person:nicholas stern

  • La #relance, oui, mais une relance verte
    http://www.alterecoplus.fr/alain-grandjean/la-relance-oui-mais-une-relance-verte/00011831

    L’OCDE et le #FMI tiennent depuis quelques mois un discours sur l’indispensable relance budgétaire

    On ne peut que se réjouir de cette exhortation à accroître les #dépenses_publiques. La situation de quasi-déflation actuelle n’est bonne pour personne et l’histoire a montré qu’il est très difficile de se sortir de ce type de nasse. Il est certain que le marché laissé à lui-même n’y arrive pas. Les acteurs économiques retardent leurs investissements et leurs achats, en attendant que les prix baissent, ou tout simplement des jours meilleurs.

    On ne peut également que se réjouir que des économistes ayant pignon sur rue promeuvent une forme de relance keynésienne, leurs discours étant traditionnellement plus classiques.

    Il reste maintenant un dernier pas à franchir. Si la relance par le financement d’infrastructures est une bonne idée, toutes les infrastructures ne sont pas bonnes à financer.

    Les grands travaux peuvent conduire à des « grands projets inutiles imposés », des aéroports vides, des immeubles sans habitants… Ils peuvent aussi conduire à la poursuite d’une croissance dont on sait qu’elle n’est pas durable, en encourageant la consommation de ressources naturelles et les émissions de gaz à effet de serre.

    Les seules infrastructures souhaitables sont celles qui permettent à chacun une vie décente tout en réduisant l’empreinte de l’homme sur la nature. L’économiste Nicholas Stern et l’ex-président du Mexique Felipe Calderon ont montré dans leur rapport « Meilleure croissance, meilleur climat » que la lutte contre le changement climatique passait par ces investissements, et qu’au total, un développement fondé sur des infrastructures bas carbone n’était guère plus coûteux que de poursuivre selon le modèle actuel… Ces investissements bas carbone sont donc à la fois la clef pour sortir de la trappe économique actuelle et pour éviter de tomber dans la trappe climatique, dont nous savons qu’elle serait un désastre pour l’humanité.

    #économie

  • Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fuel-companies-getting-10m-a-minute-in-subsidies-says-imf

    The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.

    The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.

    Nicholas Stern, an eminent climate economist at the London School of Economics, said: “This very important analysis shatters the myth that fossil fuels are cheap by showing just how huge their real costs are. There is no justification for these enormous subsidies for fossil fuels, which distort markets and damages economies, particularly in poorer countries.”

    Lord Stern said that even the IMF’s vast subsidy figure was a significant underestimate: “A more complete estimate of the costs due to climate change would show the implicit subsidies for fossil fuels are much bigger even than this report suggests.”

    The IMF, one of the world’s most respected financial institutions, said that ending subsidies for fossil fuels would cut global carbon emissions by 20%. That would be a giant step towards taming global warming, an issue on which the world has made little progress to date.

    Ending the subsidies would also slash the number of premature deaths from outdoor air pollution by 50% – about 1.6 million lives a year.

    Furthermore, the IMF said the resources freed by ending fossil fuel subsidies could be an economic “game-changer” for many countries, by driving economic growth and poverty reduction through greater investment in infrastructure, health and education and also by cutting taxes that restrict growth.

    Another consequence would be that the need for subsidies for renewable energy – a relatively tiny $120bn a year – would also disappear, if fossil fuel prices reflected the full cost of their impacts.

    Fossil fuel subsidies – how the costs break down

    #énergies_fossiles #hydrocarbures #subventions #FMI

  • Nicholas Stern calls for countries to raise ambition of intended emissions reductions to narrow gap with pathway for 2 degree limit
    http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/nicholas-stern-calls-for-countries-to-raise-ambition-of-intended-emissions-re

    The call for greater action is based on an analysis by Rodney Boyd, Nicholas Stern and Bob Ward which shows that the emissions in 2030 that have already been signalled by some of the largest-emitting countries, along with assumptions about current and planned policies by other countries, mean that it is unlikely that the aggregate pledges made by all countries ahead of the Paris summit will collectively be consistent with the goal of limiting the rise in global average temperature to no more than 2°C.

    L’étude : http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Boyd_et_al_policy_paper_May_2015.pdf
    Les “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” : http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/indc/Submission%20Pages/submissions.aspx
    #climat #cop21

  • Earth Day: scientists say 75% of known fossil fuel reserves must stay in ground
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/22/earth-day-scientists-warning-fossil-fuels-

    Three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground if humanity is to avoid the worst effects of climate change, a group of leading scientists and economists have said in a statement timed to coincide with Earth Day.

    The Earth League, which includes Nicholas Stern, the author of several influential reports on the economics of climate change; Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a climate scientist and adviser to Angela Merkel; and the US economist Jeffrey Sachs, urged world leaders to follow up on their commitments to avoid dangerous global warming.

  • Climate change is here now and it could lead to global conflict
    Nicholas Stern
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/13/storms-floods-climate-change-upon-us-lord-stern

    In fact, the risks are even bigger than I realised when I was working on the review of the economics of climate change for the UK government in 2006. Since then, annual greenhouse gas emissions have increased steeply and some of the impacts, such as the decline of Arctic sea ice, have started to happen much more quickly.

    We also underestimated the potential importance of strong feedbacks, such as the thawing of the permafrost to release #methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as well as tipping points beyond which some changes in the climate may become effectively irreversible.

    (...)

    The lack of vision and political will from the leaders of many developed countries is not just harming their long-term competitiveness, but is also endangering efforts to create international co-operation and reach a new agreement that should be signed in Paris in December 2015.

    #climat

  • Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt
    http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/science-says-revolt

    To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now . But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval” , as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.

    Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually , according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.

    [...]

    In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity . On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:

    . . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.

    In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).

    #climat

  • Climat : comment concilier lutte contre le réchauffement et croissance ? - LeMonde.fr
    http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2013/09/24/climat-comment-concilier-lutte-contre-le-rechauffement-et-croissance

    La décroissance n’est pas une option, estime l’économiste britannique Nicholas Stern qui s’apprête à publier le second volume de son rapport sur l’économie sur le changement climatique. Tags : internetactu2net fing internetactu économie #développementdurable (...)

    #économie #écologie

  • Nicholas Stern : ’I got it wrong on climate change – it’s far, far worse’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/27/nicholas-stern-climate-change-davos?CMP=twt_fd

    Lord Stern, author of the government-commissioned review on climate change that became the reference work for politicians and green campaigners, now says he underestimated the risks, and should have been more “blunt” about the threat posed to the economy by rising temperatures.

    Wikipedia sur la critique du rapport Stern de 2006 : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Stern

    En fait la critique a été double. Le premier courant cité reprochait « à l’équipe Stern d’avoir manipulé la méthodologie économique à seule fin de parvenir à un tableau catastrophique et de justifier ainsi ses recommandations d’une action forte et immédiate »4. Au contraire, les représentants de « l’économie écologique » lui reprochaient son « orthodoxie conceptuelle »....