A volunteer distributes drinking water next to a bus stand on a hot summer day in Hyderabad, India, on March 21, 2024.
And yet economists — clearly able to keep cool heads when everybody else is losing theirs — are in the middle of a fresh debate about the real costs of climate change. A new working paper from two academics at Harvard and Northwestern, and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, argues that the macroeconomic damage from climate change might be as much as six times higher than previously estimated.
Discussion of the real costs of climate change, to human welfare and to national economies, have been going on for decades. But we no longer need such estimates to make the case that it is real, and a problem. Instead, we need them as inputs into policymaking — similar to employment or price data. India’s chief economic adviser, for example, asked earlier this year if we were irrationally scared of the health effects of global warming. It is true that we in India are more exposed to heat stress than most. But, he pointed out, large-scale studies suggest that far more people die in India as a consequence of “moderate cold” than from extreme heat.