The economics of climate change impacts a la Stern: Novel and nuanced or rhetorically restricted?

Abstract The Stern report conducts an estimation of Greenhouse Gas control costs weighed against the benefits of avoiding damages at the global scale. As I show, Stern and colleagues are aware of the limits to CBA, although they chose to ignore the considerable literature on the subject, the many contributions by ecological economists, and especially work specific to the enhanced Greenhouse Effect. Various problems are raised or mentioned in the report including: strong uncertainty, incommensurability, plural values, non-utilitarian ethics, rights, distributional inequity, poverty, and treatment of future generations. How then can this report, acknowledging so many of those aspects of climate change that render CBA an unsuitable tool for generating policy recommendations, go ahead to conduct a global CBA and make policy recommendations? I explain how issues are suppressed and sidelined in a careful and methodical manner, with the pretence they have been addressed by ‘state of the art’ solutions. Meanwhile, the authors maintain allegiance to an economic orthodoxy which perpetuates the dominant political myth that traditional economic growth can be both sustained and answer all our problems. Besides perpetuating myths, this diverts attention away from alternative approaches, away from ethical debates over harming the innocent, the poor and future generations, and away from the fundamental changes needed to tackle the very real and serious problems current economic systems pose for environmental systems.