 of an entire transatlantic flight by 'preventing future deforestation', if they want to do that, that is a failure of politics, not of climate science and its warnings for us.
It was as warm or warmer during the Medieval and Roman warming periods. So much for being extreme today.
There was a 10-20 year leveling off period recently. You are right -- it is obviously not linear.
What tipping points? The many that have been predicted to occur before now, and did not? The ones that were going to turn the planet into Venus and evidently did not? It was far warmer in the dinosaur ages, and obviously did not tip past any point of no return.
Tipping points are the last refuge of those with weak arguments. We have had MUCH higher levels of CO2 in the past and considerably higher temperatures with no tipping points occurring.
"John Kerry called the conference 'the last best hope for the world,' "
Okay, so that was only the last best one
Now we will have to turn to other hopes
granted the best ones are gone, but that still leaves a lot of really good ones
lucky us
newly formed religions have to have an apocalypse of some kind
and they require an individual who bestrides the globe like a colossus, someone who is equal to the apocalypse at hand, a prophet
obama and climate change work quite nicely for this purpose
race, gender, and climate change are untouchable, special
some of your readers will go absolutely nuts over this
if my children were readers, they would go 100% nuts
truth is a speed-bump
just swerve around it
John is one of those frogs that will happily boil in a pot because the temperature change is marginal at each point in time.
That mischaracterizes his view. Do you understand anything about the cost of preventive actions, the growth of wealth and capability over time, and discounting over time? You are also using the bullshit "boiling" language. You climate panickers are going to kill every last one us. (I can say that if you can talk about boiling.)
I assume you understand those things super goodly. Could you explain to me e.g. how to compute the current value of a future collapse of the Greenland ice sheet?
I wonder if an editor at the NYT will be fired to publishing that piece illuminating the fraudulent, manipulative nature of climate porn.
"Prince Charles — now king of Britain — described it as “literally the last-chance saloon.”" Literally? I don't think climate is literally a bar which is the last place you can get a drink before crossing a border.
Also, activists and media have been declaring "climate crisis" for way longer than 20 years. I've been following it since the 1990s.