PGDW#6: Smearing Stern

Climate Progress wrote last year about the UK’s important Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. That report concluded avoiding catastrophic climate change might cost countries 1% of GDP (spent largely on clean energy technologies that have many other benefits such as reductions in urban smog), but failing to act could cost up to 20% of GDP as the world must deal with impacts such as massive flooding and hundreds of millions of environmental refugees.

Unsurprisingly, Planet Gore intensely dislikes the Stern Review. In Sterling Burnett’s recent post that misrepresented both the MIT report and CBO report on climate costs — to perversely argue that the media’s neglect of those reports is evidence of pro-warming bias — he writes:

By comparison, the now thoroughly discredited Stern report and the recent IPCC report on the costs of combating climate change were front page news.

As is typical on PG, he uses the phrase “now thoroughly discredited,” without a single link to an article or study. Such articles do exist, since the economic community in particular criticized certain assumptions in the Review. They especially don’t like his choice of a low discount rate. Boo-hoo! Stern places a higher value on future generations than many economists or conservatives. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.

In fact, the Stern Review is not thoroughly discredited nor was its choice of discount rate flawed, as argued here and here in some detail. This issue of the Stern Report and the discount rate is sufficiently important that I will return to it in future posts.