Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…The case is often made that the EPA doesn’t matter a great deal because it’s economics that determines what happens on the climate front. Coal plants are becoming uneconomic, and China is canceling plans to the build them, and solar is crashing in price, and so forth. Given all of that, why do you think the EPA really matters? I don’t think we know how much the EPA matters, but I don’t see any reason to deliberately do bad things with it. [laughter] And it seems quite likely that’s what will happen. But I think you’re completely correct, that the major factor in, say, climate change, it could just be luck. Do we invent something cheap enough that the whole world wants to do it? And the political battles may not go down in history as that big of a thing. I know they feel important and there’s good guys, there’s bad guys, there’s symbolic whatever on the line. I’ve said I think a carbon tax would be a good idea. You’ve got to tax something; why not do that? But that all said, it’s probably not the main thing, and a carbon tax is, in many ways, an overrated idea. Getting science and the tech world to work better is probably higher impact. Because US, if the rest of the world grows, we become a less and less important polluter. We need something cheap enough that everyone is going to do it — Africa, Vietnam. So it really has got to be pretty good. And that’s up to all of you. There’s a lot of discussion about all sorts of tail risks, especially geopolitical risks, that we could face for the next four years. Your PhD advisor was Thomas Schelling.…

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