There is currently a consensus amongst the political establishment – and amongst the intellectual communities that feed into it – that detailed and wide-ranging government intervention is necessary to combat the effects of climate change. This monograph challenges that consensus.

The authors look in detail at a number of the underlying assumptions and proposals of the policy activists and find that there is enormous uncertainty relating both to the economics and to the science of climate change. As one author shows, the policy activists have form: alarmists have been wrong, time and time again, about ecological disasters.

However, the authors of this monograph have more humility than their critics. They do not argue that there is no threat from climate change, merely that the level of uncertainty is huge. Given this uncertainty, and the historic failure of central planning to do anything other than undermine economic welfare, the editor, Colin Robinson, one of the country’s leading energy economists, argues that it is prudent to proceed with caution.

The flexibility of the market economy will deal better than central planning with any problems arising from man-made climate change. The wide ranging array of regulations, taxes, subsidies and artificially created incentives proposed by climate change activists should be rejected.

Visit Climate Change Policy: Challenging the Activists Download Page

You can download full publication in PDF format.

Edited by Colin Robinson
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)
ISBN 978 0 255 36595 6

CONTENTS
The authors 8
Foreword by Bruno Prior 11
List of tables 16
1 Climate change and the market economy: introduction 19
Colin Robinson
References 25
2 Global alarmism 26
Russell Lewis
Introduction 26
The population growth false alarms 27
Natural resources false alarms 30
Ecological false alarms 33
From global cooling to global warming 36
Conclusion 38
References 40
3 Climate change, centralised action and markets 42
Colin Robinson
Apocalyptic predictions 42
Climate change and its consequences 48
Markets and global environmental problems 55
The policy response 57
References 67
4 Governments and climate change issues: questioning a consensus 70
David Henderson
An official worldwide consensus 70
The basis for consensus 72
Aspects of mishandling: the content of policies 75
Questioning the IPCC process 78
Summing up 88
What can be done? 88
Postscript 90
References 91
5 Weighing the present against the future: the choice, and use, of rates of discount in
the analysis of climate change 92
Ian Byatt
The issues and the options 92
The underlying analysis 98
What flows of resources, i.e. of goods and services, should be discounted at what rate? 111
References 113
6 Climate change, religion and human freedom 114
Alan Peacock
Introduction 114
A typology of the climate change issue 115
Climate change and individual freedom 121
Is individual freedom under threat? 124
References 130
7 Which policy to address climate change? 132
Julian Morris
What do we know about the science of climate change? 132
‘Insuring’ against global warming 136
Adaptation: insuring against the impacts of climate change 139
How should society address the threat of catastrophe? 142
A proposal 149
Conclusions 151
References 152
About the IEA 160

THE AUTHORS
Ian Byatt
Sir Ian Byatt is Chairman of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland and a Senior Associate at Frontier Economics. He was Director-General of Water Services (Ofwat) from the privatisation of the Water Authorities in 1989 to 2000, setting up the regulatory office and developing the new regime.

He was previously head of the Public Sector Economic Unit and then Deputy Chief Economic Adviser at HM Treasury, where he was engaged in the reform of supply-side policy. Before entering government service he taught at Durham University and the London School of Economics.

He works closely with the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida.

David Henderson
David Henderson is formerly head of the Department of Economics and Statistics at the OECD and is currently a Visiting Professor at the Westminster Business School, London.

He has written a number of IEA publications, including Misguided Virtue – an investigation into the corporate social responsibility agenda. He is also a member of the IEA’s Academic Advisory Council.

Russell Lewis
Russell Lewis is a veteran campaigner for political and economic freedom who has always been ready to defy majority opinion. In 1968 he put forward in the Daily Telegraph detailed proposals for wholesale denationalisation by selling shares in public concerns to the people. In 1971 his IEA monograph Rome or Brussels spelt out the danger of a superstate Europe run by unelected bureaucrats.

In 1973, in his book The New Service Society, he showed that the economic future lay with the services, not, as pop economists like G. K. Galbraith were arguing, with the likes of General Motors.

His ten or so books include the first biography of Margaret Thatcher – a best-seller. His more recent publication Global Warming: False Alarms is available to be downloaded from the IEA website (www.iea.org.uk).

Julian Morris
Julian Morris is Executive Director of the International Policy Network (www.policynetwork.net) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham. Prior to founding IPN, he was Director of the Environment and Technology Programme at the IEA, where he wrote and edited numerous books, monographs and papers, including Global Warming: Apocalypse or Hot Air? (with Roger Bate, 1994) and Global Warming: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom (1997). Julian has various Masters degrees in economics and related disciplines, as well as a graduate diploma in law.

He is co-editor, with Dr Indur Goklany, of the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (www.ejsd.org), and a member of the editorial board of Energy and Environment. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he is on the Council of the School of Pharmacy (London) and on the Academic Advisory Council of the IEA, as well as being on the boards of several other think tanks.

Alan Peacock
Allegedly retired, Sir Alan Peacock, a Fellow of the British Academy and erstwhile Chief Economic Adviser to the Department of Trade and Industry, now holds honorary appointments as Professor of Economics at the Universities of York and Heriot-Watt.

He has previously been Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, a professor at four UK universities and was chairman of the Home Office Committee on the Funding of the BBC (1985–86). In 1985 he co-founded the David Hume Institute, Edinburgh, becoming its first Director (1985–91). In 2002 he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Colin Robinson
Colin Robinson worked for eleven years as a business economist, mainly in the oil industry, before being appointed in 1968 to the Chair of Economics at the University of Surrey, where he founded the Department of Economics and is now Emeritus Professor.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, of the Society of Business Economists and of the Institute of Energy. In 1998 he received from the International Association for Energy Economics its ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Profession and its Literature’ award. From 1992 to 2002 he was Editorial Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, in addition to his university post. He is a member of the IEA’s Academic Advisory Council.

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