In my previous post, I summarized William Nordhaus' new article, "Economics of the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet," which showed that standard estimates of the "social cost of carbon" were not much changed even if we explicitly include the "tipping point" of a melting Greenland ice sheet. I showed that the pushback from some in the scientific community--who warned of sea level rise that wouldn't occur for centuries--demonstrated how baseless these warnings really were. After defending his DICE model's earlier estimates of the social cost of carbon, Nordhaus goes on to argue that government intervention is important, because a "no-action baseline," even if followed by aggressive "geo-engineering," would be too late. In response, in the present post I sketch out a scenario in which completely voluntary actions, without any government intervention at all, could achieve just as satisfactory an outcome regarding the Greenland ice sheet as Nordhaus' recommended carbon tax.

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