Robert S. Pindyck is a professor of economics and finance at MIT, with several decades’ experience publishing articles and books dealing with energy. Moreover, as he explains in this interview, Pindyck believes that man-made emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases will impose climate change damages on future generations, and is an advocate of a carbon tax agreement among the major world governments (though he is doubtful such a tax is politically feasible). With a pedigree like that, you might expect Pindyck to be very complimentary about the computer models that the Obama Administration and other policymakers are using to justify the economics of anti-carbon measures. But as it turns out, Pindyck has written a new, peer-reviewed paper (forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature) that is absolutely scathing in its critique of such models. In this post I’ll highlight some of his points.
