The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded economists William Nordhaus and Paul Romer the Nobel Prize in economics Monday for their work on the effects of climate change and innovation.
Nordhaus and Romer will split a prize of a little over $1 million. Nordhaus is Yale University’s Sterling Professor of Economics and Romer is a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business.
BREAKING NEWS: ⁰The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2018 to William D. Nordhaus and Paul M. Romer. #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/xUs6iSyI7h
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2018
The Nobel prize committee chose Nordhaus for his work showing “the most efficient remedy for problems caused by greenhouse gases is a global scheme of universally imposed carbon taxes,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, according to The Associated Press.
“[Government] policies are lagging very, very far — miles, miles, miles — behind the science and what needs to be done,” Nordhaus said in an interview with a spokesman from the Nobel Prize committee.
Nordhaus took the opportunity to critique President Donald Trump’s policies relating to climate change.
“It’s hard to be optimistic. And also, we have fallen behind because of the policies, we are actually going backwards in the United States with the disastrous policies of the Trump administration,” Nordhaus said.
Romer’s work focused on the effects innovations have on the global economy and what market forces and government policies are best for encouraging people to develop such innovations.
His research “demonstrates how economic forces govern the willingness of firms to produce new ideas and innovations,” building on and modeling theories that previous economists had already developed about market forces, according to the Nobel prize committee.
The awards come the same day as the United Nations’ panel of climate change researchers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released a report on the odds of the Earth avoiding the warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius, the goal most countries committed to in the Paris Climate Accord in 2016. (RELATED: UN’s New Report Shows There’s Little Basis For A Favorite Claim Of Climate Activists)
Trump announced he would pull the U.S. out of the global climate agreement in 2017, stating “this agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States.” (RELATED: It’s The Final Chance We Have To Stop Global Warming … Until The Next Chance)
The IPCC found that countries must institute radical and unprecedented reforms within the next 12 years to avoid warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures.
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