St Catharine's Political Economy Seminar Series - Terry Barker 'The institutional capture of IPCC economics by neoclassical ideology'

Wed 12 February 2020

Ramsden Room

The Assessment Reports (AR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bring together scientists from across disciplines to assess the literature on climate change, adaptation and mitigation.
Most of the reports are reviews of the literature, which Terry Barker will not discuss, but the IPCC authors also instigate substantial interdisciplinary exercises with climate and energy-economy models to make and report projections involving the policies and their economic costs required to achieve climate stabilisation. Terry Barker asserts that the economics behind the projections in AR5, Mitigation of Climate Change, 2014, appear scientific but are the outcome of ideological assumptions about the economy, typically based only on one year's data.
The economic models used all involve General Equilibrium. Many are based on the premise that the global economy is in long-term optimal equilibrium, such that any deviation from that equilibrium, e.g. in the form of regulations and/or carbon taxes, will ipso facto lead to economic costs. Terry Barker will assess this and other aspects of this approach and the implications for the costs of radical cuts in emissions.

Cost: FOC