Environment

Climate change is a collective problem that has largely been addressed through market-based solutions focused on individual actors. Economics has been a driving factor behind this market approach. The push for continued and perpetual economic growth is seen by many as incompatible with climate action. What is the role of economics in addressing the climate crisis? Can existing economic paradigms deliver an equitable low-carbon future?

Ambitious climate policy needs a broad-based organizing effort to combat the fossil fuel industry. As the climate movement moves towards embracing racial and economic justice as part of climate advocacy, what strategies and policies are needed to build a multi-racial, multi-class coalition? How can movements build the power needed to ensure the low-carbon transition is just?

Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades about the severe global impact that rising temperatures will have on the environment, economies, and health outcomes, and ultimately humanity’s long-term survival. With disaster after disaster stacking up, the time for action is now.

The path to sustainable and just climate transition globally cannot happen without meaningful actions and cooperation between the US and China – the world’s largest economies and carbon emitters. What can we expect from US-China climate relations?

How do we pay for the vast transformation required? Who is responsible to whom, and how do we decide?

Can we realize the energy transition? What institutions might help us do so? What is the role of technology?

Please join us for networking before the start of each day.

Please join us for discussions at the end of each day.

What, if anything, can economics contribute to addressing the climate crisis? What role can or should markets and incentives play, and how?

Has the financial system contributed to the climate crisis? Can it contribute to a green transition?

Are existing institutions up to the task? Is the nation-state an obstacle, and if so how do we overcome it? What would alternatives look like, and how would we realize them?

Please join us for networking before the start of each day.

Please join us for discussions at the end of each day.

Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades about the severe global impact that rising temperatures will have on the environment, economies, health outcomes, and ultimately humanity’s long-term survival. Yet little has been done.

The work of feminist thinkers helps illuminate why billionaires seek to solve problems on Earth by blasting into space.

Getting the whole spectrum of governments, academia and civil society to track “natural capital” would help create shared efforts toward solving shared problems like the climate crisis.

A global carbon tax alone will not be enough to significantly reduce CO2 emissions

Lance Taylor’s New INET Paper

And electric vehicles don’t do a lot better

Wealthy predators are playing stock market games with companies needed to develop and produce clean technology

The IPCC was correct in emphasizing the need for early mitigation, but their analysis of possible growth trajectories appears to be faulty.

Carbon pricing still has the potential to be a powerful tool contributing to emissions reductions, but it is clearly no panacea.

Carbon pricing still has the potential to be a powerful tool contributing to emissions reductions, but it is clearly no panacea.

Global carbon emissions could fall by an estimated 5.5% in 2020 as a result of declining industrial production in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. But if the change is not systemic these effects may be fleeting, and the changing climate could put hundreds of millions of lives, trillions of dollars of economic activity, and the world’s physical and natural capital at risk.

Please join us for a discussion with Geoff Mann, INET Senior Fellow and author of Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, on how the coronavirus pandemic might (or might not) teach us to prepare for a life on an increasingly hot planet.

Economists have gone to great lengths to write humans out of economics, pushing self-interest and generally providing two choices—faith in markets or the state.

What ails the EU Green Deal is exactly what troubles the Union in general — an absence of social democracy at work

This paper considers the ambition, scale, substance and strategy of the European Union’s Green Deal

Freeing ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels is not only good for the planet and future generations. It also saves lives here and now, not just in the far future.

How models treat innovation may be just as important as their assumptions about climate damages

We conclude that representing dynamic realism in such models is as important as – and far more empirically tractable than – continued debate about the monetization of climate damages and ‘social cost of carbon’.

Inadequate demand and climate change require a global green new deal

By promoting unrealisitc models, economists have become part of problem rather than the solution

How free electricity could fight climate change and inequality

The Nobel laureate economist discusses how an activist government is needed to tackle problems like climate change

John Kenneth Galbraith noted in 1973 that establishment economics had become the “invaluable ally of those whose exercise of power depends on an acquiescent public.” If anything, economists’ embrace of that role has grown stronger since then.

Chaired by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence, INET has assembled a global team of leaders and scholars calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

Wishful thinking and tinkering won’t cut it. Nothing short of a mass mobilization for deep de-carbonization across the global economy can avert the looming climate catastrophe.

Hope for mitigating climate catastrophe may not be lost, but the scale of political change needed is no cause for optimism

A response to economists who doubt our capacity to decarbonize while maintaining robust growth

Market tweaks and incentives won’t save us from climate catastrophe. Only radical policy change will.

The new IPCC Report is overly optimistic about global productivity growth and fossil fuel energy use. More dramatic, immediate action is needed

Wishful thinking and tinkering won’t cut it. Nothing short of a mass mobilization for deep de-carbonization across the global economy can avert the looming climate catastrophe.

A new report shows an economically viable path to net-zero CO2 emissions in key industries by 2060

The YSI Economics of Innovation, Economic Development and Africa Working Groups, in partnership with Global Network for Economics of Learning, Innovation and Competence Building Systems (GLOBELICS), Globelics Alumni, are organizing the 1st GLOBELICS Pre-Conference for Young Scholars entitled ‘Financing of Innovation and Infrastructure for Development’.

Young Scholars based in Africa are invited to convene in Harare, Zimbabwe. The event serves to strengthen the African network of new economic thinkers pursuing a new economic paradigm. Attendees will be able to attend the annual conference of the Zimbabwe Historical Association in the same trip.

The Latin America Working Group and the Keynesian Economic Working Group of the Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) of the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) are hosting the workshop “Technology, Globalization and the Environment: Latin American Development in the XXI Century” to be held at the headquarters of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC) in Santiago de Chile on the 23-24 July 2018.

Economist James K. Boyce argues that the distribution of carbon tax revenue is just as important as the price itself

For the BRICS countries to not just grow their economies but also raise the standard of living of their people, inclusive growth that prioritizes poverty reduction is a must

The BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—play a crucial and growing role in the world economy. Sanjay Reddy kicks off our series exploring shifting social and economic dynamics within these countries, and what they mean for the global economy.    

In the face of  laissez-faire capitalism at home and resurgent nationalism across the globe, INET offers an innovative look at the causes of—and solutions for—the problems that ail a fissuring world economy.

China is now the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter, accounting for over 25% of the global total. But the country has also demonstrated a growing understanding that a truly green economy promises to improve quality of life and create enormous opportunities for technological and political leadership.

The World Economic Roundtable seeks to help the business, investment, and policy communities understand ongoing changes in the world economy and to promote a discussion of ideas that can advance the goal of a widely shared global prosperity.

Two years after the 2015 Paris Agreement, where we stand today is better than you may think 

A discussion with Michael Grubb, INET Grantee and Professor of Energy and Climate Change at University College of London.

The Implications of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative for China and the World Economy

The path to holding fossil fuel producers accountable for climate change & climate damages 

What economics can – and can’t – tell us about climate change 

Climate Change and Denial

What Do Citations Actually Measure in Economics and How Should Economic Journals and Department Review Committees Use This Data? 

Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Spence and a global team of leading thinkers are calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

INET gathered hundreds of new economic thinkers in Edinburgh to discuss the past, present, and future of the economics profession.

The Festival for New Economic Thinking is a collaborative initiative of several organizations, and aims to bring together those who seek to improve how economics is taught, studied and practiced. 

Faced with rapid cost reductions for clean electricity generation, some commentators suggest that we no longer need the Paris agreement or other policy interventions, because technology alone can solve all problems.

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord sets the US economy back

YSI Working Groups are cooperating with Dimensions of Poverty conference

Ocean expert Peter Neill says the watery depths hold solutions to earth’s most pressing challenges

A discussion featuring Kenneth Smith, Head of the Trade and NAFTA Office of the Ministry of the Economy of Mexico, and Jay Pelosky, Principal of Pelosky Global Strategies.

The energy transition is happening. But the pace of change depends on a range of technical, business, and societal factors.

Eurocentric modernism has unhinged us from our human nature, argues Rajani Kanth in his new book

A reference guide to all Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) community presentations at the Eastern Economic Association’s (EEA) 2017 annual meeting

The practical question in Washington today is not whether regulations will go, but whether anything will replace them

Smick argues that distortions of capitalism have fed populist rebellion, and that reviving a capitalism that offers opportunity for average people to increase their earnings is an urgent priority if America’s political economy is to be stabilized.

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

In the 40th anniversary year of John Kenneth Galbraith’s Age of Uncertainty, the 1970s look remarkably stable in comparison with today’s turbulent world 

The YSI Working Group on Economic Development, the Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre (GPERC) of the University of Greenwich, and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) would like to invite you to a talk by Professor Tim Jackson. 

A conversation with Isaac Stone Fish, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for U.S. – China Relations and Asia Editor at Foreign Policy Magazine.

A conversation with Richard Vague, Managing Partner at Gabriel Investments and Chairman of the Governor’s Woods Foundation.

Institute grantee Boyce cited for integrating ‘ecological, developmental and justice-oriented approaches’ into economics

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) in collaboration with the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) are organizing India’s first “Law Economic Policy Conference (LPEC 2016)”. The aim is to bring together economic, legal and policy thinkers together to consider policy issues in a holistic manner.

China is drowning in it. The whole world has too much of it. History suggests: This won’t end well.

Estimated space requirements for solar energy sufficient to power the entire world are reassuringly trivial, at 0.5-1% of global land area. For individual countries however, the challenges vary greatly, reflecting dramatic differences in population density.

We are grateful to Michael Grubb, Annela Anger-Kraavi, Igor Bashmakov, and Richard Wood for their interesting, empirically rich and structurally insightful commentary on our paper on the production-based and the consumption-based Carbon Kuznets Curve (CKC).

A comment on Goher-Ur-Rehman Mir and Servaas Storm’s Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth: Production Based vs Consumption-Based Evidence on Decoupling

The Advanced Graduate Workshop in Development, led by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz is interested in identifying the complex interactions that influence well-being, development and growth.

We assess the Carbon-Kuznets-Curve hypothesis using internationally consistent and comparable production-based versus consumption-based CO2 emissions data for 40 countries (and 35 industries) during 1995-2007 from the World Input Output Database (WIOD).

A stark warning from Institute researchers on the probability that ‘2°C capital stock’ will be reached in 2017

The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.

Join us for a reception at the ASSA conference in San Francisco

Will environmental limits, including limits on the climate system, slow or even halt economic growth? If not, how will the nature of economic growth have to shift?

We provide an explanation for the large spatial wage disparities and low male migration in India based on the trade-off between consumption-smoothing, provided by caste-based rural insurance networks, and the income-gains from migration.

How well do our assumptions about the global challenges of energy, environment and economic development fit the facts?

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has awarded $2 million in grants to fund 21 different projects as part of the latest round of its research grant program.

People adopt diverse measures to protect from contagion. I propose a taxonomy of protection technologies, and present a model to study the implications of the technology on the prevalence of infections and on welfare at different levels of exposure.