…the United States should act to curb emissions.

“Many observers look at economists as skeptics of the need for (climate) mitigation,” says economist Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. But “most accept the unquestionable consensus from the natural scientist that the planet is warming and humans are to blame.” —Dan Vergano, USA Today

The New York Times also picked up on last week’s report from the Institute for Policy Integrity, and of course gives a slightly different synopsis than the story linked above though both are brief and helpful.

Of particular note from the report:

The median social cost of carbon estimate was $50, but there was very wide variation, suggesting that there is no clear consensus on the exact extent of the harm created by each unit of greenhouse gas emissions.

Contrast this with the following from the executive summary of another group paper headed by local professor Frank Ackerman economists say deep cuts to greenhouse gas won’t mean deep cuts to economy:

Suppose that the cost of climate protection turns out to be 2.5 percent of global GDP, toward the high end of the global scenarios just discussed. In an economy that is growing at 2.5 percent per year, a rate that is common for developed countries, spending 2.5 percent of GDP on climate protection each year would be equivalent to skipping one year’s growth, and then resuming. Average incomes would take 29 years to double from today’s level, compared to 28 years in the absence of climate costs. In an economy experiencing 10 percent annual growth, as China has in many recent years, imposing a cost of 2.5 percent per year is equivalent to skipping 3 months of growth; if 10 percent growth is sustained, average incomes would reach twice the current level in 86 months, compared to 83 months in the absence of climate costs.

Consider another comparison: military spending is greater than 2.5 percent of GDP in 68 countries around the world; it is greater than 4 percent of GDP in both the United States and China. It is difficult, therefore, to believe that we are unable to remove this amount from current consumption in order to defend against a remote but dangerous threat to our way of life. On the strength of a different narrative about potential dangers we already do so, year after year. —Ackerman, et alia (2009)